Humanitarian Crises and Public Health Systems

About

Humanitarian crises—including large-scale displacement, epidemics, food insecurity, climate shocks, and armed conflict—pose profound and interlinked public health challenges. These crises evolve dynamically over time, involve multiple actors with conflicting objectives, and frequently generate unintended consequences due to feedback, delays, and accumulations.

This course introduces System Dynamics (SD) as a rigorous yet accessible framework to analyze humanitarian public health challenges. Rather than focusing on single issues in isolation, participants will learn to conceptualize crises as feedback-rich systems linking populations, health services, humanitarian response capacity, and governance structures. Using real humanitarian examples—many drawn from the instructor’s prior teaching and field-based work—participants will develop causal loop diagrams, stock-and-flow representations, and simple simulation models using Vensim or Stella.

The course emphasizes dynamic structure, feedback mechanisms, accumulation processes, and time delays present in complex humanitarian challenges. The course emphasizes learning for policy design, helping participants understand why well-intended humanitarian interventions often underperform or backfire, and how systems modeling can support more robust decision-making under uncertainty.

Core humanitarian topics covered include:
- Epidemics dynamics, disease transmission in crises, surveillance gaps, reporting delays, and behavioral responses
- Malnutrition dynamics, humanitarian supply chains, aid dependency
- Shelter provision, unintended pull effects, WASH access and health outcomes
- Protracted crises, conflict, forced displacement, migration, population dynamics
- Health service capacity, workforce burnout, service capacity, and congestion effects
- Policy resistance, delays, and unintended consequences in migration governance

Course leader

Prof. Paulo Gonçalves (USI, CH)

Target group

Practitioners, researchers, and graduate students

Course aim

By the end of the course participants will be able to:
- Conceptualize humanitarian crises as dynamic public health systems
- Identify feedback loops driving escalation, stabilization, or collapse
- Explain how migration emerges from broader humanitarian dynamics
- Distinguish stocks, flows, and delays in humanitarian contexts
- Develop causal loop diagrams for complex humanitarian problems
- Build simple stock-and-flow simulation models
- Use models to explore trade-offs and unintended consequences of interventions

Fee info

Discounts are available for PhD and Master’s students, participants from UMICs and LMICs, and members of LSS partner institutions (USI, SUPSI, Swiss TPH, and SSPH+). For details on fees and available discounts, contact us at info@ssph-lugano-summerschool.ch or visit our website.