Reform of the international humanitarian system

Date, Time 15/12/2004 Venue Overseas Development Institute, London Speaker Hilary Benn, UK Secretary of State for International Development Event Speech to invited audience Title or brief Reform of the international humanitarian system The Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI is one of the most respected humanitarian policy and research think tanks in the world. You have made an important contribution to DFID s evolving thinking on humanitarian policy reform, so I can t think of a more appropriate place to be for what I want to talk about this evening. I would like to begin by paying tribute to the extraordinary efforts of humanitarian staff; those who work tirelessly for the Red Cross Movement, NGOs and UN agencies around the world, in increasingly harsh and dangerous conditions in a noble endeavour. Their independence, as well as their humanitarianism, is particularly important and we must protect it at all costs, especially from those who no longer wish to recognise either. I am sure therefore that we would all want to express our sadness at the deaths of the two SCF staff in Darfur earlier this week. Humanitarian action is an increasingly big business. It costs $4 or 5 billion a year. Humanitarian agencies deliver assistance and protection to 100 million people in 100 countries, providing food, water, sanitation, shelter and health services to save lives, alleviate suffering and maintain dignity. DFID s humanitarian assistance programme totalled 381 million last year, making us the second largest bilateral humanitarian donor. Yet despite the sums of money involved and the profound consequences of our actions for vulnerable people, the international system is not working well. Rightly, we look to the UN to lead the international response. But without reform, the UN is at risk of losing credibility. And without reform, we will let down the thousands of brave humanitarian workers who operate in the most difficult circumstances and the millions who depend on them to survive. Humanitarian funding is insufficient to meet all the needs there are. The response to each crisis is the product of lots of separate funding decisions by donors. These decisions are reasonable in themselves, but they don t add up to a sensible whole. Some crises receive a lot of funding while others are severely under-funded. For example, the 2003 UN appeal for Chechnya was 91% funded and beneficiaries received approximately $40 per person of support. The 2003 UN appeal for Mozambique was 15% funded and beneficiaries received approximately 40 cents per person of support. How do we justify this huge disparity? When a major crisis occurs, agencies spend time and effort approaching different donors for funds. Donors can be slow to respond. So the system fails to get sufficient relief supplies to where they are needed quickly enough, resulting in unnecessary death and suffering. Final: 15/12/04 1/8

There are lots of agencies involved in most crises. The number has rocketed in the last 10 years. They often operate in an uncoordinated way. Some have unclear and overlapping mandates; for example, the confusion between the UNHCR and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Iraq. There is a lack of prioritisation and leadership. Now I recognise and pay tribute to the exceptional performance of organisations like Médicins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), but overall performance by agencies is somewhat patchy. OCHA is supposed to coordinate but doesn t have the power or resources to do the job effectively. When coordination is weak, undefined and underresourced, the overall response suffers. Agencies struggle to get the right people with the right skills in place quickly. UN recruitment procedures are bureaucratic. The sector as a whole does not have sufficient human resource capacity. We know that the UN has found it difficult to recruit sufficient staff in Sudan. And the early exit of emergency personnel, for example from the Pan American Health Organisation and UNICEF from Haiti in March, has damaging consequences for the most vulnerable people. Needs assessments are not as objective, strong or sophisticated as they could be. Individual agencies often assess needs on their own, in an uncoordinated manner, and then appeal for funds. This does not produce a comprehensive assessment of need or an effective response; and it can provide an incentive for needs assessments to be overstated. Recent UN Flash Appeals in Grenada, Haiti and Bangladesh involved little coordination and suffered from duplication and confusion over which agency leads in which sector. Some UN agencies see Appeals as an opportunity to seek funding for development projects. Humanitarian data is not good. Not all donors and agencies report what they are doing to OCHA. Different donors use different definitions of what to classify as humanitarian. Despite the achievements of the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance, we are not good at learning lessons. There are few good evaluations. There are no clear means of holding donors or agencies to account. There are no agreed goals or performance indicators. Donors impose complex reporting burdens on agencies. Not enough is spent on prevention. Disasters have a huge impact on development, and this challenge will increase as the impact of climate change becomes more widely felt. The World Bank estimate that losses from disasters in the 1990s could have been reduced by $280 billion if $40 billion had been invested in mitigation and preparedness. They also estimate that every pound spent on risk reduction can save 7 in relief and repair costs. An earthquake of the same magnitude that killed tens of thousands in Gujarat or Bam only loosened a few tiles in San Francisco. No wonder Jim Wolfensohn has said Reducing disaster vulnerability may very well be the most critical challenge facing development in the new millennium. The number of refugees has declined over time and now amounts to less than 10 million. The number of Internally Displaced People has increased and now Final: 15/12/04 2/8

