Think Tank for Aid Workers

After Michael J. VanRooyen finished his residency in emergency medicine in 1991, he went to Somalia. Eager to see how his medical training would translate into the context of a poor nation torn by civil war, VanRooyen concluded very quickly that it didn’t. His training had focused on maladies a doctor would expect to encounter in the developed world; instead he was dealing with malnourishment and malaria. During the next decade, he traveled to some of the world’s most dangerous and disaster-riven places: Sudan, Bosnia, Rwanda, Croatia, North Korea, Haiti. Those experiences convinced him that the field of humanitarian aid is “150 years behind medicine” in terms of evaluating need and using evidence-based practices to respond.

VanRooyen is now assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and an associate professor in the department of population and international health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH). He arrived from Johns Hopkins in 2004 to work with Jennifer Leaning, associate professor of medicine at HMS and professor of the practice of international health at HSPH. She, too, has copious field experience—in Afghanistan, Albania, Angola, Kosovo, Somalia, and Darfur, among other places—and also saw opportunities for greater efficiency. Too often in humanitarian work, Leaning says, “the din of work drives out creative thinking and strategic planning.”

In 2005, Leaning and VanRooyen founded the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) as a place where such thinking and planning could occur. An interdisciplinary center with affiliated faculty from Harvard’s schools of law, government, and business, as well as medicine and public health, HHI brought leaders from major humanitarian organizations to Cambridge in September for the second annual Humanitarian Health Conference. In all, 123 representatives from 68 organizations—including UNICEF, the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Oxfam America, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank, Catholic Relief Services, and Mercy Corps—attended.

Sidebar:

Counting the War Dead

Much of this year’s conference focused on the need for better, more rigorously gathered data from crisis zones. As an example of the impact such data might have, VanRooyen points to results in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has been embroiled in civil war since 1996. A randomized mortality survey, conducted by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in 2000, found that the war and its byproducts—crippled infrastructure, food shortages, and the like—had caused 2.8 million deaths. The findings dwarfed previous estimates, which had been in the low six figures, and prompted a drastic increase in aid to the conflict area. (The war continues, and the last IRC survey, in 2006, put the death toll at 3.9 million.)

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Sidebar: Counting the War Dead