Every day, humanitarians learn how to better prepare for crises, respond to emergencies, and support communities in building resilience. These learnings come from experience on the ground and collaboration with local communities and humanitarian partners.
But valuable knowledge does not always reach the people who could benefit from it. Lessons can remain within individual projects or organisations, and vital information can be difficult to find when it is needed most.
RED, the humanitarian collaboration platform of the Netherlands Red Cross, aims to help change that.
A place to discover, learn and share
RED is a hub for humanitarian knowledge, bringing together expertise, stories and resources from the Netherlands Red Cross and its partners. Designed for National Societies, practitioners and partners alike, it offers a place to learn from experiences across a wide range of humanitarian contexts.
The ambition is to make knowledge easier to discover and apply, so that experience gained in one context can inform decisions and inspire action in another.
On RED, you can discover how a community in Ethiopia was able to protect their livelihoods ahead of devastating floods. You can learn how people in conflict-affected Sudan continue to meet their needs through digitally delivered cash assistance. And you can explore how the Moroccan Red Crescent improves its assistance to communities affected by the 2023 earthquake by directly engaging with them.
Working together to strengthen humanitarian action
For Harm Goossens, secretary general of the Netherlands Red Cross, RED reflects the importance of learning from experience and making that learning available beyond its origin:
“Humanitarian work generates valuable knowledge every day. By sharing what we learn, we can help others make informed decisions and improve how we, as the wider humanitarian community, prepare for and respond to crises.”
RED also creates an opportunity to share not only what works, but how and why it works, including the challenges and lessons learned along the way.
Learning from one another, across contexts
Humanitarian challenges rarely have simple solutions. What works in one place may need to be adapted in another. This is where Derk Segaar, director of International Assistance at the Netherlands Red Cross, sees value in RED facilitating this dialogue:
“There is a wealth of humanitarian knowledge and experience we gain from working with communities and National Societies around the world. But having that knowledge is not enough if others cannot find it or learn from it. RED helps bring these experiences, insights and practical solutions together, so we can learn from one another and use that knowledge to strengthen each other’s work.”
RED will feature practical tools, programme experiences, research, partner perspectives and local stories. Together, these form the bigger picture of the realities of the humanitarian world.
A platform we can build together
This is only the beginning of RED. Its value will grow through the insights shared by its community.
There are several ways to get involved:
- Explore: Discover resources relevant to your work.
- Apply: Use what you find to inform your own decisions, adapted to your context.
- Share: Pass useful insights on to colleagues who could benefit from them.
- Contribute: Bring valuable experience to a wider audience by sharing content from your own day-to-day.
Not every contribution needs to be a major research project or a polished publication. A practical lesson from a programme, an approach that has been tested on the ground, or an honest reflection on what could have worked better can all help others learn.
Because knowledge is built collectively, RED also welcomes contributions from partners and practitioners working alongside the Netherlands Red Cross.
Let’s connect and make humanitarian knowledge go further
RED has one clear ambition: to help useful experience travel further, so that lessons learned in one context can inform action in another.
That ambition can only be realised together. By sharing what we know and learning from one another, we can help good ideas reach others, and support better humanitarian action.
Explore RED, discover what others have learned, and help us make humanitarian knowledge go further.