NGOs and Risk

For humanitarian organizations, the presence of risk in the operating environment can force difficult trade-offs between the needs of people they are trying to serve and the need to mitigate potential harm to their personnel, resources, and reputation. Whether or not the risks to humanitarians have objectively increased in recent years (and there is evidence that they have), more to the point is how the organizations perceive their risk and how these perceptions have affected their work by dint of new policies and practices. These are the central questions of this study, undertaken by Humanitarian Outcomes on behalf of InterAction, and funded by the Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) and the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM).

Focusing on a participant-sample group of 14 major international NGOs, the study analyzes the current approaches to risk in humanitarian action through a systematic review of 240 relevant policy documents, interviews with 96 key informants, and a web-based survey of 398 humanitarian practitioners.

The findings reveal an international NGO sector whose major operators perceive a heightened level of risk, particularly manifest in the same, roughly half-dozen extreme environments: Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Iraq/Syria region, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen.