Crisis Response

  • To improve maternal, newborn and child health, don’t forget fathers

    Undernutrition is associated with 45% of child deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Supporting women who are able to breastfeed is essential to preventing child deaths. More than 820,000 children under 5 years old could be saved each year if all children were optimally breastfed in their first two years of life. The importance of fathers’ support in this endeavor cannot be understated.

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  • Humanitarian crises are proliferating. Here’s how we’re responding.

    Disease. Drought. Conflict. It is not your imagination; there are more emergencies today than in years past. Storms are growing more frequent and extreme in some regions, while other areas are becoming more arid, with growing seasons disappearing before farmers’ eyes. More competition for scarce resources means more displacement and more conflict.

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  • Shaping the world we want to live in

    As FHI 360 marks its 50th anniversary, explore our history of solutions and future of possibilities. 

    Dr. Timothy Mastro, FHI 360’s Chief Science Officer, offers his perspective on where we’ve been, where we’re going and what’s at stake in human development.

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  • COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: The problem ahead

    Vaccines are here! The end of the pandemic is in sight! There is light at the end of the tunnel! Wait a minute. Is that really a light or the next more challenging phase of the pandemic speeding toward us? After more than a year of lockdown and restrictions, all of us have grown weary of the struggle and should be racing to get vaccinated. But we are not.

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  • Confronting dilemmas in humanitarian response

    Wealthy nations are now fragile states. Climate change poses an existential threat to humanity. And, the damage done by a global pandemic is not yet fully known but has already erased a decade of progress in the fight against extreme poverty. We are living in a world where crises are proliferating and take much longer to resolve. Some never end.

    My guest for this episode of A Deeper Look, Heba Aly, is drawing attention to the many forces disrupting the world and the implications for us all. Heba is the Director of the New Humanitarian, host of the podcast Rethinking Humanitarianism, and a career journalist. Heba is questioning everything from the power dynamics in aid to the increasingly intertwined nature of humanitarian response and development.

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  • Pandemic preparedness: Four strategies to keep HIV programs on track during COVID-19

    A little more than a month after World AIDS Day 2019, COVID-19 started to impact our HIV programs in Asia as countries like Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam began quarantine. Community testing ground to a halt. People living with HIV worried about access to their medications. HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) enrollment slowed. COVID-19 testing diverted laboratories from HIV services. By March 2020, the rest of the world was equally impacted. FHI 360’s HIV programs were determined to continue serving people, but there were deep concerns. We were not alone, of course; the global HIV community was facing COVID-19 together. But with so much uncertainty, we wondered: Would COVID-19 substantially set back hard-won gains toward epidemic control? Did we have the tools in hand, or could we develop the tools, to weather this crisis?

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  • Five ways to keep COVID-19 messaging relevant this fall

    This fall, we face new challenges as COVID-19 overlaps with the flu season and continues to spread across the United States and the world. We must stay vigilant about protecting ourselves, our friends and families, and others around us. At the same time, people are experiencing pandemic fatigue and need new reasons and reinforcements to keep up protective behaviors.

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  • Community schools support students and families during the COVID-19 pandemic

    For the past six years, FHI 360 has worked with community schools in New York City and Hempstead, Long Island. When COVID-19 hit earlier this year, the way we did our work immediately shifted away from focusing on in-person supports for students and families. Our first hurdle was bridging the digital divide, that gap between who has access to technology and the internet— and the skills to use them — and who doesn’t.

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  • Model shows intersecting secondary impacts of COVID-19 in the United States

    The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States has been unlike anything most of us have seen in our lifetimes. Conditions such as stay-at-home orders, wearing masks in public and the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression affect all of us in different ways.

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  • Native communities are already resilient. Here’s how we can help them thrive.

    More than ever, American Indians and Alaska Natives face some of the greatest challenges in the United States. Resources — including food, housing, medical care and family support services — have been inaccessible or nonexistent for years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, those resources have become even scarcer. According to researchers at the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, the COVID-19 crisis is “devastating tribes’ abilities to fund their governmental services and forcing tribes to make painful decisions to lay off employees, drop workers’ insurance coverage, deplete assets and/or take on more debt.” At the same time, some Native communities have experienced disproportionately high numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths.

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