DFID - UK Department for International Development
DFID - UK Department for International Development

This seminar will expose the dramatic gap between health needs and health capacity in conflict-affected settings and highlight the need to better protect the healthcare system and keep it running during periods of conflict. Recommendations for data collection and research that can provide an informed basis for new approaches and their implementation will be presented.

The Norwegian Red Cross, the Centre for Global Health (CGH) at the University of Oslo and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) invite you to a seminar exploring healthcare services in areas of armed conflict. Armed conflict and other situations of violence are major challenges to sustainable development, including their impact on access to and delivery of quality healthcare services.

Healthcare services in these regions are exposed to attacks and are extremely under-resourced. As a result, millions of people have no access to healthcare at all and the effects of a collapsed healthcare system often long outlive the conflict itself by many years. In this regard, two Sustainable Development Goals overlap: SDG3 and SDG16.

New approaches are needed to better protect impartial healthcare services and ensure an informed engagement of development actors, not just after the conflict, but also during conflict so that the healthcare system continues to function when it is needed the most and will not need to be rebuilt from scratch once the conflict is over.

Recently, some states and development institutions have moved towards new ways of thinking, but in order to develop contextualized and effective approaches to protect healthcare services while simultaneously keeping the healthcare system running in conflict areas, more data and information are needed at the national and regional levels.