Cash-based interventions (CBIs) as one form of aid have recently received substantial interest from humanitarian organizations in persistent humanitarian crises. This article proposes a system ...dynamics (SD) approach to study the CBIs' impact factors on all aspects of the beneficiaries' dignity in longstanding refugee crises, such as the case of Syrian refugees in Turkey. Reviewing the humanitarian management literature, we first develop a set of holistic causal loops to better understand the building boxes of refugees' dignity and their interactions. Then, an SD model is proposed and calibrated by field data from humanitarian organizations. The result of CBI amount sensitivity and payment time periods shows that CBIs are significantly more effective in diminishing child labor rates and to improve in health and accommodation service reception by the refugees in short terms, but to be as much effective in longer terms, humanitarian organizations must be more directly contribute to service capacity-building activities that are strategies by the hosting governments and supported by the international bodies, such as EU and UN. Otherwise, long-term or enhanced CBI supports can only lead to accelerated service capacity saturation and thus put extra pressure on already strained services and cause tensions between hosting and refugee communities.
Founded at Purdue University in 1995, Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS) in IEEE empowers teams of university and high school students to collaborate on socially innovative projects ...that will have a lasting impact on local humanitarian organizations and community members. Not only does this program give students a unique platform to experience a career in the engineering field, which many of them are already pursuing, but it also enables them to develop and broaden their technical skills to address critical community issues while transforming lives.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected more than 214 countries across the world, disrupting the supply of essential commodities. As the pandemic has spread, humanitarian activities (HAs) have attempted ...to manage the various situation but appear ineffective due to lack of collaboration and information sharing, inability to respond towards disruption, etc. This study aims to determine and provide insights into the critical factors that may enhance the effectiveness of HAs during the pandemic. A systematic literature review was undertaken to explore critical factors and validated by experts using the fuzzy–Delphi method. These were further assessed to identify the cause-and-effect relationship by means of the fuzzy decision-making trial and laboratory (DEMATEL) method. The results show that building a blockchain-enabled digital humanitarian network (BT-DHN) is the most significant factor during the pandemic. The use of digital platforms for sharing real-time information enhances the effectiveness of HAs. This study offers stakeholders, policymakers, and decision-makers the opportunity to consider these factors in strategic planning to deal with pandemic disruption.
Before the occurrence of disasters, medical supplies should have been prepared at warehouses to support the infected cases. As the possible mismatch between initial medical supply preparedness and ...actual disaster situation, it would trigger off serious social outcomes. Thus, taking medical supply adjustment operations among the warehouses is an imperative task to ensure the sustainable development of society. However, a single-period logistics action with fully uncertain information usually leads to sub-optimal schemes. In this sense, multi-period planning for medical resource adjustment is required with the concern of social sustainability, where the uncertain information is promptly adjusted following real-time cases in different periods. With the socially sustainable goals, a multi-objective stochastic optimization model is developed to facilitate the multi-period sustainable relief supply adjustment problem, which can be divided into two subproblems. The first sub-problem contains two conflicting objective functions, where a specific ε-constraint method is developed. After that, a linearization approach is applied due to the nonlinearity of the proposed model. Finally, Yushu Earthquake is considered to validate the effectiveness of the proposed model. It is found that the multi-period planning for the relief supply adjustment problem outperforms compared with a single-period one in terms of social sustainability.
A rigorous examination of the most recent advancements in blockchain technology (BCT) and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled supply chain networks is provided in this book. The edited book brings ...together the perspectives of a number of authors who have presented their most recent views on blockchain technology and its applications in a variety of disciplines. The submitted papers contribute to a better understanding of how blockchain technology can improve the efficacy of human activities during a pandemic, improve traceability and visibility in the automotive supply chain, support food safety and reliability through digitalisation of the food supply chain, and increase the performance of next-generation digital supply chains, among other things. The book attempts to address and prepare a way to address the complicated issues that supply chains are encountering as a result of the global pandemic.
