While the humanitarian aid sector has become highly professionalised, it also remains a fundamentally ethical sector, grounded in humanitarian principles. These include the core ethical belief that people facing life -threatening situations should receive help, regardless of their nationality, ethnicity, or religion. But living up to this ethical belief is getting a lot harder as humanitarian funding is starting to fall just when the job is getting bigger.
The belief that humanitarian assistance should be allocated based on need, and go to those who require it most, forms the bedrock of modern humanitarian action. But when resources are scarce, or insufficient to address the scale of need, this creates important ethical challenges for donors and individual agencies in deciding where to focus their efforts and put their funding.
Join our host, Alice Obrecht (Head of Research at ALNAP), for ‘A Matter of Priorities’, a new podcast series which asks humanitarians across the system, and those outside of the system, urgent questions about how we should prioritise when lives are at stake.