Attachments
Emergency: A situation impacting the lives and well-being of many people or a significant percentage of a population and requiring substantial multisectoral assistance. For a Health sector response, there must be clear public health consequences. An emergency can be acute (such as a cholera outbreak) or slow onset (such as a drought), and multiple emergencies can occur concurrently.
Protracted emergency: An environment in which a significant proportion of the population is highly vulnerable to death, disease, and disruption of livelihoods over a prolonged period of time. Governance in these settings is often weak, with limited State capacity to respond to and mitigate the threats to the population or provide adequate levels of protection.
Area based approach: as opposed to a focus on specific target populations, takes a geographic area as starting point for analysis and response, looking at the entire population in it and its diversity. It allows mapping of all different types of capacities, vulnerabilities, investments, and response, from government, local NGOS and communities, to development and humanitarian programming, and considering differences in security and accessibility. It can be a district, a cluster of districts, a province, and/or a region with fragile settings that can cross borders.
Fragility: There are several definitions of fragility and/or fragile states, often used to identify and group countries. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/ Development Co-operation Directorate (OECD/DAC) has defined a state as being fragile when ‘state structures lack the political will and/or capacity to provide the basic functions needed for poverty reduction, development and to safeguard the security and human rights of their populations’. Various definitions tend to converge towards a combination of dysfunctions in key governance dimensions: inability to protect populations from violence, failure to provide basic services, and lack of legitimacy.
Furthermore, fragility is dynamic, and changes over time. Some countries with fragile situations could be in post-conflict, transition, or development phases, or faced with recurrent disasters and humanitarian crises, while other countries could have all these different contexts of fragility existing simultaneously in the same country.
The World Health Organization WHO takes a comprehensive approach to all aspects of emergency management, embracing prevention and mitigation, preparedness and readiness and response and recovery. WHO supports Member States to build their capacities to manage the risk of outbreaks and emergencies with health consequences. When national capacities are exceeded, WHO as the cluster lead assists in leading and coordinating the international health response to contain the emergency and to provide effective relief and recovery to affected populations.
The Sudan Health Cluster members work collectively to provide timely, effective, and appropriate actions to minimize the health impacts of humanitarian and public health emergencies through strengthening of service delivery, addressing gaps, and promoting effective leadership. The partnership contributes to building the capacities for emergency preparedness, response, and early recovery; actively engages in collective and coordinated field operations; encourages the participation and capacity development of national partners and advances existing evidence base and practice.