Fordham University’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA) will hold a wide-ranging discussion about the worsening crises in Sudan’s Darfur region and Chad with humanitarian aid workers who have provided assistance to victims in the region on Thursday, June 21, at 8:30 a.m. in the 12th-Floor Lounge, Lowenstein Center, on the Lincoln Center campus.
Moderated by Larry Hollingworth, IIHA’s director of humanitarian programs, the session will feature a lecture on Chad by Gonzalo Sanchez-Teran, a Jesuit Relief Services’ (JRS) project director who coordinates educational projects in the Goz Beida and other camps for internally displaced persons in the central African country, and a plenary session on Darfur as part of the institute’s International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance Program.
Aid officials have called the humanitarian crisis in eastern Chad no less severe than the one in Darfur. Estimates place the number of refugees from Sudan and the Central African Republic in Chad’s eastern and southern border areas at more than 280,000.
The plenary session on Darfur will feature aid workers from organizations throughout the world who will discuss efforts to provide assistance in one of the world’s most unstable regions. The four-year-old crisis in Darfur has claimed the lives of some 200,000 people as rural villagers have come under attack by Arab militias, known as janjaweed, which many observers believe are armed by the Sudanese government.
The monthlong diploma program at Fordham, which draws students from organizations throughout the world, helps aid professionals function more effectively in times of “complex emergencies,” including wars and natural disasters. The program, which enrolled 38 humanitarian aid professionals from 25 countries this year, is run by the IIHA.
