Excellencies,

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is an honor to be with you all and to be asked to share a few thoughts at the outset of this round of consultations. On behalf of the humanitarian community; I would first like to express our deep gratitude to Under-Secretary-General Valerie Amos for her superb leadership as the Emergency Relief Coordinator: few could have managed what she has achieved in this era of unprecedented, large-scale, simultaneous and complex humanitarian crises – crises for which there seem to be no political solutions in the short to medium-term. Indeed, I cannot remember a time in my career when I have seen so many conflicts; this seems to be a world out of control. The terrible irony is that, for many, there would appear to be a “globalization of indifference”, to borrow the words of Pope Francis.  Many simply turn a blind eye or portray these crises as distant. Consider the response of many countries to the Ebola crisis, e.g., close down the air transport and put everyone into quarantine: the crisis will pass – they say – but it won’t. It must be clear to us all that these threats to humanity are immediate and horrifying, as much as for the ship master who lifts the corpses of murdered migrants from the Mediterranean. Valerie, your guidance and advocacy have provided us with the intellectual and moral support to improve our concerted humanitarian efforts to save lives and protect the most vulnerable.

In this regard, we owe a particular debt of gratitude to you, Valerie, for the “Transformative Agenda” – a reform agenda that has sharpened our overall crisis response, especially in regard to leadership, accountability and coordination. In a certain sense, the Transformative Agenda has helped bring us to where we are today and to prepare us for the World Humanitarian Summit.

In this worrying global context, we must renew our commitment to support a collective effort to create a more effective and efficient humanitarian system. The path forward includes the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction, the World Humanitarian Summit and our work over the next two days. As humanitarian actors, we are stretched to our limits – perhaps beyond – as are the donors. This should only make us more determined to redouble our efforts and our commitment to more effective assistance. 

The principles we share – humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence – remain our core even though we must negotiate these every day in the field. Likewise, the credibility and effectiveness of our work relies on predictability, accountability, responsibility, and partnership. The stakes today and for the WHS are high: gathered here are major humanitarian actors, donor countries and countries affected by crises. The global community has provided recommendations to the “Europe and Others Group”. Everyone expects significant outcomes from this meeting.  With these introductory comments, I would like to make three points: Partnership; Accountability; and Responsiveness, or “PAR”.

I: Partnership

Humanitarian action has helped link cultures throughout the world.   Over generations, humanitarian action has built a sense of shared humanity and, therefore, the need to give priority to saving human life, and to help and protect others. The current humanitarian system and structures – including the IASC and its members – represent a shared tradition built on the shoulders of generations of humanitarians. Identifying the strengths of the varieties of the humanitarian tradition is the foundation for partnerships to improve humanitarian assistance. The State, of course, continues to bear the primary responsibility to protect the rights of its people. States, however, often need the help of partners with a variety of abilities in order to fulfil the State’s responsibility to protect; partners include citizens and diasporas, civil society organizations and religious groups, businesses and international organizations. We need one another, we need to abandon our institutional egos and selves.

There is no single approach to partnership. Each partnership requires us to respect the varied manner by which different actors approach our common humanity. During the Libya crisis, for instance, IOM and UNHCR jointly appealed to donors, who were pleased to see this kind of collaboration and provided the funds to evacuate 270,000 stranded migrants. I can also remember visiting Haiti, where staff from IOM’s partner NRC were working so closely with my own staff that they were indistinguishable – this is how it should be.

We must, re-invent our perceived-to-be-Western and public-sector-focused funding approach, to reach out and engage the private sector, the diaspora, and other less-traditional sources across all levels that may have divided us and caused us to go our own way. These different sources just might share the same values as we do.

II: Accountability

We urgently need greater accountability – and the transparency that goes with it – to hold all of us to our commitments; a greater sense of accountability makes humanitarian responses more credible, reliable and effective. Different actors are accountable in different ways, and accountability often depends on context. We, in the humanitarian community, need to clarify types of accountability at the agency, cluster and system-levels, recognizing that agencies’ different kinds of accountability help us to innovate and adapt. Let me give you another example from the Libya crisis: we evacuated over 200,000 migrant workers from Libya back to their homes mostly in the Sahel (Mali, Chad), but we just left them there. We – the international community – cannot do this any more; we need to help people re-integrate or we will just end up spreading crises.

As the IASC-designated “champion” on Prevention of Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, I must urge that all of us hold ourselves accountable to  protect women and children from sexual harassment, exploitation and abuse. In crises, women and children are the most vulnerable of all -- as I have seen after the earthquake in Haiti and in the camps; and as Ms. Amos and I saw, standing side by side, at the vulnerable women and children who were looking for safety in Tacloban after the destruction of typhoon Haiyan.  

The Ebola crisis will be the next big test of our accountability. Will we as humanitarians walk away when there are no more Ebola cases, or will we stay and help these afflicted countries to build adequate medical capacity?

III: Responsiveness

The humanitarian system has only recently begun to see and address an entire range of vulnerabilities: sometimes this is because these are new; in other cases, it is because of structural blind spots in how we organize ourselves. We must remain alert and innovative to adapt to changes – whether armed conflict, political oppression, natural disaster, or climate-induced – so that all vulnerable populations have access to aid.

Migrants caught in crises are often invisible – in a world of increasing migration, we must take care to incorporate migration concerns into preparedness, response, recovery, and the transition into development. Again, responsiveness requires partnerships: no one organization can or should try to do or have specialized expertise in everything.

To be fully responsive and effective also requires longer-term planning linked to disaster risk reduction, emergency response and development: we should not be content merely to bridge the gap when we can pull the sides together – emergency responders and development actors – from the very beginning of humanitarian responses to a crisis, without compromising principles, whether assisting migrants at sea or assessing protracted mass displacement into urban environments. This innovative responsiveness requires us to be accountable enough to have good data and communications for evaluating, planning and improving how we save lives.

With these three points, I have tried to highlight the need for the humanitarian community to be more responsive and effective through strengthened partnership, greater accountability and more effective responsiveness. The humanitarian system, of course, can never supplant state responsibility nor replace meaningful political processes to resolve conflicts.

In conclusion, there are several critical issues within the UN humanitarian system that, in my view, the World Humanitarian Summit should urgently seek to resolve as outcomes of the Summit. I would like to give you three last examples of desirable outcomes:

• Restoring or re-establishing a link among the various actors to achieve a sustainable solution to a crisis, namely, from disaster risk reduction, to the  crisis itself to emergency assistance, from post-crisis recovery to development and capacity-building. These are not phases but a continuum – a continuum of actions and common purpose. To achieve this unity of action and purpose, a way must be found whereby humanitarian and developmental specialists work together, casting aside their silos and institutional egos – e.g.,  through a joint commitment by respective Agency heads and regular consultation and coordination. In this regard, rather than rigid “phases”, the various responders should be seen as key players on a common team working together along a continuum. This means remaining on the ground, often overlapping for a longer period, as there is no one day on which, e.g., one moves from emergency exclusively to post-recovery assistance  or from post recovery exclusively to development.

• Similarly, in crises to which a UN peacekeeping operation (PKO) has been mandated, means need to be found to ensure that the military and humanitarian leaders work more closely together – setting aside their traditional mutual distrust in favor of mutual respect for, and acknowledgment of, their respective roles in a crisis.

• To restore the humanitarian space lost in recent years, the WHS should have as an objective the restoration of a global consensus on the inviolability of humanitarian workers and their mission so that the UN flag and those of other humanitarian agencies might, once again, be a protection from, rather than an attraction to, terrorists.