totals some 25 million. As Kofi Annan has said internal displacement has emerged as one of the great human tragedies of our time. Yet no international agency has an explicit global responsibility for IDPs.. UNHCR only covers about 20% of IDPs. The Representative of the UN Secretary General on IDPs has done a great deal to raise awareness of IDPs, but he lacks operational capacity and resources. The OCHA Inter Agency Internal Displacement Division has neither operational capacity nor formal authority to achieve coordination. Darfur exemplifies many of these problems. If there is one event that has motivated me to make this speech, it was my visit to Darfur in early June. That s where this comes from. The whole international community was slow; for most donors, Darfur was a low priority until the suffering appeared on television. The UN system was slow; it lacked strong authority, leadership and political clout. Some agencies didn t do what they should have done. No one is questioning the difficult environment facing humanitarian workers in Darfur. Lack of access, insecurity, logistical challenges and lack of local implementing capacity present enormous obstacles. But the humanitarian community - us - has to get better equipped to operate in challenging environments. For example, the lack of clear responsibility on IDPs has led to confusion and poor delivery, as I saw for myself in June. Even now, IDPs are not being protected adequately; and camps are not being managed consistently well. We urgently need to find a better way of assisting and protecting IDPs than we have collectively achieved in Darfur. We should look closely at the institutional arrangements. Is it really sensible that we have different systems for dealing with people fleeing their homes depending on whether they happen to have crossed an international border? I have my doubts. Mobilising staff and financial resources for Darfur has taken far longer than the urgency of the situation demanded. UN agencies need to be more flexible to move operations quickly from development to dealing with an emergency. A crisis like Darfur needs experienced senior humanitarian personnel on the ground fast, backed up by equipment and resources. This means being prepared for emergencies, planning the response before it is needed and knowing that the capacity is there when the situation demands. Donors cannot be complacent. For too long at the start of this crisis, the international community was focused - for good reason, in that it was Africa s longest civil war - on the North/South peace process. Without contributions from donors, UN agencies struggled to get the money they needed. Before August, the US, UK and EC contributions alone accounted for 75% of the total world response. Even now, these three donors account for 65%. Crises on a scale of Darfur cannot be carried by three donors alone, however generous. We need to learn the lessons from Darfur and to prevent suffering we have seen happening elsewhere. Final: 15/12/04 3/8

I welcome the work that is already underway to improve the humanitarian system. I strongly support the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative which the Swedes launched last year and the Canadians now lead. This reaffirms our collective commitment to the humanitarian principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality. Pilot exercises are taking place in DRC (led by the US and Belgium) and Burundi (led by DFID) to deliver a stronger humanitarian response. In addition, Jan Egeland has called for a review of global humanitarian capacity to find out what s hindered speed and effectiveness, identify gaps in expertise and resources, and recommend steps to improve speed and effectiveness. I welcome this initiative and have agreed to co-finance his review. This is a valuable step forward. But I do not believe this action alone can address all the problems that we saw in Darfur, and that could arise in a future crisis of similar proportions. I have six specific proposals for change. First, I believe that, to improve leadership at the country level, in particularly serious crises, the UN Secretary General should provide UN humanitarian coordinators with emergency powers to direct other UN agencies. I believe the UN Secretary General should decide which crises are sufficiently severe to warrant this action, on the basis of advice from Jan Egeland. For this to work, the best UN humanitarian coordinators must be deployed in the most urgent situations. I urge the UN to enhance its efforts to strengthen the quality, selection and training of humanitarian coordinators. Second, I believe that UN humanitarian coordinators, with the support of a better- resourced OCHA, should take lead responsibility for sharper needs assessment, planning and allocation of resources. The humanitarian coordinator should produce a Common Humanitarian Action Plan which costs the achievement of targets and standards. I believe donors should put their money through the Coordinator. He or she should then pass the funds on to other UN agencies for the programmes within the Common Humanitarian Action Plan that he or she judges most critical. Third, to inform Jan Egeland s review of sector capacity, I believe we need to set benchmarks for the scale and speed of response we require the humanitarian system to provide. Jan s review should set standards against which we can hold agencies to account, for example, that agencies will monitor threats to the survival of a vulnerable population once a week; will stabilise threats to survival within two months of a crisis developing through fulfilling basic needs; and will achieve access to basic needs by 80% of target populations within three weeks of the start of a crisis. Fourth, I propose that we establish a substantial new humanitarian fund, under the control of the UN Secretary General, and administered by Jan Final: 15/12/04 4/8

