AlertNet – Alerting Humanitarians to Emergencies

Reuters AlertNet is a humanitarian news network based around a popular website. It aims to keep relief professionals and the wider public up-to-date on humanitarian crises around the globe.
AlertNet attracts upwards of three million users a year, has a network of more than three hundred contributing humanitarian organizations and its weekly email digest is received by more than 10,000 readers.

It was started in 1997 by Reuters Foundation – an educational and humanitarian trust — to place Reuters’ core skills of speed, accuracy and freedom from bias at the service of the humanitarian community.

Why was it set up?

During the Rwanda crisis of 1994, the Reuters Foundation became interested in media reports of poor coordination between emergency relief charities on the ground. It surveyed charities on what could be done to remedy this. The conclusion was that there was a need for a service that would:

– Deliver operation-critical information to relief charities worldwide
– Incentivise relief charities to swap information with one another
– Raise awareness of humanitarian emergencies among the general public

These overlapping objectives are summarised in the Reuters AlertNet tagline – ‘Alerting Humanitarians to Emergencies’.