44 questions · 18 almanac · 0 findings

Humanitarian Organizations

Institutions delivering relief and humanitarian aid.

Almanac Two Ways to Stand Against War
  • What happened at the Battle of Solferino that led Henry Dunant to found the Red Cross?
  • How did Dunant's improvised battlefield relief effort turn into the Geneva Conventions?
Almanac A Minimum of Humanity, Maintained
  • What kind of work was the International Committee of the Red Cross doing on the front lines of World War One in 1917?
  • Why did the Nobel committee award a Peace Prize for humanitarian work rather than for achieving an actual peace?
  • What connects the ICRC's 1917 prize to its second Peace Prize in 1944, also awarded during a world war?
Almanac A Dismissed Professor, Vindicated at 79
  • What kind of cross-border work did John Mott do through the YMCA and World Student Christian Federation?
  • What was the logic behind pairing Balch and Mott as co-laureates in the same year?
Almanac Feeding Every Side of the War
  • What relief principle did the Quakers apply when deciding who received food and medical aid during wartime?
  • How far back did the Quakers' tradition of cross-conflict relief work go before the 1947 prize?
  • In which countries did the Friends Service Council and American Friends Service Committee carry out reconstruction and refugee work?
Almanac A Hospital Built on Reverence for Life
  • What did Albert Schweitzer mean by his ethic of 'reverence for life'?
  • Why did Schweitzer abandon a distinguished European career to build a hospital in Lambaréné?
  • What did Schweitzer do with the money from his Nobel Peace Prize?
  • How have later assessments complicated the legacy of Schweitzer's hospital in Gabon?
Almanac A Three-Year Mandate, Renewed Indefinitely
  • Why was the UNHCR originally created with a mandate limited to just three years?
  • How large was the UNHCR's annual budget in 1954, and how did the organisation typically fund itself?
  • What is the irony the entry identifies in an international-goodwill organisation winning a prize for managing goodwill's failures?
  • When did the UNHCR win a second Nobel Peace Prize, and what did that repeat award signal about the refugee problem?
Almanac Villages Built Instead of Camps
  • What did Georges Pire's 'European villages' provide that temporary refugee camps did not?
  • What was Georges Pire's activity during the German occupation of Belgium, and how did it lead to his postwar humanitarian work?
  • How many families did Pire's villages house at their peak?
Almanac A Century of Tending the Wounded
  • What happened at the Battle of Solferino that led Henry Dunant to found the Red Cross movement?
  • How did Dunant's book A Memory of Solferino lead directly to the Geneva Convention of 1864?
  • Why did the Nobel Committee choose 1963 specifically to award the ICRC its third Peace Prize?
Almanac Peace, Measured in Fed Children
  • Why was UNICEF originally founded in 1946, and why did it not dissolve once its emergency mission ended?
  • How did UNICEF's mission expand from postwar Europe to operating in over a hundred countries by 1965?
  • What reasoning did the Nobel committee give for awarding the Peace Prize to an organization rather than an individual?
Almanac She Skipped the Banquet, Fed the Poor Instead
  • What led Mother Teresa to found the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta in 1950?
  • What did Mother Teresa ask the Nobel committee to do with the banquet money?
  • What kind of people did the Missionaries of Charity focus on serving that other institutions turned away?
Almanac A Light Aimed at a Dark Prison
  • What was Servicio Paz y Justicia, and why was documenting human rights abuses in Latin America dangerous work in the 1970s?
Almanac A Temporary Office, Still Open
  • Why was the UNHCR originally established as a temporary body in 1950?
  • What refugee crises in the decades after 1950 kept expanding the UNHCR's mandate instead of winding it down?
  • What day-to-day work does the UNHCR actually do in refugee camps and with host governments?
Almanac Treating the Wound and Naming the Cause
  • What experiences in Biafra and Bangladesh led French doctors to found Médecins Sans Frontières in 1971?
  • What does témoignage mean, and how did it distinguish MSF from traditional relief organisations?
  • How did MSF use its Nobel prize money to campaign for medicine access in developing countries?
Almanac A Three-Year Experiment, Still Running
  • Why was the World Food Programme originally created as a temporary three-year experiment?
  • How many people was the WFP reaching by 2019, and in how many countries?
  • Why did the Nobel Committee's 2020 timing require no further explanation?