Six sudden emergencies we responded to in 2022

We look back now on how Concern teams on the ground have responded to those emergencies and worked hand-in-hand with local communities to meet people’s immediate needs and help them recover.

On 9 January 2022, a fire swept through part of the camp in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, destroying 1,200 shelters and leaving 5,000 people homeless. The settlement hosts more than a million mostly Rohingya people and is the world’s largest refugee camp.

Despite being located in the part of the camp where the fire broke out, Concern’s integrated nutrition facility escaped damage. So our priority was to follow up with 423 children, aged under-five, directly affected by the blaze, including 30 children who were being treated for malnutrition.

Concern's emergency teams also distributed clothing to people who had lost their belongings in the fire.

The recent outbreak of conflict in Ukraine started on 24 February 2022 and led to a major humanitarian crisis, with an estimated 17.7 million people in need of immediate assistance. Around 7.84 million people have fled to neighbouring countries and across Europe, and 6.5 million people are on the move inside Ukraine or are unable to leave encircled towns and cities.

The provision of public services such as water, electricity and heating is under severe pressure, and people’s access to healthcare continues to be challenging.

So far, Concern and our partners have reached almost 40,000 Ukrainian people with cash assistance, food supplies and hygiene kits.

After conducting initial assessments in late February on the borders with Poland, Moldova, Hungary, Slovakia and Romania, we supported Ukrainian people crossing into Poland by providing food to people on the move, assisting with the building of toilets and heated tents and distributing vital hygiene supplies.

Working closely with our Alliance2015 partners ACTED and People in Need, Concern's focus then turned to inside Ukraine to support thousands of people displaced internally by the conflict. We delivered food, hygiene items, trauma kits, nappies, sleeping bags and mats to the cities of Lviv and Kyiv by truck and train. We also provided psychosocial support for people experiencing trauma, via a telephone hotline.

Months into the conflict, we joined with humanitarian partners Welthungerhilfe and Cesvi to operate the Joint Emergency Response in Ukraine. 

Originally operating in western Ukraine, Concern is also now working from Poltava and Kirovohrad in the centre of the country to get supplies to communities in the east and south of Ukraine which are accommodating huge numbers of displaced people. We are providing cash payments to vulnerable families to enable them to buy what they need, supplying food to transit centres working with displaced people, and food and hygiene supplies to communities hosting large numbers of people fleeing the conflict.

In May, deadly monsoon rains in north-eastern Bangladesh killed around 100 people and left an estimated 7 million people in desperate need of shelter and emergency relief.

Hundreds of thousands of homes were underwater, and in the worst-hit areas, whole villages were submerged after the country experienced the highest amount of rainfall in living memory.

Following the flooding, Concern worked closely with the national disaster management authority in Bangladesh and carried out a needs assessment with local disaster management committees and community groups.

Alongside our local partner, our response initially focused on emergency rescue and evacuation efforts for communities in two remote areas in Shantigonj.

We also provided dry food packages, water purification tablets and hygiene kits to around 5,000 families to help meet their immediate needs of food and clean water.

On 22 June 2022, a powerful 5.9 magnitude earthquake – the most deadly in two decades - struck south-eastern Afghanistan, causing catastrophic damage and killing over 1,000 people. Scores more people were injured.

At least 1,800 homes were destroyed, displacing thousands of people. At one stage, 400,000 people were in need of humanitarian assistance. The affected areas are some of the poorest and most remote in the country.

Concern’s emergency team in Afghanistan coordinated an immediate response, alongside OCHA, other UN agencies, local partners and members of the Afghanistan government, providing transportation for assessment teams to reach remote villages.

Following that, we moved quickly to distribute hundreds of non-food item kits, dignity kits, emergency shelter tents and blankets to families in urgent need in Khost and Paktika provinces.

We continued to carry out further needs assessments to ensure that other hard-to-reach communities received help, and conducted technical assessments of water systems and shelter repairs. 

A renewed wave of gang violence in the capital of Port-au-Prince left hundreds of people dead in July. Since then, armed gangs have taken over parts of the country, isolating entire neighbourhoods, cutting off power and water supplies, and limiting access to health facilities.

The impact is that almost half the population of Haiti – 4.7 million people – now face severe food insecurity. That includes 19,000 people living in Cité Soleil, a marginalised neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince, who are on the brink of starvation.

On top of that, a cholera outbreak in October has pushed the humanitarian crisis in the country to an alarming level.

Concern is responding to the immediate needs of those affected by the current crisis in Cité Soleil with water distribution and psychosocial support. Through other existing programmes in that part of the capital, we are also helping to meet people's basic food needs.

Seeds of Peace: Haitian youth committed to building a better society, a programme run by Concern along with two Haitian NGOs - Sakala and Lakou Lapé, continues to address the root causes of the conflict among gangs in Port-au-Prince.

And following a cholera outbreak in October, we supported health centres and cholera treatment centres with materials and resources to disinfect contaminated areas. We provided hand washing points in public spaces and ran mass prevention awareness campaigns using community radio stations, mobile phone operators and social media platforms.

Torrential monsoon rains triggered the most severe flooding in Pakistan’s recent history in August, killing 1,400 people, washing away thousands of villages and leaving around 33 million people in need of assistance and at increased risk of waterborne diseases and malnutrition.

More than 5 million people remain displaced and living in temporary shelters after their homes were damaged or destroyed, while many public health facilities, water systems and schools were also badly affected.

With crops destroyed and livelihoods badly affected, the World Food Programme estimates that as many as 7.2 million people could be food insecure by early 2023 as a result of the floods.

Concern's initial emergency response centred on the province of Punjab, one of the worst-hit areas. We provided 1,200 families with immediate cash assistance to enable them to buy essential items, such as food, medicine and makeshift tents.

Since then, Concern has supported a further 500,000 extremely vulnerable people affected by the floods in Sindh and Balochistan with multi-purpose cash assistance.

We also distributed shelter materials, mattresses and blankets and hygiene kits, containing items like soap and period pads, to help protect the health of at-risk communities.

We're still gathering figures for 2022, but last year Concern responded to 66 emergencies in 23 countries, reaching 17.8 million people.

And there's still time to support our latest emergency appeal in response to the devastating floods in Pakistan as we assist communities in desperate need of food, clean water and shelter.