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We like to spotlight existing and new organizations doing work on North Korea, and New Focus International brought this start-up to our attention: the European Alliance for Human Rights in North Korea. According to its founder Mike Glendinning, the organization began via social media and has the ambition to work with refugees to highlight issues [...]
We are introducing a new periodic feature on the blog called NGO’s in Action. Amidst all of the trouble, it is important to highlight the numerous groups that are seeking to do good work in North Korea, whether related to human rights, information, refugees or the massive humanitarian tasks facing the country. We cannot, of [...]
Amidst all the troubles, it is worth pausing to spotlight the good humanitarian work done by NGOs working in North Korea. We were recently reminded by of the work of the American Friends Service Committee. In 1997, AFSC was one of several NGOs that received permission to work directly with cooperative farms. Since then, it [...]
We are always interested in news from organizations doing work in North Korea. Wheat Mission Ministries sent us a Christmas card, so we thought we would pass along their website. Founded in 1989 by Sandra Suh and based in LA, the organization was involved in feeding programs as soon as the regime opened to the [...]
A few items came to our attention that warrant bundling into a “count your blessings” post for the holiday week. First up, UNICEF has issued a press release—but not the full report—on its recent nutrition survey. The survey is national in scope, and was a joint venture between domestic agencies and UNICEF, the World Food [...]
Whenever I talk to students about North Korea, the first question I get is typically “what can I do to get involved?” We fretted over this in the last chapter of Witness to Transformation. But I finally got around to looking at the National Endowment for Democracy’s Annual Report for 2009 and found that it [...]
The most difficult problem in formulating a reasonable North Korea policy—whether military, political or humanitarian–is the absence of decent information. Although we shoot ourselves in the foot in this regard, the root problem is North Korean: outsiders never know whether official claims are true or not. This battle is now being fought out with respect [...]
As we have indicated in a series of posts, signs point to a deteriorating food situation in North Korea. Now, a consortium of US NGOs who were involved in the last major relief effort in 2008 has completed an assessment which is sobering to say the least. They document a downward revision in expected spring [...]
There are more and more signs of a coordinated North Korean push for food assistance. Among the most recent indicators are efforts to bypass the LMB government and appeal directly to South Korean NGOs. The Ministry of Unification denied a request in August from the Korea NGO Council for Cooperation with North Korea to undertake [...]
