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With COVID-19, new challenges arise in keeping aid workers safe

Context · Health emergencies

The pandemic removed the assumption underneath most humanitarian security planning: that a person in difficulty can be moved somewhere better.

Four consequences followed quickly, and organisations that had planned for one of them were caught by the other three.

Movement stopped being routine. Border closures, quarantine requirements and domestic restrictions meant that relocation, rotation and medical evacuation could not be relied on. An organisation that had approved a deployment on the basis that the person could be extracted within a day had to re-examine whether that was still true, and in many cases it was not.

National staff carried more. Where international staff could not travel, national staff took on work that would otherwise have been done by people who could leave. That is a security decision that most organisations took without recording it as one, and it changed who was exposed, for how long and with what support.

Health became a line in the security plan. Infection control determined how a team moved, where it stayed, how it met communities and what happened when a member became ill. In locations with no adequate treatment, the plan had to state what the organisation would do, who would pay for it and who would decide, and it had to state it before deployment rather than after a positive test.

The economic shock outlasted the health emergency. Lost livelihoods and diverted state capacity produced the conditions in which crime, unrest and armed recruitment increase. Agencies that stood down and later returned found a harder environment than the one they left.

The organisational lessons are the ones that recur whenever a familiar risk changes shape. Re-read the insurance rather than assuming it. Write down what happens if the medical evacuation route is closed, and who pays. Treat remote management as a risk arrangement with named consequences for the partners and national staff delivering the work, not as a cost saving. Give staff a route to raise a concern about their own exposure that does not pass through the manager who set the plan. And plan family contact in advance, because the assumption that a relative can travel to the location may no longer hold.