The international community (donors, international cooperation agencies and NGOs) have worked hard to agree on and disseminate principles, standards and technical guidance and to document good and bad practices to orient humanitarian assistance and donations. Following is a summary of some of these initiatives.

• The Code of Conduct for the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and NGOs in Disaster Relief (approved in 1995) was a first step in defining and clarifying a number of ethical principles in humanitarian work.
• The SPHERE standards (launched in 1997 by a group of humanitarian NGOs and the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement) is another solid inter-agency effort to define norms to improve efficiency and coordination in humanitarian response. The SPHERE standards detail the minimum standards in disaster response (health, water, shelter, etc) that people affected by disasters have a right to expect from humanitarian assistance.