Why?
Conflicts can be caused by a great many things. They may happen when two countries go to war or when opposing groups within a country start fighting.

What are the effects?
Conflicts often lead to people leaving their homes in huge numbers, as they try to escape the threat of war. Often, most of these people are women and young children.
As well as the fear of violence, the disruption caused by conflict may cause further problems like shortages of food, which will lead to even more people having to leave their homes.
Often people who flee from conflicts will have had to leave behind all of their personal possessions as well as their homes.

How does ShelterBox help?
ShelterBox can help in times of conflict by sending tents to house people who have had to leave their homes.

Tents sent by the charity have been used in Africa to house families who have walked all the way to a different country to escape from fighting in their home country.

Sometimes camps are set up in safe areas of the country where there is no fighting or once the fighting has stopped and families are trying to get home again.

ShelterBox Response Teams

When ShelterBoxes are sent out to a disaster, a 'ShelterBox Response Team' is also deployed. These teams are all made up of volunteers, who have trained with us, and are ready to go with the ShelterBoxes anywhere in the world.They ensure the safe delivery and distribution of the ShelterBoxes. Our team members are men and women who usually work in very different types of jobs e.g.
policemen and policewomen,paramedics,firemen,chef,writer,accountant,graduates,ex-navypersonnel,businessmen etc.

The main person we deploy is Mark Pearson. Mark is a photographer and journalist, and his photographs are very important to our work. He sends back to our Headquarters up to date information and pictures and advises us where the greatest need is, and the type of aid required.Almost all of the photos that you can see on the website have been taken by Mark.

Below you will find some true stories of some of our 'ShelterBox Response Team' members, we hope you will enjoy them.

My name is Alison Morton and I work at Truro Police Station in Cornwall as a Police Community Support Officer. I also work for Shelterbox in my spare time.

In June this year I went to Uganda in Africa to find out where help is needed.
I found that many parts of Northern Uganda have large camps where people from Sudan have settled as they need help to survive from War and drought in their own country.
Some of the camps are too large in Northern Uganda and there are not enough facilities to help people survive.

Approximately 25% of children have the opportunity to have an education in Uganda. Many of these camps do not have the facilities to educate children at all.
This is one of the reasons why Shelterbox has given itself the challenge of ‘A Million in Africa’.
We want to help as many children and adults as possible in Africa and we can only do this with kind donations we receive.