At the request of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Working Group HelpAge International has carried out a review of the humanitarian community’s current policies and practice relating to older people, and made recommendations for improvement.

Strong and fragile

The recommendations are published in a UNFPA-funded report, Strong and fragile: learning from older people in emergencies.

The report makes a series of recommendations designed to help relief programmes better meet older people’s particular needs, and to see older people as much as an asset as an under-served group.

These include:

• increase awareness of the global growth in numbers of old and very old people
• develop training and guidelines on ageing issues for the humanitarian sector
• introduce more effective data collection, including disaggregation by age and sex
• engage older people in decision-making respond to the health needs of older people
• include older people in livelihood interventions reflect the special requirements of older people in return, repatriation and reintegration programmes
• reflect older people’s needs when distributing food packages.

Putting policy into practice

The IASC will request member agencies to incorporate these recommendations into their policies and programmes, circulate them to global "cluster leads" and chairs of IASC subsidiary bodies, and review progress within 18 months.

HelpAge International will collaborate with the World Health Organization to develop practical guidance.

The Humanitarian Reform Group at OCHA are also promoting  the recommendations.