Regrettably, loss and harm of humanitarian workers is a prevailing occurrence in the humanitarian conflict zones of today. One does not have to search far to find headlines such as: Six Afghan Red Cross aid workers have been killed in an ambush or Attack on aid workers in South Sudan. As humanitarian laws are being ignored how can we protect those that risk their lives to help others?
One solution could lie in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), which can help humanitarian workers improve the efficiency of logistics, risk management and coordination of humanitarian missions. And this is already happening. As noted by Donini and Maxwell there is an increasing change in humanitarian relationships and practice ‘from face-to-face to face-to-screen’. The shift to relying on technology is a rapid process with low barriers to entry; we can thus expect many new technological solutions to protecting humanitarian work. Today already ‘ICT use for humanitarian response runs the gamut from satellite imagery to drone deployment; to tablet and smartphone use; to crowd mapping and aggregation of big data’ (Raymond and Harrity, 10).