Abstract:

Unrequested and often unsuitable goods sent to humanitarian disaster zones, often classified as Unsolicited Bilateral Donations (UBDs), cause disruption. In June 2017, a project was launched to reduce the number of UBDs from Australia. At the time, there was no existing research on motivations for this phenomenon, and so the crucial first step was to gain an in-depth understanding of the behaviour. The unique and impactful findings from this study now offer new foundations for public messaging to effectively reduce the number of UBDs sent from Australia. Next steps are to raise global awareness of the findings and translate into communications to reduce the disruptive impact of UBDs sent to humanitarian crises zones.