Friedman Seminar with Karen Jacobsen
Updated Friday, March 18, 2016
This Friedman Seminar features Karen Jacobsen, presenting a talk titled "Understanding Urban Settings – Developing an Information Toolkit for Humanitarian Agencies through Academic-Practitioner Partnerships." This seminar was originally held on 3/16/2016.
Humanitarian crises and forced displacement are increasingly played out in urban settings, as evident in the Syrian crisis. The humanitarian response has been slow to adapt to urban settings. New types of programming are being tried out, but humanitarian agencies lack information gathering tools that help them understand the urban context in which they work. A key aspect of the Feinstein Center’s work is to help humanitarian, government and donor organizations understand and respond to new problems. This presentation shows how this process is unfolds, drawing on experience from a current partnership in the Syrian region. The partnership’s goal is to operationalize what is known as an “urban area-based approach” by creating a methodology – a conceptual framework and an information toolkit - for use in urban areas affected by humanitarian crises and displacement.