Sparing Women and Children from Violence: Speaking with Dr. Samantha Nutt

“[People] want to give back, they want to help out, and the mistake is in presuming that the most effective and transparent way of helping is to do the work ourselves—to get on a plane to see and participate in it being done.”

Dr. Samantha Nutt has more than twenty-five years of experience providing humanitarian aid to war-torn countries. In 1999, Dr. Nutt founded War Child Canada, an organization dedicated to the empowerment of women and children. War Child now operates in seven countries across Africa and the Middle East, and recently opened a branch in the U.S.  In 2011, Dr. Nutt published her book Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies and Aid about her experiences in humanitarian aid. Today, Dr. Nutt is a staff physician at Women’s College Hospital in Toronto and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. On June 27th, Dr. Nutt and Merion West’s Erich Prince discussed her beginnings in humanitarian aid, the problem of “poverty tourism,” and what her organizations do to combat sexual violence against women and young girls in nations experiencing violence.

Dr. Nutt, good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. You started your career with a $1 contract from UNICEF to work in Somalia fresh out of medical school. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of your career and how things got started?

I finished a medical degree in public health and developing countries at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which is part of the London University. Many of my mentors and teachers had worked for the UN and other humanitarian agencies, so this volunteer opportunity came out of that. I combined my work with UNICEF with my master’s thesis. I was—and what I still am—is a primary care public health specialist. I’m somebody who will go in if there’s an epidemic or an outbreak of some kind and try to set up programs that will benefit the maximum number of people. It’s not that one-on-one kind of care, but it’s really about program-planning and implementation.