Copyright: MSF/H.J. Burkard
If you want to know how hard it is to save a life you should definitely tune in for this event on January 31, 2012. From the site:
Humanitarian negotiations are life-and-death issues for people in need, but they also raise troubling political and ethical dilemmas for the organizations that are engaged in them. In the forthcoming book Humanitarian Negotiations Revealed: The MSF Experience, published by Columbia University Press, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) takes a critical look at how its teams have negotiated to gain access to people in urgent need of lifesaving medical assistance in the 40 years since MSF was founded, including recent case studies from Somalia, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar.
Please join us for a live online discussion of these issues featuring several experienced MSF aid workers, who will share their first-hand experiences from past assignments. They will describe the often complicated process of negotiating with governments, armed groups, public health officials, international actors, community leaders, and local officials; as well as the struggle to define what compromises are acceptable in order to run programs in crisis zones.
You can register here. The schedule is as follows:
8:00 PM Eastern
7:00 PM Central
6:00 PM Mountain
5:00 PM Pacific
It is nice to see that MSF is trying so hard to help people understand what is for most an opaque industry.
