Duty of Care
Duty of Care is a moral or legal obligation to protect personnel from physical and mental harm. In humanitarian response, it reaches beyond an organisation’s own staff to partners and volunteers — and includes safety, mental health, aid-delivery practices, coordination and fair partnership.
Care is broader than equipment and security management
The review calls for a shared understanding of safety and security standards across humanitarian actors in Ukraine, with Duty of Care applied throughout partnerships and implementation chains.
The review defines Duty of Care as an obligation to ensure the safety and security of personnel from physical and mental harm. It includes appropriate equipment and safety management, but is not limited to them.
The concept also covers mental health, aid-delivery mechanisms, coordination and principles of fair partnership. This means that responsibility for care should be considered not only inside an organisation, but also in the way projects are funded, partnerships are structured and humanitarian operations are organised.
Five elements for frontline staff and volunteers
The proposed minimum package is intended for NGO/CSO staff and volunteers working in frontline areas.
Accident & life insurance
Insurance coverage for NGO/CSO employees and volunteers.
Psychosocial support
Measures that support mental health and psychosocial well-being.
Personal protective equipment
PPE appropriate to the risks faced during humanitarian operations.
Individual first aid kits
IFAKs available to staff and volunteers operating in high-risk contexts.
Training
Training on package items, combined with introductory safety and security management training.
From individual protection to system-level responsibility
The study’s recommendations address donors, humanitarian coordination and organisations themselves.
Fund care as part of the response
- Discuss and adopt a widely accepted minimum and optimum Duty of Care package.
- Support endorsement of the minimum package by the Humanitarian Country Team.
- Provide more flexible, lean and medium- to long-term funding.
- Include structural and administrative overhead costs that sustain core organisational functions.
- Offer adaptive support packages reflecting different organisational capacities and needs.
Coordinate, mentor and protect data
- Strengthen coordination at oblast and, where relevant, hromada level.
- Prioritise mentoring and organisational development over short, stand-alone trainings.
- Coordinate capacity-building initiatives to reduce duplication and standardise content.
- Budget for data-protection measures where sensitive information is collected.
- Improve evidence on returns to unsafe areas and clarify the legal framework around evacuations.
Make responsibility practical
- Ensure employees and volunteers comply with safety and security standards.
- Require incident reporting, humanitarian-principles training and appropriate use of equipment.
- Promote bilingual information sharing on risks and incidents.
- Build fair-partnership consortia between more established and smaller or newer organisations.
- Invest in organisational specialisation and professionalisation over the medium and long term.
How Duty of Care becomes part of humanitarian practice
Read the Duty of Care package
The study is available in Ukrainian and English. Authors: Oleksandra Golub, Nicola Morganti, Yuliia Tretiakova.
Duty of Care package for local humanitarian responders in Ukraine
Ukrainian version дослідження та рекомендацій щодо мінімального пакета Duty of Care.
Open Ukrainian version →Duty of Care package for local humanitarian responders in Ukraine
English version of the review, minimum package and recommendations for humanitarian actors.
Open English version →Strengthening Duty of Care in Ukraine requires dialogue, coordination and shared responsibility
The Alliance of Ukrainian Civil Society Organizations works to ensure that the safety, well-being and voice of Ukrainian humanitarian actors remain visible in humanitarian coordination, partnership and system reform.