Egeland, into which donors pay and from which humanitarian coordinators can draw funds early on, when a crisis threatens or occurs. I propose a new fund of $1 billion a year. In order to provide sufficient incentive for Governments to contribute, the UN would have to attribute donor contributions pro rata and give credit for them in the media. To set the ball rolling, I am prepared to contribute 100 million a year from DFID. More flexible finance will need to be accompanied by a credible proposal for performance measurement and monitoring. I invite OCHA to work with donors to put together such a proposal. Fifth, I propose that to balance the unequal allocation of resources by donors (think back to my examples: Chechnya and Mozambique), ECHO, the world s second largest humanitarian donor and in my view one of the most effective parts of the EU development architecture - should take on a stronger role as a financier of last resort, focusing more of its funds on forgotten crises. ECHO should assess which crises are most poorly-served by other donors and use this as a criterion in determining its own resource allocation. Finally, given the evidence in support of increased investment in disaster risk reduction, I propose to increase the funding provided by DFID to international efforts to reduce disaster risk and to allocate 10% of the funding provided by DFID in response to each natural disaster to prepare for and mitigate the impact of future disasters, where this can be done effectively. Donors should build disaster reduction into their development programming. The World Bank and regional development banks should consider how disaster risk can be incorporated into Poverty Reduction Strategies. And the UN should look carefully at whether its current institutional set-up is adequate for the scale of the challenge. I intend to promote these proposals with our partners, and during the UK Presidencies of the G8 and the European Union. I will discuss them with Kofi Annan and senior UN leaders when I visit New York in February. I attach very high priority to improving the international humanitarian effort to save lives and alleviate suffering. But as well as addressing the impact of conflict, it is equally important that we look at the context in which humanitarian assistance is often provided. As we know, the most difficult humanitarian situations are those characterised by conflict. We must find better ways of meeting humanitarian needs in such environments. And we must find better ways of addressing the underlying causes that give rise to conflict and suffering. That is why I welcome so strongly the recognition of the UN High Level Panel that security and development go hand in hand. I congratulate Kofi Annan for the leadership and vision which he showed in setting up the Panel. It came out of his fork in the road speech last year at the General Assembly, with a mandate to look at new threats, challenges and change not least in the wake of disagreements over Iraq. As you will be aware, it reported just a couple of weeks ago. Final: 15/12/04 5/8

I think the Panel is a once in a generation opportunity to seize the chance for reform, and the international community needs to respond boldly. I strongly support the recommendations of the High Level Panel on the responsibility to protect. The Security Council has a duty to respond swiftly when a Government is unwilling or unable to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe. None of us can forget that ten years ago, Rwanda experienced the equivalent of three September 11ths every day for a hundred days. Two weeks into that genocide the Security Council withdrew its peacekeepers from the country. As Kofi Annan has said The issue is not one of a right to intervene, but rather of a responsibility of the whole human race to protect our fellow human beings from extreme abuse wherever and whenever it occurs. I am concerned about lack of progress on peacebuilding. 40% of post-conflict countries quickly slide back into conflict. The whole international community needs to do better. The World Bank and IMF are not as involved as they should be. Change is badly needed. Therefore I very much welcome in principle the Panel s attempts to improve our approach to peacebuilding through their recommendations for a Peacebuilding Commission and a Peacebuilding Support Office. There is a need for debate amongst Member States about the details of how these can best work in practice. But I do think the proposals need to be taken very seriously. There has been progress on peacekeeping since the Brahimi report. But there is much, much more to do. One challenge is to improve the quality of UN peacekeeping troops. The UK plans to spend 21 million over the next two years on strengthening DPKO s training modules and training of third-country peacekeeping troops and police. Peacekeeping missions must also be well led. The quality of Special Representatives of the UN Secretary General is too variable. Training and briefing are ad hoc. We must improve selection and training of SRSGs. Another challenge is to make sure that UN forces mandates are clear. Some peacekeeping missions currently have a degree of ambiguity in their instructions from the Security Council: where, for instance, it may be unclear how far UN forces should go to re-establish peace if it is disrupted. But most important of all is the need to make sure that there are adequate numbers of peacekeepers above all if we are moving towards more demanding mandates. If a comprehensive peace deal is reached in Sudan by the end of the year as we all hope then demand for UN peacekeepers will rise to unprecedented levels. But as the High Level Panel bluntly states, in the absence of a commensurate increase in available personnel, UN peacekeeping risks repeating some of its worst failures of the 1990s. The experience in DRC demonstrates many of these problems. The international community has entrusted the UN, through MONUC, to deliver peace and security to a country the size of Western Europe, a country that has not had a functioning state for decades and has been mired in ethnic Final: 15/12/04 6/8

