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RedR History

DRC, RedR member Peter Goulding, 1998 RedR has grown from a small register of volunteers, inspired by one man’s personal experiences of working in a refugee camp, to an international organisation, which has deployed over 2,500 experts to worldwide relief efforts and runs an international programme of training courses.

In 1979 Peter Guthrie was working as an engineer with Scott Wilson Kirkpatrick when a huge exodus of Vietnamese boat people caused a refugee crisis in Malaysia. Peter Guthrie was recruited through Oxfam to work in the refugee camps for three months. He was the only engineer there. “When I returned I saw the pressing need for engineers to help in this sort of work and compiled a register of engineers who could be called upon at short notice to work with frontline relief agencies.”

In 1982 RedR, the Register of Engineers for Disaster Relief, was formally established as a charity. It relied mainly on volunteers and ran a small programme of training events. The first big test came in 1985 when the Ethiopian famine required a significant number of RedR members to work on relief programmes in Ethiopia and across the border into Sudan.

In 1988, HRH The Princess Royal became President of RedR and the organisation got its first director.

RedR members were called on again in 1991 to respond rapidly to the ‘first’ Gulf War and the desperate needs of the Kurdish people fleeing into northern Iraq. It turned out to be a significant year for the organisation as a RedR Australia was set up and the RedR training programme started.

Throughout the 1990s RedR members were frequently called on to respond to the emergencies and disasters that peppered the decade. Hundreds of RedR members were deployed to respond to the genocide in Rwanda, the crisis in Bosnia and the Kosovo crisis.

Oxfam latrine slabs - RedR member Step Haiselden, Pakistan 2005 By the turn of the new millennium, RedR’s international reach was expanding. More training courses were being run in countries around the world and the number of international RedR offices also grew. By 2003 there were RedR offices in Canada, New Zealand, Eastern Africa and India.

2003 was also the year that RedR merged with IHE (International Health Exchange). IHE brought 22 years of health expertise in the relief and development sector, running training courses and a medical register. Together, RedR-IHE offered a broader range of professionals able to respond to emergencies and a wider scope of training courses.

Within a year, in response to the worsening security crisis, RedR-IHE set up its first regional training programme based in the field – in Afghanistan. This experience was to prove invaluable when two rapid onset emergencies struck Asia within months of each other – the tsunami in South Asia and the Pakistan earthquake. RedR-IHE responded immediately by recruiting aid workers and setting up training programmes in each region. It also set up a security programme in Sudan to help aid workers responding to the Sudan crisis be able to work there safely.

After a pilot period where the organisation was known as RedR-IHE, it has now rebranded as RedR, with a new clear logo drawing attention to RedR’s uncompromising attitude to providing quality services and best practice in disaster response.