This article contains content that is written like an advertisement .(November 2023) |
Company type | News agency |
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Founded | Nairobi (1995) |
Headquarters | Geneva, Switzerland |
Key people |
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Website | www.thenewhumanitarian.org |
The New Humanitarian, previously known as IRIN News, or Integrated Regional Information Networks News, is an independent, non-profit news agency. It specializes in humanitarian stories from often overlooked or under-reported regions. [1] [2]
Originally a project of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), IRIN News operated under the UN until 1 January 2015. [3] [4] On 21 March 2019, IRIN relaunched independently as The New Humanitarian. [5] Its aim is to "strengthen universal access to timely, strategic, and non-partisan information. so as to enhance the capacity of the humanitarian community to understand, respond to, and avert emergencies." [6] Its content is available via its website and newsletters. [2] The primary language is English, with a smaller number of articles available in French and Arabic.
The New Humanitarian is a non-profit association, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Its board of directors is led by South African journalist Paula Fray. [2]
IRIN was launched in 1995 after the Great Lakes refugee crisis resulting from the 1994 Rwandan genocide overwhelmed the existing information management systems set up by the humanitarian aid community. [7] [8] At that time, its headquarters were in Nairobi, Kenya, [9] with regional news desks in Nairobi, Johannesburg, Dakar, Dubai, and Bangkok, with liaison offices in New York and Geneva. The agency was managed by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. [10] [11]
Its global expansion began in 1997, when it opened an office in West Africa, to be followed by offices in Southern Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
In 2001, IRIN created PlusNews, [12] a news service dedicated exclusively to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The service gradually expanded to include French, Portuguese, and Arabic. It became one of the largest providers of original HIV and AIDS reporting. One of its documentary series, "Heroes of HIV", earned an honorable mention at the 14th annual Webby Awards. [13]
That same year, it launched a radio service, producing soap operas, programming, news packages, and training for radio stations in Angola, Afghanistan, Somalia, and West Africa.
In 2002, IRIN introduced a French translation service, opening its work to readers in West and East Africa and elsewhere worldwide. In 2008, it would do the same in Arabic.
In 2004, IRIN created a video team, and one of its first documentaries, "Our bodies... their battleground" – on sexual violence against women in Congo and Liberia – went on to win "Best Feature" at the UN Documentary Film Festival. [14] Other films have covered the impact of the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, female genital mutilation, the 2004 West Africa locust swarm, opium cultivation in Afghanistan, and the humanitarian impact of climate change.
On 1 January 2015, IRIN became an independent non-profit news organization. [15] [16] On 21 March 2019, it rebranded to The New Humanitarian. [5] [17]
In 2020, in partnership with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, The New Humanitarian investigated and broke news about the widespread abuse of women who worked for humanitarian agencies in the Democratic Republic of the Congo while responding to the Kivu Ebola outbreak. [18]
The New Humanitarian seeks to inform the prevention and response to humanitarian crises by contributing to better decision-making, accountability and transparency, and greater awareness.
Recent examples of impact include:
A 2018 survey of their readers found that they are composed of: Not-for-profit and NGO (35.9%), Academia (8.6%), United Nations (8.5%), Government (8.1%), Media (7.6%), Business (5.4%), Donor (1.2%), Other (24.7%). [22]
More than 40 percent of its audience originates from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. [2]
The New Humanitarian regularly hosts in-person and live-streamed discussions on key issues in the humanitarian sector. [23]
When The New Humanitarian was established as IRIN in 1995, it used fax and email to distribute weekly roundups on the Great Lakes region from its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. Its first website was launched In the late 1990s. [24]
Today, in addition to its website, The New Humanitarian continues to provide daily and weekly newsletters to more than 40,000 subscribers. [2]
The New Humanitarian's funding comes from a mix of governments, foundations, and a small number of private donors. [2]
Key supporters in 2019 include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Canton of Geneva, the Open Society Foundations, the Swiss Lottery, and the international aid agencies of Australia, Belgium, Canada, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. [2]
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is a United Nations agency mandated to aid and protect refugees, forcibly displaced communities, and stateless people, and to assist in their voluntary repatriation, local integration or resettlement to a third country. It is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, with over 18,879 staff working in 138 countries as of 2020.
The Lord's Resistance Army insurgency is an insurgency by the Lord's Resistance Army against the government of Uganda. After the Ugandan Civil War, Ugandan militant Joseph Kony formed the Lord's Resistance Army and waged an insurgency against the newly-installed president Yoweri Museveni. The stated goal was to establish a Christian state based on the Ten Commandments. Currently, there is low-level LRA activity in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic. Kony proclaims himself the "spokesperson" of God and a spirit medium.
An internally displaced person (IDP) is someone who is forced to leave their home but who remains within their country's borders. They are often referred to as refugees, although they do not fall within the legal definitions of a refugee.
A refugee camp is a temporary settlement built to receive refugees and people in refugee-like situations. Refugee camps usually accommodate displaced people who have fled their home country, but camps are also made for internally displaced people. Usually, refugees seek asylum after they have escaped war in their home countries, but some camps also house environmental and economic migrants. Camps with over a hundred thousand people are common, but as of 2012, the average-sized camp housed around 11,400. They are usually built and run by a government, the United Nations, international organizations, or non-governmental organization. Unofficial refugee camps, such as Idomeni in Greece or the Calais jungle in France, are where refugees are largely left without the support of governments or international organizations.
The Ituri conflict is an ongoing low intensity asymmetrical conflict between the agriculturalist Lendu and pastoralist Hema ethnic groups in the Ituri region of the north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). While the two groups had fought since as early as 1972, the name 'Ituri conflict' refers to the period of intense violence between 1999 and 2003. Armed conflict continues to the present day.
