Mundubat considers Humanitarian Aid a broad concept that goes beyond help and emergency aid, and which includes not only helping the population by providing them with goods and services so that they can survive, but also protecting the victims and defending their basic human rights.

 

Besides the punctual interventions in the characteristic scenes of humanitarian aid (natural disasters and armed conflicts), given the situation of the countries where we work, we also have to face what we call complex emergencies for their causes and their impact. This type of situations entail new challenges for Humanitarian Aid, not only operational, but also ethical -such as the question of neutrality and impartiality- and political. For this reason we set our intervention within that area, in the framework of the New Principles, trying to take a step forward as against the Classic Principles of Humanitarian aid.

 

Humanitarian aid is increasingly adopting principles and positions that tend towards development theories. Therefore, the time sequence proposed by what was termed as the humanitarian continuum (emergency-rehabilitation-development cooperation-preparation to face disasters) is no longer enough to face complex emergencies. We must, consequently, combine different forms of intervention each time within an integrated framework, and prioritise according to the existing vulnerability levels.