Harvard Humanitarian Initiative collaborated with the World Health Organization to deliver its humanitarian response intensive course to Jordan.
January 11, 2024 — With battle and local weather change-driven emergencies erupting across the globe, there’s an pressing want for extra expert professionals prepared to reply to crises. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Humanitarian Academy has been getting ready college students with expertise and sensible expertise to work within the discipline since 2004. Last month, organizers collaborated with the World Health Organization (WHO) to supply the whole course outdoors of the US for the primary time.
The course was held in Amman, Jordan, from December 3-12, 2023, on the invitation of the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office. Participants included 65 humanitarian professionals from 52 nations throughout the Middle East and Africa.
A pupil group listens to a briefing in the course of the simulation.Like the unique course, which is obtainable every spring in Massachusetts and is now open for registration, college students spent class time studying key ideas in areas together with human rights and worldwide humanitarian legislation, along with sensible expertise for assembly the wants of populations in disaster. They then put what they discovered into follow throughout an immersive three-day catastrophe and battle simulation.
To make sure that the course was contextually acceptable, its HHI co-directors Sean Kivlehan and Michelle Niescierenko labored intently with WHO representatives to establish content material consultants and audio system from the area.
Adapting the simulation portion of the course from a state forest in Massachusetts to the King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC), an city set up in a desert atmosphere, was difficult, mentioned Kivlehan, an emergency doctor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and director of the Lavine Family Humanitarian Studies Initiative at Harvard. HHI, WHO, and KASOTC employees remodeled the Center right into a border area beset by illness, meals shortages, and battle. Jordan’s Center for Disease Control coordinated greater than 100 pupil volunteers from native universities to function play the affected inhabitants, native officers, media, and others whom humanitarian staff would doubtless encounter within the discipline.
Kivlehan mentioned that organizers had been capable of map all the authentic simulation’s studying aims onto the brand new atmosphere, with the addition of 1 new situation primarily based on a singular KASOTC characteristic—an actual airplane. Students “flew” to the simulated crisis-affected nation and obtained their preliminary briefings on the way in which.
Bringing coaching to the place it’s wanted
Niescierenko, MPH ’15, a pediatric emergency medication doctor and director of the Global Health Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, took the humanitarian response intensive course as a pupil and is now a co-organizer. She mentioned that the variety of the individuals in Jordan—and the experiences they had been capable of share with their fellow college students—elevated studying and enhanced the standard of the category.
Victor Tugumizemu was one of many course’s enthusiastic individuals. He is the well being info administration and threat evaluation lead of the emergency preparedness and response unit within the WHO Nigeria Country Office in Abuja. He has greater than ten years of expertise in humanitarian disaster response—together with coordinating well being care providers and main groups in battle zones and pure disasters—however noticed the course as a possibility to boost his expertise and community.
“The course’s complete curriculum, coupled with the wealth of information shared by the course instructors and fellow individuals, contributed considerably to my skilled development,” he mentioned. “I’m wanting to leverage these newfound connections and insights.”
Kivlehan mentioned, “It has been a private aim of mine to deliver this coaching on to those that can greatest use it, versus having them come to us right here in Boston. It was actually wonderful to see it occur in a area the place the wants are so acute and with such an extremely various group of individuals.” He mentioned that HHI is different alternatives to deliver the course on to extra folks world wide.
Co-directing the course on the WHO facet was Samar Al-Mutawakel, lead of regional emergency well being workforce within the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Regional Office. The course was a powerful success, she mentioned, and he or she hopes to proceed to construct on it, given the evolving international panorama of public well being emergencies and humanitarian crises. “We imagine that by persevering with to work intently with HHI, we will develop extra strong and built-in response methods that align with regional and international greatest practices. We are actually assured that our mixed efforts will contribute to the general strengthening of humanitarian response capabilities in our area.”