IRIN
| News agency | |
| Founded | Nairobi (1995) |
| Headquarters | Geneva, Switzerland |
|
Key people
|
Heba Aly, Director |
| Website | www.irinnews.org |
IRIN (formerly Integrated Regional Information Networks) acts as a news agency focusing on humanitarian stories in regions that are often forgotten, under-reported, misunderstood or ignored.
Until 1 January 2015, IRIN was a project of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). IRIN aims to create greater awareness and understanding of regional issues and events, and to contribute to better-informed and more effective humanitarian action, media coverage and advocacy.
The news service is widely used by the humanitarian aid community, as well as academics and researchers.
IRIN came into being in 1995 after the Great Lakes refugee crisis resulting from the 1994 Rwandan Genocide overwhelmed the existing information management systems set up by the humanitarian aid community. With its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya, it now covers 82 countries, including Papua New Guinea since 2008, for more than a million readers. IRIN has regional news desks in Nairobi, Johannesburg, Dakar, Dubai and Bangkok, with liaison offices in New York and Geneva. The agency is managed by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Its aim is to "strengthen universal access to timely, strategic, and non-partisan information so as to enhance the capacity of humanitarian community to understand, respond to, and avert emergencies."
The main language is English, with a smaller number of articles available in French and Arabic.
The main users of IRIN news are people working in the humanitarian aid community, followed by academics, consultants, government officials and other media – newspapers and other print publications, websites, radio stations and television broadcasters - where other readers often pick up IRIN content.
Reports provided by IRIN essentially provide an early warning and help generate humanitarian responses. IRIN news is distributed free of charge to subscribers by e-mail and via the website.
There is also a range of multi-media services:
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