About Us
What is HumVenezuela?
HumVenezuela is an independent platform developed by Venezuelan civil society for the monitoring, documentation and follow-up of the Complex Humanitarian Emergency (CHE) that affects the country since 2016. This type of crisis causes a serious situation of human insecurity, with massive needs of protection and humanitarian assistance, as a consequence of a systemic deprivation of human rights.
When did HumVenezuela start?
The HumVenezuela platform was created in 2019, based on the experience of documentation of the rights to water, food, education and health, carried out by 300 actors of Venezuelan civil society during 2018, with an interdisciplinary methodology that allowed the presentation of evidence on the humanitarian emergency in Venezuela.
What are the objectives of HumVenezuela?
The purpose of HumVenezuela is to provide relevant information for the measurement, review and comprehensive assessment of the CHE, based on evidence and a culture of open communication that contributes to decision-making, consistent with the reality of the CHE in Venezuela and the protection of the rights and dignity of all affected persons.
All of HumVenezuela's activities respond to a collaborative dynamic of consultation, exchange and consensus among diverse actors of civil society and are centered on the protection of human rights, in accordance with the framework of principles and standards of international law and the humanitarian system.
What is HumVenezuela's approach?
HumVenezuela works with a multidimensional approach to address the CHE in its various layers and dimensions. The layers outline CHE's impacts on the country's population and capacities; the humanitarian response to people's needs and rights; and the complexity to resolve the CHE due to factors that limit or hinder society's efforts to overcome it.
How does HumVenezuela work?
HumVenezuela works with a system for collecting, processing, systematizing and analyzing data and evidence from different sources that can provide a broad outlook on CHE's impact on rights sectors, vulnerable populations and states in the country. This work combines three lines of research:
Monitoring Data collection with standardized indicators to measure the scale, severity, intensity, and gaps in the population' s living conditions and rights caused by the CHE; and to assess the humanitarian response and complexity of the CHE.
Documentation Recording and systematizing evidence on the situation of rights, needs, and threats faced by EHC-affected populations and communities on the ground, collected and reported by interdisciplinary civil society groups.
Follow-up Observation of events that impact the CHE and periodic publication of CHE evaluation reports based on the data collected, on the ground documentation, and on the evolution of events, considering new milestones and circumstances.
A CHE is a humanitarian crisis caused by political factors. These crises develop during a long period of instability that erodes the legal, institutional, economic and social structures of a country and collapses the capacities that depended on those structures to ensure the life, security, freedoms and well-being of the population.
The CHE’s present great challenges to the affected society, including access restrictions to a sufficient, timely and effective international humanitarian response; exposure to threats related to abuses and arbitrariness, and practices of persecution, coercion, deprivation and discrimination; and the no visibility of their needs due to large information gaps, fragmented views of reality, and impediments to mobility and communication within the country and beyond its borders.
Civil society is the space in which a society organizes itself to exercise its right to act with a common purpose and its own voice in the public sphere, to demand guarantees of inclusion, protection and assistance for all its members, and to participate freely and autonomously in decisions that concern its lives, security, freedoms and well-being.
Civil society actors play a critical role in decision-making to protect society from the adversities of a CHE because they understand the context better and know the ground realities; they have first-hand information about affected communities and populations, know the threats to which they are exposed and the obstacles to reach them; they have a valuable amount of data about the affected capacities and the factors that cause the emergency; they support and accompany people who require protection and assistance and are supportive to these persons in defending their dignity, rights and freedoms.