Who we are
The New Humanitarian (formerly IRIN News) was founded by the United Nations in 1995, in the wake of the Rwandan genocide, out of the conviction that objective on-the-ground reporting of humanitarian crises could help mitigate or even prevent future disasters of that magnitude.
In 2019, aAlmost twenty years later, we became an independent non-profit news organization and changed our name from IRIN to The New Humanitarian to signal our move from UN project to independent newsroom and our role chronicling the changing nature of – and response to – humanitarian crises.
This allowed us to cast a more critical eye over the multibillion-dollar emergency aid industry and draw attention to its failures at a time of unprecedented humanitarian need. As digital disinformation went global, and mainstream media retreated from many international crisis zones, our field-based, high-quality journalism filled even more of a gap.
The New Humanitarian speaks to the profound shifts impacting our world today.
Traditional forms of humanitarian intervention are bursting at the seams; new approaches and players are emerging to fill an increasing gap between needs and response.
Today, we are one of only a handful of newsrooms world-wide specialized in covering crises and disasters – and in holding the aid industry accountable.
