Nicole Guedj
Former french Minister
President of the Red Helmets Foundation
Not a month passes without a hurricane, a storm or an earthquake striking our planet. Every year, more than 250 million people are victims of natural disasters. They should be 375 million in 2015.
Beyond the remarkable commitment of ground actors, the humanitarian community is not strong enough to meet with the challenges of climate change. The tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004 or the hurricane Katrina, fatal for the State of Louisiana, has shed the light on the limits of the current humanitarian system.
And yet, we do not need an additional actor. NGOs and intergovernmental agencies are already doing a considerable job. What the humanitarian world needs is preparation, management, coordination and regulation.
This is why, I have been pleading for the last ten years towards the creation of Red Helmets at the UN. These humanitarian brothers of the Blue Helmets would have vocation to organize and coordinate the rescue teams deployed, in an emergency, on a theatre of natural disaster.
In 2004, after the tsunami, I convinced the French President to transmit this proposal, on behalf of France, to Kofi Annan, who accepted it. It is now up to the international community to mobilize in order to accelerate the creation process.
And it is to help this implementation that I created the Red Helmets Foundation in 2006. In the meantime, to facilitate humanitarian action, we are developing innovative technologic tools that will be used in the future by the "Red Helmets" and which are currently made available to governmental organizations and NGO partners.
Our first project was the development of a container of telecommunication by satellite, Emergesat, in collaboration with the CNES (French Centre of Space Dtudies) and Thales Alenia Space. We are now focussing on putting internet at the heart of our actions. Therefore, we are developing several interactive projects including MISSING, a global humanitarian search engine for missing people and MyHumanitary, the first on-line humanitarian social media.
Together we can do it.
