One of the goals of World Human­i­tar­ian Day is to shed light on the dan­ger that aid work­ers are in. Those who pro­vide food and com­fort to the poor are at high risk of being kid­napped for ran­soms, or being killed by anti-government extremists.

A study from the the British Over­seas Devel­op­ment Insti­tute gives us some stats at the increased threat that aid work­ers face. We learned of the study from this Reuters arti­cle writ­ten by Patrick Worsnip

Last year, 260 aid work­ers were vic­tims of vio­lent attacks, accord­ing to the British-based Over­seas Devel­op­ment Insti­tute. Some 122 of them lost their lives against 36 deaths in 1998.

“The 2008 fatal­ity rate for inter­na­tional aid work­ers exceeds that of U.N. peace­keep­ing troops,” the group said in a recent report.

It said there had been a par­tic­u­lar upswing in kid­nap­ping of human­i­tar­i­ans, which jumped 350 per­cent in the past three years, with expa­tri­ates pre­ferred to nation­als as they brought higher ran­soms and a “more vis­i­ble polit­i­cal statement.”

The three most vio­lent coun­tries for aid work­ers are Sudan, espe­cially the Dar­fur region, Afghanistan and Soma­lia, it said. This year has already seen killings and other vio­lent acts in Pak­istan, Soma­lia, the Philip­pines and Sudan.

Soma­lia, scene of a two-year insur­gency led by Islamist mil­i­tants against the gov­ern­ment, has one of the high­est per capita inci­dents of aid worker attacks in the world, U.N. offi­cials say. So far in 2009, eight aid work­ers have been killed and 13 remain in cap­tiv­ity since 2008.

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