As the world grows more urbanised, large scale disasters are increasingly impacting urban areas. The role aid agencies have and the response that they provide is changing from the more familiar rural or camp contexts. Urban emergencies have a higher level of complexity and the kind of response required is greatly affected by the different urban environments, whether huge cities, medium-sized towns, peri-urban or slum areas. Aid agencies are much less significant players in urban responses, as their available resources are often dwarfed by those of existing service providers. It is crucial for effective urban disaster response to build strong relations with national and municipal authorities as well as private sector services suppliers, and to work within existing legislation and long term plans for the cities. Working with communities is as important as ever, but communities are less tightly defined and engagement becomes more complex: communities are unlikely to be geographically-identified but instead based around common interests or, for instance, income opportunities.
This Urban Humanitarianism course aims to explore and develop the necessary skills and knowledge of a humanitarian to effectively work in the early stages of an urban emergency.
Who should attend? Humanitarians who have at least two years’ experience working in emergency response.This may or not be in an urban environment, but participants should have an interest in working in an urban emergency response. This course presupposes a working knowledge of basic humanitarian principles.
Course content Sessions covered will include:- An introduction to urban disasters
- Defining and targeting affected populations in an urban context
- Urban stakeholders in emergencies and communications
- Coordination approaches for urban emergencies
- Multi-sector assessments in urban environments
- An introduction to market assessments and cash and voucher programming
The duration of the facilitated online course is 6 consecutive weeks. All activities take place on-line, but it is expected that you spend around 1 hr per working day on participating in team activities and completing individual tasks.
All the activities are asynchronous, so there aren’t fixed times when you need to be online to meet with all the others in the group. Yet, with plenty of discussions it often feels like real time, with the added advantage that you can take a little longer to formulate your contributions. The asynchronous model means that you can log in when convenient for you, whether that is during the working day, in the evening at home or while traveling. However, you need to work on the same topics in the same weeks as other participants so you will need to access the online learning site regularly to contribute.
The most important thing is that participants are fully committed to completing the course and sharing their own experiences with the other participants they will be working with. The maximum number of participants is 24.
Fees This course is sponsored by Lloyd‘s Charities Trust- the fees are banded.| Band | Fee |
| Band A Those working for southern national & local NGOs full time students | £50.00/ $62.72 |
| Band B Individuals funding themselves Those working for charitable organisations with an annual income of less than £1million/$1.5million | £88.50/ $111.02 |
| Band C Those working for charitable organisations with an annual income greater than £1million/$1.5million | £156.65/$195.70 |
| Band D Those working for commercial, governmental and intergovernmental organisations £277.26 | £277.26/$347.80 |
For this project, we are also running a “Bolt On” discount for those interested in participating in another one of our online courses in addition to the Online Urban Humanitarianism course (for example Online Wash in Urban Emergencies, Online Shelter in Urban Emergencies, Online Urban Security or Online Disaster Risk Reduction).
If you wish to know more about the Bolt On discount, or have any further queries about this course, please e-mail, training@redr.org.uk