This is not much of a diary entry, but I thought it would be useful for the community to have knowledge of Relief Web
In my view the best source of updates on the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Haiti.
Link filtered for Haiti-updates only
All the humanitarian organizations of the world can – and mostly do – submit updates and status reports on their work in various disasters, whether man made or natural.
ReliefWeb is an information portal formed by OCHA in 1996 as a way to rapidly share humanitarian information across the world. It has offices in New York, Geneva and Kobe, Japan. OCHA’s 2005 budget was some USD 110 million, mostly received directly from UN member states.
The idea came from a UN ‘ReliefNet’ conference in 1995, and its mandate when it was launched in 1996 was “to strengthen the response capacity of the international humanitarian community through the timely dissemination of reliable information”. ReliefWeb’s $2M annual cost (2007) is funded by voluntary government contributions.[1]
The online collaboration platform chosen was Lotus Notes, which was used throughout the UN at the time.
Content is contributed by around 2,500 organisations and disseminated at the rate of 200,000 pages per day – at quiet times.
Follow the work of your favorite humanitarian organizations and stay up-to-date. The site has the following sections and information can be filtered by region or country:
- Latest Updates
- Countries and Emergencies
- Appeals and Funding
- Policy and Issues
- Professional Resources
- Maps
Don’t get addicted 🙂
My name is hari rud, and I am a ReliefWeb addict.
For those not in the know, ReliefWeb “is the global hub for time-critical humanitarian information on Complex Emergencies and Natural Disasters,” a website bought to you by the good people of the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. They have all sorts of useful information about people starving, living with AIDS or having their houses blown away by a hurricane.
Serious stuff. But the most important bit of ReliefWeb is its Vacancies page. They don’t give the data in their annual statistics report, but I’d wager a month’s unemployed salary that this is the most visited part of the site. What they do tell us is that in 2008 they posted 14,910 job adverts on behalf of NGOs, IOs the UN and, increasingly, those hard to name for-profit development companies. ReliefWeb is your one-stop shop for finding a job.
And as per above, also a great source for finding a job in a challenging environment.
