Operational Humanitarian Support – Help the Helpers

Norwegian Support Team (NST) – delivers complete, tented heavy base camps for 50-100 relief workers with all necessary facilities.

Norwegian UNDAC Support (NUS) – small field teams for ICT support, mainly used by the UN Disaster Assessment and Coordination teams (UNDAC) in an early phase of an humanitarian operation.

The assistance is financed by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the official Norwegian emergency aid programme. DSB has standby partner agreements with UNHCR and WFP, and has a close cooperation with UN OCHA. Since the end of the 1990s, DSB has worked in close integration with our sister organizations in the International Humanitarian Partnership (IHP) in most of our operations.

The Norwegian Support Team has participated in humanitarian operations for the United Nations in several countries since the start in 1999, among these to Albania, Guinea, Tadjikistan, Iran, Indonesia, Pakistan, Somalia and Haiti.  Norwegian UNDAC Support has been supporting around 25 missions since the first in 2000, like Eritrea, Algeria, Haiti, Guatemala, Thailand, Pakistan, Honduras, the Caribbean and Namibia.

DSB may also assist countries that request material support in the event of disasters through the Civil Defence department, on a case-to-case basis. The Civil Defence provided such support during various European disaster situations, like the flood in Georgia and the forest fires in Macedonia.

The concepts are made ups of resources made available by the Norwegian Civil Defence, combined with a pool of volunteers, which are trained for this kind of missions.