While continuing to take the lead in the international response to refugee emergencies, UNHCR has endeavoured to ensure the effectiveness of its interventions and the durability of results by building partnerships with other United Nations agencies and by coordinating its activities in complex emergency situations with the Department of Humanitarian Affairs. In its emergency operations in the former Yugoslavia, the Great Lakes region and other parts of Africa, and the central Asian republics, UNHCR has continued to strengthen its collaboration with United Nations agencies and programmes, in particular WFP, UNICEF, WHO and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), in activities such as food aid, immunization and health care, water supply and sanitation, mother and child medical care, family planning and education.
Faced in the Great Lakes region with the most severe refugee emergency in recent history, the Office was again obliged to innovate. With its own staff resources heavily committed in the region and elsewhere, it appealed to donor Governments to assume an operational role by providing self-contained services in a number of critical assistance sectors through the deployment of resources drawn largely from their military and civil defence establishments. The use of these so-called "service packages" in the Rwanda emergency has demonstrated how, under certain conditions, unique military skills or assets can support UNHCR emergency relief activities. The positive impact of service packages in responding to the critical conditions that characterized the massive exodus of Rwandans has led UNHCR into a process of consultation with Governments and the Department of Humanitarian Affairs on how, when necessary and appropriate, this mechanism can best be used.
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