Cyber-resilience in Humanitarian Aid

Objective

Humanitarian organizations increasingly rely on digital infrastructures such as biometric registration, cloud platforms, and digital cash transfers to deliver aid. While these tools improve efficiency and traceability, they also expose humanitarian actors and crisis-affected populations to serious digital risks. Recent years have seen cyberattacks disrupt operations, compromise sensitive data, and raise critical protection concerns. These incidents are not isolated technical failures but politically and ethically significant events revealing structural weaknesses in digital governance. As digital threats intensify, humanitarian actors face pressure to sustain essential operations under cyber duress. Yet prevailing responses focus narrowly on technical fixes, compliance, or restoring functionality, with little attention to how resilience is shaped by organizational routines, governance structures, and external constraints, or whose vulnerabilities are prioritised or overlooked. CYBERAID addresses this gap by conceptualising cyber-resilience as a socio-technical process. It investigates how humanitarian organizations respond to digital threats, what factors shape cyber-resilience-building strategies, and how benefits and risks are distributed. The comparative design examines the International Committee of the Red Cross, the UN Refugee Agency, and Welthungerhilfe, combining document analysis, expert interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork in headquarters and country offices. Ukraine is included as a key site, as it is among the largest recipients of humanitarian funding and faces increasing cyber threats and documented cyberattacks linked to the war with Russia. CYBERAID will deliver the first systematic study of cyber-resilience in the humanitarian sector, advance an analytical framework for organizational cybersecurity, and generate actionable policy recommendations for protecting operations and affected populations in high-risk environments.