Welcome back. In this session,
we are going to discuss more in detail how we can
concretely strengthen the resilience of the communities affected by the conflict.
How concretely we can help them to better protect themselves,
to facilitate the access to medical services,
and also how to generate respect for healthcare.
The community-based protection activities can
be classified into five specific categories.
The first one is, Risk Education Awareness.
The second one is, Self Protection Measures.
Third one, Assistance Aiming to Reduce Risk Exposure and Engagement Strategies,
and finally, Community Self-organisation and Social Cohesion.
Let's look at them more precisely.
Risk Education Awareness.
So, Risk Education Awareness are all the activities which aims to provide lifesaving,
useful, and actionable information for the communities.
We are also providing leaflets to the communities that are affected by, for example,
frequent shooting, shelling, on the where to go,
how to react in case of an attack.
And in context, where sexual violence is occurring,
the ICRC is organizing risk education awareness to communities.
In some context, to communities,
despite the fact that there is the medical facilities,
will not seek medical care,
because perhaps they do not know,
they are not aware of specifically what kind of services they can expect.
So that is why we are making awareness to the community,
so that they can know better where to go and what kind of
support they can expect from the medical facilities that is in their area.
The second type of activity are Self Protection Measures.
Here we have, for example,
reinforcement of passive security.
Those are all the measures that ICRC is
helping the community with to better protect themselves.
To give you concrete examples,
ICRC is providing sandbags to reinforce safe rooms,
also helping to construct protective walls
in school premises in areas that are affected by the conflict.
So here concretely we have
an activity which is called Re-enforcement of Passive Security.
So, we are providing
constructive materials in order to reinforce the passive security of the premises,
so we can reinforce the security of the school but also of a hospital.
And, sometimes in areas where houses
or the community members are directly exposed to shelling,
to shooting, ICRC also is providing for them sandbags,
three M, to reinforce the passive security for themselves.
Safe movement is another way to better protect themselves.
So, here the ICRC is supporting the community to better move from one place to another.
Quite often when we organize community-based protection workshop,
the community is asking us to help them to,
for example, know which way to take in order to
evacuate a person that needs to have access to a medical support.
But concretely, the ICRC is supporting the volunteer from the National Society to
organize evacuations for the wounded in areas that are affected by the conflict.
Assistance Aiming to Reduce Risk Exposure is our third type of activities.
Here concretely, the ICRC is addressing a physical need of
a person but at the same time will reduce the exposure to a threat or to a risk,
or to mitigate the harmful coping strategies.
The old example that is very visual is, for example,
in a village where we
have the community that do not have access to water within the village,
and each time they have to fetch the water they have to go by the river
that is close to a military base, for example.
So each time the community is going to take water,
they are exposing themselves for example to be here at the wrong time,
wrong place, because the military base can be targeted but also.
For example, women can be exposed to unpleasant comment
if the military personnel has taking alcohol or,
in the worst case scenario,
can be even exposed to sexual violence.
So therefore, by building inside
the village a well not only we are addressing the water need of
the community but also we are reducing the exposure of
the committee each time they have to go by the river and fetch the water.
And here in the context of access to medical health care services,
the ICRC has developed mobile health unit in Kaga-Bandoro and
also in areas in Nigeria that are occupied by Boko Haram.
So, we have mobile health unit coming,
and we are bringing the service to the people,
so that if they need medical access,
they do not have to expose themselves in doing long journey.
And also, in South Sudan we have surgical mobile team
that also are bringing the services to the area where the danger is occurring.
The fourth type of activities are Engagement Strategies.
Those are all the strategies that the community
is developing with the weapon bearers, or, for example,
the authorities who normally is in charge of
providing the support for the community or who can be the source of the threat.
So, here we are quite often asked also when we
do community-based protection workshop by the community,
to help them to better engage with the authorities or with the weapon bearers,
in order to negotiate their health care access for example.
So, here I have a very interesting example from DRC,
where the ICRC organized a platform of discussion that was facilitated by us,
where we invited the health care workers,
the community members, and members of the weapon bearer group.
And we have facilitated this discussion in order to discuss
a safe healthcare access for the members of the community that
needed to go and to travel for medical purposes.
And finally, the last type of activities that we can do,
it is to help the community to better organize themselves,
and also to develop social cohesion.
We see that in times of conflict,
when the state apparatus is not working properly,
when people are displaced they can no longer
rely on the support from the family, from their friends.
We see that there is a raise in tension,
in general, that is occurring usually at three levels.
The first one it is for example between the host communities and the IDP community.
The second one it is between the communities themselves.
And the third one is even at the household level.
So, how we can help the community to better coordinate,
to better collaborate between each other in those difficult times?
So, here we usually do and cooperate with our colleague from the National Society.
In Mali, in Timbuktu,
the ICRC open prenatal consultation clinic for women from both,
they have different communities,
from the Tuareg communities and from the Arab community that usually were in tension.
And after discussion with the community,
they realized that if men on those specific days were not allowed to the clinic,
women from both communities could come.
And this created a lot of cohesion among themselves because they realized that they were
facing the exact same problems and the exact same threats.
So, throughout this approach,
we managed to create a little bit more link
and contribute to the social cohesion within the town among the women.
So the last example is again from Mali where the ICRC facilitated the exchange of
health community members from two areas that were in tension among themselves.
So, we have facilitated and created a platform where once
the health community workers could go to the other region and they could see an exchange,
all the good lesson learned and
all the bad experiences in order to enhance their role within the community,
to facilitate access to health care for the people affected.
This exchange has widely contributed to social cohesion and also,
apart from having pure health purposes,
it has also created the links as
communities could see that they were facing the exact same problems.
So the funny anecdote was that when
those community members had to separate and return to the house,
it was a very emotional moment.
I would like just to conclude how important it is to engage with the community,
how important it is to strengthen their resilience and remind that
our action or all our humanitarian work is about supporting the community.
And recognizing that they are the ones who are the frontliners,
they are the one who needs to be supported,
and their resilience needs to be strengthened.
The community is at the core of our humanitarian action.
Thank you.
Angela GussingRegional Director for the Americas
Beat StollDr
Esperanza MartinezDr, Head of Health
Alexander BreiteggerLegal Adviser
Frederik SiemSenior Adviser for Health Care in Danger
Bruce Eshaya-ChauvinDr, Medical Advisor Health Care in Danger Project
Jamie WilliamsonHead of Unit, Relations with Arms Carriers
Luigi FratiniHead of Prevention Cell Unit, Law & Policy department
