The rising trend of violence against aid workers has generated a need for better reporting, tracking, analyzing and sharing information among humanitarian actors on these attacks. The Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD) records over a decade of the major incidents of violence against aid workers, from 1997 to the present. The database is the single most comprehensive global source of this data, and we hope that in this publicly accessible form it will provide a much-needed quantitative evidence base for analysis of the changing security environment for civilian aid operations.

The AWSD is a project of Humanitarian Outcomes (www.humanitarianoutcomes.org), and has been made possible by contributions from the Government of Canada, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.