EveryHumanTZ project seeks to understand how people interacting in everyday situations respond to crisis situations (emergencies/disasters) outside of the formal structures of humanitarian assistance in Tanzania. Such quotidian humanitarian acts have too often been overlooked, with humanitarianism being frequently explored in a North-South perspective, based on the assumption that humanitarianism is carried out as acts of ‘rescue’ in the Global South by organisations funded and dominated by the Global North, with the focus being often placed on the recipient.

Challenging these assumptions, EveryHumanTZ project engages with the concept of Everyday humanitarianism (Richey, 2017) offering three central contributions. First, it explores the everyday humanitarian actions of ordinary citizens, outside of institutional and formal structures and documenting the increasing diversity of actors undertaking interventions in development and humanitarianism contexts. Second, the project explores these responses in a Southern context, not though the typical Northern perspective. And third, EveryHumanTZ focuses explicitly on the givers as well as the receivers. Our project thus emerges as the first study to focus on the multitude of private Southern givers, not only receivers of humanitarianism with explicit attention given to the agency of the Tanzanians as givers who shape relationships, local economies and politics.