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IFRC Psychosocial Centre Annual Report 2022

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INTRODUCTION

24 February 2022 marks a dramatic escalation of the Russia-Ukraine international armed conflict. The devastation caused by the conflict throughout 2022 affected the lives of millions. More than eight million people have fled the country while an estimated eight million are internally displaced in Ukraine. Loss of family members, jobs, homes, daily air raid sirens, ongoing violence, power cuts, and water shortages – all factors adding to the everyday stress for Ukrainians in Ukraine and the surrounding countries.

The IFRC network in Europe launched its biggest mental health response in history as a response to the impact on the mental health of people affected inside and outside of Ukraine. Specialist volunteers and staff in more than 30 countries including Ukraine are providing mental health and psychosocial support to hundreds of thousands of people.

From the beginning, the IFRC Psychosocial Centre (PS Centre) played a central role in this response. Initially as a coordinating body, but as the scope of the crisis grew clearer, the PS Centre offered technical support, trainings, guidelines, workshops, webinars, and training videos to Red Cross (RC) National Societies (NS) in Ukraine and the affected countries in Europe and Central Asia. Essential resources were translated and disseminated in close collaboration with RC NS and the IFRC Europe Regional Office.
The effects of the conflict were not only confined to Ukraine and the region.

An emerging energy and food crisis causing prices to rise fueled an already devastating hunger crisis in East Africa triggered by a toxic cocktail of one of the worst recorded droughts, Covid-19, and local conflicts affecting more than seven million people. In Yemen, an estimated 21.6 million people – 75% of the population – needed humanitarian assistance by the end of 2022. From June to October, floods in Pakistan killed 1,739 people and left an estimated 20.6 million people in need of assistance. And the list goes on: the economic collapse in Afghanistan spinning a whole population into poverty, armed conflict in northern Ethiopia displacing more than 2.4 million people, 4.3 million displaced in Venezuela and neighboring countries, unprecedented floodings in South Sudan, unrest in Myanmar… The combined force of a global pandemic, emerging and sustained conflicts, food crisis, inflation, and the devastating consequences of seemingly unstoppable climate change have created unprecedented uncertainty about the future around the world. In the 2021/22 Human Development Report,
UNCERTAIN TIMES, UNSETTLED LIVES: Shaping our Future in a Transforming World, the United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, outlines a new uncertainty complex defined by current events, but on the backdrop of “everyday uncertainty that people have always faced”. These new instabilities are layered and feed off each other. The consequences of climate change, the Covid-19 pandemic, food insecurity, an increase in polarization, and the Ukraine conflict interact to unsettle life in unparalleled ways.

The report, and the context it was written in, makes it evident that the world needs more ways to manage ambiguity and face these uncertainties, and – unsurprisingly – the PS Centre once again faced its busiest year ever.
The increase in demand called for a reflection: How is the PS Centre perceived by the stakeholders it aims to support? Do we have the right focus, and do we provide the right services? To answer these questions, the partners of the centre, Danish Red Cross, and the IFRC commissioned an evaluation and a review of PS Centre activities since 2015, to guide the way ahead and to strengthen MHPSS within the Movement and beyond.
An external consultant was hired to conduct the evaluation. The report is available on the PS Centre website and an interview with consultant Rebecca Horn can be found in this report, but the result in short, is: The National Societies want more - more technical support, more trainings, more resources, more language adaptions, and more humanitarian diplomacy with states and international organisations. They want more PS Centre.

Hopefully, in 2023 and the years to come we will be able to fulfil this wish.

Nana Wiedemann
Director, the PS Centre