Seminar on Humanitarian Aid’s impact and challenges

The Seminar on Humanitarian Aid’s impact and challenges: New humanitarian actors in the Middle East developed in two sessions the 9th of March of 2016 in the Casa Árabe in Madrid. The first part counted with the intervention of Middle East local actors assisting the humanitarian crisis and the second with other kind of humanitarian actors in the Middle East.

The Seminar helped to improve humanitarian aid’s impact in the Middle East thanks to the shared knowledge with new humanitarian actors, such as private companies, Armed Forces and religious movements.
The opening speech of Francisco Rey, Director of the Institute for the Study of Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (IECAH), followed United Nations’ arguments on Humanitarian Aid in the Middle East exposed in the I World Humanitarian Summit, taken place in Istanbul in May, 2016.

Humanitarian, and non-humanitarian actors, and some new actors in the field such as Armed Forces, shared its opinions and experiences about the area and contributed with ideas to improve the impact of the projects in a crisis conflict. The conclusion of this meeting is that every actor has its own added value and that it is important to count with the coordinating mechanisms at all levels (politics, strategic, task management, etc), in order to guarantee a better impact of the humanitarian labor.

Speakers: Jesús Gracia (Secretary of the State for Internatinal Cooperation and Ibero-America (SGCIB)), Pedro Antonio Villena (Casa Árabe’s Director), Jumana Trad, (FPSC’s President), Francisco Rey Marcos (Codirector of the Institute for the Study of Cooperation and Humanitarian Aid (IECAH)), Rabih El Chammay (Cheaf of the Mental Health Programme of the Health Care Public Department in Lebanon), Izzat A. Zeidan, Project Manager of Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (Palestinian territories), Amer Hizaji (President of the Association of Help for Syrian People), María Luisa Clavera i Maestre (General Director of the Spanish Association of CSR Directos), Colonel Juan A. Mora Tebas (Economic Analist of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies (IEEE)), Riay Tatary Bakry (President of the Union of Spanish Islamic Communities), Monseñor Audo (Chaldean Bishop of Aleppo and President of Caritas Syria) and Blanca de Mesa (READI’s President).