Humanity First began in 1993 at the time of the Balkans Conflict in Europe when a group of volunteers were organising convoys to Bosnia, Croatia and Hungary. The focus in the initial years was disaster response, and took in the Kobe earthquake in Japan in 1995, the Kosovo conflict (1998-2000) and the Izmit earthquake in Turkey in 1999 which killed 17,000. Over 3 weeks, HF assisted more than 15,000 people in western Turkey. Throughout this period, Germany was a strong ally of the UK. By 2000, Humanity First started to focus more on long term human development. Initially to address food security, we began our Feed a Family project in Africa that grew into Feed a Village. Soon HF was registered in the USA and Canada who started to take ownership of projects in central and southern America. In terms of human development, HF started to repair water pumps at scale in Africa through its Water for Life programme.
2004 & 2005 proved monumental years in which HF first responded at scale to the Boxing Day Tsunami in Indonesia and assisted 30,000 people. The next year, the Kashmir earthquake killed 80,000 in Pakistan and HF was able to assist over 60,000 with medical support, food, shelter, water and sanitation. At this point, Humanity First began to focus on education and training projects across Africa, Asia and Central America and soon dozens of training centres were established for IT, Tailoring and Engineering trades. In 2010, HF mounted a global response to the terrible Haiti earthquake, and a year later to the drought in East Africa. By now, HF was building new schools especially in regions struck by disasters such as Haiti, Guatemala and The Philippines. In 2014, HF responded to the Ebola crisis across West Africa with a focus on Sierra Leone and was able to assist over a quarter of a million people in what is still our largest ever disaster response operation. HF is now registered in 50 countries across 6 continents. HF relies largely on volunteers and has assisted almost 900,000 through disaster response and over 5 million through long term development programmes.
