Trafigura Foundation and ISWAN have formed a collaboration to assist the seafarers. The Trafigura Foundation awarded ISWAN a grant to improve its helpline and support dedicated emergency funds for seafarers experiencing difficult situations at sea.
As ISWAN notes, seafarers’ lives can be very difficult. SeafarerHelp, ISWAN’s 24-hour multilingual helpline, addresses this problem by providing a lifeline to seafarers who are experiencing challenging situations.
With the grant that Trafigura Foundation awarded ISWAN, this system will be improved in order to provide a better service and improved data monitoring of seafarers in need.
Furthermore, ISWAN will administer two funds to assist the seafarers:
- The Seafarers’ Emergency Fund, which provides essential aid to seafarers and their families,
- The Piracy Survivors Family Fund (PSFF), created to help seafarers affected by piracy attacks around the Horn of Africa. The PSFF offers support during and after seafarers’ captivity, by providing livelihood and living expenses to their families, as well as mental and physical rehabilitation. The fund is providing ongoing support to seafarers held hostage by Somali pirates.
‘Our partnership with ISWAN not only makes sense in the framework of our philanthropic strategy promoting clean and safe supply chains. It is also a pioneering collaboration able to engender a strong positive impact on the lives of seafarers, whose working category deserves special support and welfare measures,’ Vincent Faber, Executive Director of the Trafigura Foundation, said.
ISWAN had emphasized the importance of seafarers’ welfare in its 2016 annual report. Specifically, in 2016, the SeafarerHelp helpline saw a record number of contacts from seafarers, dealing with 3,073 new cases, involving 11,228 seafarers and their families, of 99 different nationalities making contact from 122 different countries.
Furthermore, the ISWAN report highlighted that issues of social isolation and mental health continue to be key concerns, as do welfare issues and the problems of bullying, harassment and abuse.
While issues such as mental health are receiving more attention, other issues stubbornly remain, ISWAN says. Threats posed by piracy and robbery, as well as the abandonment of seafarers, continue to take their toll on those working at sea. The issue of owners abandoning their responsibilities and their vessels, leaving crews to sit on ships as water, food and fuel run out, was often reported by seafarers to the helpline.
