COVID-19 and aid worker security
The pandemic did not replace the risks that humanitarian staff already carried. It rearranged them, added new ones, and made several existing problems worse.
What changed
Four changes mattered most for security management, and they arrived together.
Movement stopped being routine
Border closures, quarantine requirements and domestic movement restrictions removed the assumption on which most humanitarian security planning quietly rests: that a person who is somewhere difficult can be moved somewhere easier. An organisation that had planned to relocate staff, to rotate them out, or to fly in a specialist had to assume that none of those would work, and had to say so before deployment rather than during an incident.
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 shift is a security question, not just an operational one. It changes who is exposed, for how long, and with what support, and it usually happens without anyone formally deciding it.
Health became a security risk
Infection control moved from a medical concern into the security plan: how a team moves, where it sleeps, how it meets communities, and what happens when a member of staff tests positive in a location with no adequate treatment. The knock-on effects included stigmatisation of staff and, in some places, of the communities they served.
The economic shock created new risk
Lost livelihoods, restricted trade and diverted state capacity produced the conditions in which crime, unrest and armed recruitment increase. The security consequences of the pandemic therefore outlasted its health consequences, and agencies that had stood down their programmes found the environment harder when they returned.
What agencies changed
- Deployment decisions were taken with an explicit statement of what would happen if the person became seriously ill where they were working, and who would pay for and arrange the response.
- Medical evacuation cover was re-read, and the gaps in it were documented rather than assumed away.
- Remote management was treated as a security arrangement with its own risks, in particular for the partners and national staff delivering the work.
- Teams were given a way to raise concerns about their own exposure without going through the manager who had set the plan.
- Family communication was planned in advance, because the usual assumption that a relative could travel to the location no longer held.
Reading
Practical guidance and research on the security of humanitarian staff, for the organisations that send them.