The Do No Harm Handbook

Beginning in the early 1990s, a number of international and local NGOs collaborated through the Local Capacities for Peace Project, also known as the “Do No Harm” Project (DNH) to learn more about how assistance that is given in conflict settings interacts with the conflicts. We knew that assistance is often used and misused by people in conflicts to pursue political and military advantage. We wanted to understand how this occurs in order to be able to prevent it.

The collaboration was based on gathering and comparing the field experience of many different NGO programmes in many different contexts. Through this, we were able to identify very clear patterns regarding how assistance and conflict interact.