The Great Lakes refugee crisis is the common name for the situation beginning with the exodus in April 1994 of over two million Rwandans to neighboring countries of the Great Lakes region of Africa in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Many of the refugees were Hutu fleeing the predominantly Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which had gained control of the country at the end of the genocide. However, the humanitarian relief effort was vastly compromised by the presence among the refugees of many of the Interahamwe and government officials who carried out the genocide, who used the refugee camps as bases to launch attacks against the new government led by Paul Kagame. The camps in Zaire became particularly politicized and militarized. The knowledge that humanitarian aid was being diverted to further the aims of the genocidaires led many humanitarian organizations to withdraw their assistance. The conflict escalated until the start of the First Congo War in 1996, when RPF-supported rebels invaded Zaire and sought to repatriate the refugees.
Various international and local diplomatic and humanitarian efforts in the Somali Civil War have been in effect since the conflict first began in the early 1990s. The latter include diplomatic initiatives put together by the African Union, the Arab League and the European Union, as well as humanitarian efforts led by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), UNICEF, the World Food Programme (WFP), the Puntland Maritime Police Force (PMPF) and the Somali Red Crescent Society (SRCS).
Bruno Geddo is an Italian national, born in Novara in 1959. He has served with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for over 30 years in Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and the Middle East.
The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is a Christian extremist organization operating in Central Africa and East Africa. Its origins were in the Ugandan insurgency (1986–1994) against President Yoweri Museveni during which Joseph Rao Kony founded the LRA in 1987.
UNICEF, originally called the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund in full, now officially United Nations Children's Fund, is an agency of the United Nations responsible for providing humanitarian and developmental aid to children worldwide. The organization is one of the most widely known and visible social welfare entities globally, operating in 192 countries and territories. UNICEF's activities include providing immunizations and disease prevention, administering treatment for children and mothers with HIV, enhancing childhood and maternal nutrition, improving sanitation, promoting education, and providing emergency relief in response to disasters.
Filippo Grandi is an Italian diplomat and United Nations official, currently serving as United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. He previously served as Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and United Nations Deputy Special Representative for Afghanistan.
The Dongo conflict was a minor conflict centered in the town of Dongo, on the left bank of the Ubangi River in Sud-Ubangi District, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Violence initially broke out in late October 2009 after a local dispute over fishing rights. This destabilised the region and led to a spiral of violence, and an exodus of civilians attempting to flee from the fighting. By December 2009, this conflict was one of the biggest conflicts of the United Nations Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) and the United Nations; more than 168,000 people had fled their homes, many of them crossing into the neighbouring Republic of the Congo. An intervention by the Congolese army and MONUC brought the conflict to an end by 13 December 2009.
The Great Lakes Twa, also known as Batwa, Abatwa or Ge-Sera, are a Bantu speaking group native to the African Great Lakes region on the border of Central and East Africa. As an indigenous pygmy people, the Twa are generally assumed to be the oldest surviving population of the Great Lakes region. Current populations of Great Lakes Twa people live in the states of Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and the eastern portion of the Democratic Republic of Congo. In 2000 they numbered approximately 80,000 people, making them a significant minority group in these countries. The largest population of Twa is located in Burundi estimated in 2008 at 78,071 people.
Africa Humanitarian Action (AHA) is a non-governmental organization that provides relief services to countries in Africa. It was founded by Dr. David Zawde in 1994 in response to the Rwandan genocide.
Arnauld Antoine Akodjènou, a native of Benin, is a long-life humanitarian and diplomat, currently serving as Senior Adviser for Africa at the Kofi Annan Foundation specifically working on the Democracy and Electoral Integrity Initiative. Prior to this he served as the Regional Refugee Coordinator and Special Adviser to the High Commissioner for refugees for the South Sudan Situation at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). He has held numerous positions in the United Nations Department of Peace Operations, in Côte d'Ivoire (ONUCI) and Mali (MINUSMA), and as a Deputy Special Representative of UN Secretary General. His career with the UNHCR spans over twenty-five years.
Qatar Charity is a humanitarian and development non-governmental organization in the Middle East. It was founded in 1992 in response to the thousands of children who were made orphans by the Afghanistan war and while orphans still remain a priority cause in the organization's work with more than 150,000 sponsored orphans, it has now expanded its fields of action to include six humanitarian fields and seven development fields.
Equity Group Holdings Limited (EGHL), formerly Equity Bank Group, is a financial services holding company based in the African Great Lakes region. EGHL's headquarters are in Nairobi, Kenya, with subsidiaries in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Sudan, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo and a representative office in Ethiopia.
South Sudanese refugees are persons originating from the African country of South Sudan, but seeking refuge outside the borders of their native country. The world's youngest independent country has a recent and troubled history of prolonged conflicts and ecosystem mismanagement such as overlogging, which has led to desertification. These forces have resulted not only in violence and famine, but also the forced migration of large numbers of the population, both inside and outside the country's borders. South Sudan was cited as the largest refugee crisis in 2016, being the world's third largest, followed by Syria and Afghanistan. As of 2022, the UNHCR estimated that there were 2.4 million refugees under its mandate originating from South Sudan, making the country the fifth largest source of refugees.
Kyangwali Refugee Settlement is a refugee camp in the Kibuube District in western Uganda. As of 2023, Kyangwali is home to 136,032 people.
Uganda is one of the largest refugee-hosting nations in the world, with 1,529,904 refugees. The vast influx of refugees is due to several factors in Uganda's neighboring countries, especially war and violence in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and associated economic crisis and political instability in the region. Uganda has relatively 'friendly' policies that provide rights to the refugees, such as rights to education, work, private property, healthcare and other basic social services.