conflict across the region. Despite the increasing resources committed to MONUC, the situation in DRC and the region remains very fragile. Of course, the responsibility in the DRC doesn t fall entirely to MONUC, but what it must do is to interpret its mandate more actively, and make more of the people and equipment available to it on the ground if we are to avoid a repeat of the appalling loss of life that saw a few years ago. Heavy burdens of responsibility fall on the transitional national government of the DRC, too. Part of the answer to the challenges we face as the Panel acknowledges is for developed countries to transform their existing forces into suitable contingents for peacekeeping. That is part of the rationale for the reorganisation of British forces that Geoff Hoon has announced and also why the new concept of European battlegroups is so important. But we must also do everything we can to assist with the creation of regional peacekeeping capacity, and I welcome the Panel s recommendations in this area too. The African Union efforts to establish African peace and security, including the African Stand-by Force, are very important. I support them, and I hope the European Union will continue to support African initiatives and build African capacity. I pay tribute to Poul Nielsen, for having the vision to set up the EU s African Peace Facility. The AU is already showing a significant will and ability to mediate in African disputes. A fully functioning Stand-by Force will strengthen its hand. But Darfur has underlined that the African Union needs greater capacity in a number of areas. Setting up the Darfur planning task force is having immediate benefits in Sudan, and is also helping to strengthen the AU s overall capacity to plan and run operations in the long term. The UK Government will continue to provide advice and support to the Darfur planning task force and the African Stand-by Force. It will be important to ensure that UN and African peacekeeping efforts are in tune with each other regarding doctrine and training. But we must do more to prevent conflicts from beginning in the first place, not least because so many of the world s poor live in states which are failing. The world, including the UN, has insufficient early warning and strategic analysis capability. We are not good at foreseeing the need for, or reacting swiftly, to develop peace support and preventative operations. In the past, developing countries have been opposed to development of such capacity at the UN, perceiving it as an intelligence capability. To compensate, donors have funded external capacity within academic institutions in New York which the UN has used. This is no substitute for internal UN capacity. We must convince developing countries of the case for strengthening the UN s information gathering, analysis and policy capacity as we grapple with what to do about states that are failing. And we must do more to control the flow of the 639 million small arms and light weapons in the world that sustain conflict and take innocent lives. I hope that UN member states will commit to a Transfer Controls Initiative at the UN review conference on small arms and light weapons in 2006. And in the Final: 15/12/04 7/8

longer term, I strongly support an Arms Trade Treaty as called for by Amnesty International, Oxfam and SaferWorld amongst others, as well as Jack Straw in his speech to the Labour Party Conference earlier this year. In conclusion, I regard strengthening the humanitarian system as a key objective for 2005. Above all because vulnerable people deserve much better of us than we have given them in Darfur. I very much hope we can build consensus around the reform proposals I have set out today before the end of the UK s Presidencies of the EU and G8. Above all, because we have a clear moral duty to do our utmost to improve the effectiveness of the assistance and protection that we collectively provide to the many millions of people struggling to survive in appalling conditions in emergencies across the world. Thank you. ENDS 3591 words Final: 15/12/04 8/8