In marking Monday’s annual event, the world body says women account for more than 40% of humanitarian workers worldwide and that these 250,000 women work in some of the most dangerous places on Earth. These include the frontlines in conflicts raging in places such as Yemen and Syria, South Sudan, and the Lake Chad Basin.
Patricia Danzi, regional director for Africa for the International Committee of the Red Cross, tells VOA that women and men who become humanitarians do so because they want to alleviate the suffering of others.
“When you do this job, you do not think about your life,” she says. “What you do as a man and a woman, you think about the lives of others and what can you do to improve that very life of people that are in a situation much worse than you could ever imagine.”
Danzi says it is important to have female humanitarians in the field because they have a perspective different from that of men regarding women’s issues. She says women comprise more than half the populations involved in crisis.
“It allows us to talk to a part of the people that sometimes will be hidden or will not be able to talk to international humanitarian aid workers, but also national humanitarian aid workers,” she says. “Women very often can only talk to women.”
The U.N. General Assembly designated Aug.19 as World Humanitarian Day in 2008, in honor of the 22 people who lost their lives in the 2003 terrorist attack on the Canal Hotel in Baghdad. Among the victims were the secretary-general’s special representative for Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and seven women.
