Introduction

In 2018 alone, 210 million people needed humanitarian assistance due to multiple ongoing crises. The perception people have of humanitarian work changes depending on where they stand. In most cases, the images that people have in their heads when they think about it are of concrete actions that take place in the field of operations after a disaster or a humanitarian crisis like thousands of refugees crossing a border. The diversity of the humanitarian machine is also clear in the variety of underlying motivations and objectives of those that converge onto the field of operations. There is also great variation in their sizes, ranging from a few that operate much like multinational corporations with annual budgets over a billion dollars, to nongovernmental organizations with a few dozen workers. Unfortunately, when humanitarian workers reach the field, they often meet with the despair of the people they want to serve combined with the many obstacles and inefficiencies of the humanitarian machine.