'Let communities do their work': the role of mutual aid and self-help groups in the Covid-19 pandemic response.

How to respond quickly, effectively, and sensitively to large-scale crises is debated at length in the aid sector. Institutional focuses on projects and outcomes have led to abundant literature on the efficacy of external interventions, while the actions of individuals and communities to meet their own needs remain under researched. This paper seeks to close the gap by joining global trends and specific case studies to explore the scale, breadth, and characteristics of citizen and community-led responses to the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-21.

Humanitarian crises: what determines the level of emergency assistance? Media coverage, donor interests and the aid business.

This paper proposes a basic hypothesis that the volume of emergency assistance any humanitarian crisis attracts is determined by three main factors working either in conjunction or individually. First, it depends on the intensity of media coverage. Second, it depends on the degree of political interest, particularly related to security, that donor governments have in a particular region.