COVID-19 in humanitarian settings: documenting and sharing context-specific programmatic experiences.

Area of Science:

• Public Health
• Humanitarian Response
• Infectious Disease Epidemiology

Background:

• Normative guidance for COVID-19 response lacked humanitarian specificity.
• Humanitarian organizations required context-tailored interventions for pandemic challenges.

Purpose of the Study:

• To establish a dedicated, open-access platform for sharing COVID-19 humanitarian field experiences and guidance.
• To create a standardized repository of innovative, context-specific humanitarian responses to the pandemic.

Main Methods:

• Development of a COVID-19 humanitarian-specific website by three universities.
• Collection and review of field experiences from humanitarian workers and academic interviews.
• Standardized uploading of experiences and guidance documents using an operational framework.

Main Results:

• The website hosts 135 guidance documents from 65 organizations and 65 field experiences from 29 organizations across 27 countries.
• Content covers 38 thematic areas, including triage and sexual and gender-based violence.
• Examples of challenges and innovative solutions in humanitarian settings are provided.

Conclusions:

• An open-access, neutral academic platform can facilitate constructive dialogue among humanitarian actors globally.
• This model can empower country-level humanitarians and serve as a precedent for future large-scale health emergencies.