The genesis for CARE’s emergence into the world begun in the United States of America, in response to the ravages of the Second World War.

CARE brought relief to many countries affected by WW2 through the medium of our infamous “CARE package” – an intervention providing food, water, shelter, and protection to people in need.

Wind forward 73 years, and a high percentage of CARE’s interventions around the world today rely on the same modality, when it comes to getting aid and assistance to those in crisis. We still bring things (hardware, skills, cash) to people who lack the access themselves. Sometimes these can be locally sourced things, but the fact remains that, in many situations, agencies such as CARE are still needed to broker, facilitate and connect.

CARE is not alone in this endeavor. Like many others working in the industry of “aid” we strive to be “first responders” when an emergency breaks. However, CARE also invests in providing sustained support to the increasing number of people affected by protracted crises. In that way, we play both immediate and longer term roles.

I’ve written here about our work in Gaza, by way of an example of this. In Gaza, CARE has experience of assisting communities during times of conflict, and, we simply could not deliver the more ongoing support and assistance to Gazans that we do, were our teams not, themselves, Gazan citizens – living day by day in solidarity alongside those whom CARE is seeking to serve.

When I visited our work there last year, my Gazan colleagues spoke about the 55 day war of 2014, and turning in for bed each evening covering their faces, so as to preserve their dignity if a missile hit their house during the night. In the morning, they would covertly meet with other aid agencies, rocket fire ringing in the air, in order to design how to best support their neighbours.

Like any great pairing, humanitarian relief and longer term development bring out the best in each other. In the Gaza example, CARE is much more knowledgeable and agile in our emergency response because of the nature of our longer term status and operations there.

And so, increasingly, it is being recognized by many INGOs and institutions that there is a space of overlap between these two realms of relief and development, and this overlap has become known as the “Nexus”.

Now, a “Double Nexus” situation describes where relief and development come together. An example of this being a “disaster risk reduction” project which might seek to reduce the impact on a community affected by a cyclone, by establishing upfront an affordable micro-insurance scheme, offering property insurance to small dwellings and poorer communities.

A “Triple Nexus” takes on the third element of ‘conflict’ into this mix, and devises practical ways of intervening in such a way that positively affects not just the resilience of a community, but also the political dynamics in that same context.

All well and good, but what are some of the other frameworks into which we can deploy Double and Triple Nexus work?

Well, The Sustainable Development Goals offer us 17 specific themes that, collectively, frame an answer to addressing societal problems.

Implicit in these, and affirmed by the UN this year, is the reality that the growing number of humanitarian crises in the world today (and highlighted on these pages, too) mean that a higher percentage of the world’s most vulnerable are living in contexts of fragility, conflict, insecurity and grave uncertainty.

We cannot ignore this reality and we cannot continue to deliver aid in the same fashion as we have been doing since 1945.

Secondly, the current push behind the Grand Bargain principles (taken on by donors and NGOs) to invest higher amounts of funding into humanitarian assistance that is locally owned and implemented, is a step forward in how, from a systems perspective, the dial needs to move. Away from cyclical, transactional donor funding and away from siloed programming between emergency relief and longer term development, and towards, instead, a more harmonized way of working across these areas.

These frameworks offer up some core institutional hooks for the likes of CARE, and the good news is that we also have a “proof of concept” – the evidence – that combining approaches and harmonizing our efforts and experiences not only creates opportunities for wider impact, but it saves money.

Early warning systems, micro-insurance schemes, social protection measures – each of these upfront initiatives cost less than those initiatives deployed after an emergency.

CARE’s previous calculations from 2007 were that it cost 7 times more to respond after an emergency stuck, than it did to help prepare communities in advance of events unfolding.

What CARE is committed to is working for generational change and outcomes that go way beyond a single emergency response, but which are informed, qualified and made more robust because of the experience gained from that response.

Ultimately, we want to help create a sustained and enabling environment for marginalized and vulnerable population groups to leverage.

Put another way, we demand a levelled playing ground for all communities, in all contexts, to enjoy the social and economic freedoms and opportunities that many around the world take for granted.