Meeting the Humanitarian Challenge - UNV's Work Between Conflict and Development (United Nations Volunteers, 44 p.): Introduction: Basic objective of UNVs humanitarian relief

Meeting the Humanitarian Challenge - UNV's Work Between Conflict and Development (United Nations Volunteers, 44 p.)

Introduction

		Global context and role of the United Nations system
		Background to UNV involvement in humanitarian assistance
		Basic objective of UNVs humanitarian relief
		Progress in implementation of the approach
		Features of UNV humanitarian assistance
		Range of services - ways in which UNV specialists make a difference

Basic objective of UNVs humanitarian relief

A basic objective is immediately to respond to the front-line UN system agencies in their urgent requests for specialised personnel for speedy humanitarian deployment. The primary functions of UNV's Humanitarian Relief Unit are to recruit, deploy, and administer UNVs as individuals and in teams for assignments of variable duration according to need (e.g. 3-6 months, or more). Assignments in support of capacity-building for prevention, preparedness and mitigation of disaster may be longer.

Refugee children from Somalia

To provide its response capacity, UNV has established a facility for rapid recruitment and support, using a pool of pre-cleared candidates on stand-by. This includes the composition and orientation of emergency response teams for rapid deployment. UNV has comparative advantage in recruiting, training, deploying and administering volunteer-specialist humanitarian teams, UNV develops project concepts and documents, and engages in other programming activity, especially in relation to programmes to build capacity in disaster-prone countries for disaster prevention, preparedness, and mitigation.