Front-end stakeholder needs analysis is increasingly recognized as an essential component of sustainable engineering projects, yet most engineering curricula only cover this topic superficially. ...Fields such as humanitarian engineering have long recognized the importance of stakeholder needs analysis for the success of development interventions, and researchers have developed best practice frameworks for engaging stakeholders that can be applied to systems engineering. These frameworks rely on established social science techniques, such as ethnography and inductive reasoning, and humanitarian engineering principles, such as contextual listening and sociotechnical thinking, to facilitate comprehensive needs assessments. While conventional ethnographies are often incompatible with engineering projects' timelines and expertise, anthropologists have developed methodologies to overcome these limitations, such as rapid assessment procedure. While widely applied in the public health sector, rapid assessment procedure has been seldom integrated with engineering projects. Rapid assessment procedure, combined with humanitarian engineering principles, can help researchers quickly gain a nuanced understanding of relevant aspects of complex sociotechnical systems. This article seeks to introduce systems engineers to humanitarian engineering rapid assessment procedure as a concrete technique for conducting comprehensive front-end stakeholder needs analysis. In this article, a case study is presented on the teaching and implementation of humanitarian engineering rapid assessment procedure in a workshop with a group of undergraduate engineering students. We sought to analyze students' perceptions of and learning outcomes from the workshop. Student engagement and learning exceeded expectations, positioning humanitarian engineering rapid assessment procedure as a potentially valuable tool for systems engineers to analyze stakeholder needs to inform system design.
Project networks link specialists from different fields and organizations to work jointly on a shared activity for a limited period. In this structure, the central actor - the project owner - plays a ...key role acting as host, sponsor or parent of the project network. But, how do owners fulfil their role? We argue that the role of the project owner is to continuously reconfigure the relationships among the networks to quickly develop temporary organizations that respond to emerging needs. Using a humanitarian organization, we consider the important activity of the project owner as dynamic assembling. This capability relies on the owner's capacity to conceive, combine, coordinate and control the network. By adopting a dynamic view of the project, businesses could increase their capability to rapidly respond to trends. Playing a central role on multiple project network contributes to the owner's capability to dynamically combine resources and increase its innovation capacity.
In this paper we propose an integrated system concept for autonomously surveying and planning emergency response for areas impacted by natural disasters. Referred to as AASAPS-HADR, this system is ...composed of a network of ground stations and autonomous aerial vehicles interconnected by an ad hoc emergency communication network. The system objectives are three-fold: to provide situational awareness of the evolving disaster event, to generate dispatch and routing plans for emergency vehicles, and to provide continuous communication networks which augment pre-existing communication infrastructure that may have been damaged or destroyed. Lacking development in previous literature, we give particular emphasis to the situational awareness objective of disaster response by proposing an autonomous aerial survey that is tasked with assessing damage to existing road networks, detecting and locating human victims, and providing a cursory assessment of casualty types that can be used to inform medical response priorities. In this paper we provide a high-level system design concept, identify existing AI perception and planning algorithms that most closely suit our purposes as well as technology gaps within those algorithms, and provide initial experimental results for non-contact health monitoring using real-time pose recognition algorithms running on a Nvidia Jetson TX2 mounted on board a quadrotor UAV. Finally we provide technology development recommendations for future phases of the AASAPS-HADR system 2 DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release. Distribution is unlimited..
The coordination of humanitarian relief is always difficult due to a lack of data required for management and planning. Remote sensing imagery can be an important source of information about the ...in-situ situation, notably, no-access areas. Scenarios include situation awareness after natural disasters or military conflicts, damage assessment, or monitoring camp structure, either as a one-off exercise or on an ongoing basis. In this article, we propose a multifractal approach to automating information extraction about internally displaced persons/refugee camps and discuss its potential and limitations. Our case study uses multifractal features to determine the extent of camps in Kenya and Sudan. The results show that the method can be usefully applied to camp growing analysis and help to make a rough, but rapid estimation of their extent. Our multifractal method appears to be a reasonable step forward on the road between manual mapping and (not yet developed) fully automated, highly accurate processing.
Humanitarian values in a counterterrorism era Modirzadeh, Naz K.; Lewis, Dustin A.
International review of the Red Cross (2005),
04/2021, Letnik:
103, Številka:
916-917
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In this opinion note, we explore ways to understand the contemporary encounters between a growing global counterterrorism architecture and impartial humanitarian activities while critically assessing ...our own role in shaping responses to those encounters. Humbled by a decade of experience in this area, we aim to explain how counterterrorism concerns have been elevated over the humanitarian imperative and to offer potential avenues to secure greater respect for impartial humanitarian activities.
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