Our mission is to relieve suffering in disasters
by selecting, training and providing
competent and effective relief personnel
to humanitarian relief programmes world-wide
The Indian Ocean tsunami at the end of 2004 was a turning point for RedR Australia, as it was for a number of aid agencies. Prior to that time, we deployed up to 30 people per year. The past two years have seen a huge leap in deployments – over 90 in 2005 and close to 80 for 2006. Deployments during 2006 continued to be influenced by the post-tsunami rehabilitation process where disaster relief work has become transitional aid work, still requiring technical experts to help people struggling to rebuild their livelihoods and homes.
The skills being requested by our UN Standby Partners have also expanded. About half of our deployments are engineers, with logisticians forming a quarter of all placements and the remainder ranging from tele/data communications technicians, public health and social service workers, to project managers and report writers.
Since mid-2006 almost half the deployments have been undertaken by register members on their first assignment, and women constitute a quarter of all deployments. RedR Australia’s profile within the NGO sector has risen as these organisations responded to the need for their staff to be trained for humanitarian response work. Staff from NGOs now make up half of the 600 training course participants annually. The tsunami also highlighted the need for specialist training in such areas as humanitarian logistics and water and sanitation for emergencies, and these courses are now an integral part of the RedR Australia training calendar.
Countries where RedR Australia members have worked in recent years
