ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on personal experience in international emergency and humanitarian response in the world’s poorest and most vulnerable countries. Anthropologists have increasingly been involved in providing input to international development and humanitarian response. Many of the larger non government organizations (NGOs) usually conduct development programs as well as humanitarian and emergency response programs in disaster recovery, disaster risk reduction, and disaster preparedness. Anthropologists with appropriate experience in humanitarian response are sometimes hired as consultants for a variety of assignments, such as field assessments, proposal drafting, design of monitoring and evaluation plans, and lessons-learned analyses. As with finding other types of non-academic work, this avenue requires networking with key staff in NGOs, attending the right conferences, and producing and effectively circulating pragmatic and applicable writing. The multi-crisis composite is because in NGOs the same personnel work on all of the responses, often simultaneously, and use the same basic toolkit of principles, approaches, and technical activities, adapted to the situation.
