Speech given by the Rt Hon Hilary Benn
MP, Secretary of State for International Development, addressing
the Humanitarian Policy Group of the Overseas Development Institute
(ODI)
REFORM OF THE INTERNATIONAL HUMANITARIAN
SYSTEM
The Humanitarian Policy Group at ODI is one
of the most respected humanitarian policy and research thinktanks
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 Save the Children Fund (SCF) staff in Darfur earlier this
week.
Humanitarian action is an increasingly big business.
It costs $4 billion 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 was £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 work 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 in 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.
There are lots of agencies involved in most
crises. The number has rocketed in the last 10 years. They often
operate in an unco-ordinated 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
Medicine Sans Frontier (MSF) and the International Committee of
the Red Cross (ICRC), but overall performance by agencies is somewhat
patchy.
The United Nations office for the co-ordination
of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is supposed to co-ordinate but
doesn't have the power or resources to do the job effectively.
When co-ordination is weak, undefined and under-resourced, 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. 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 unco-ordinated manner, and then appeal
for funds to meet those needs. This does not produce a comprehensive
assessment of need or 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 fewer than 10 million. The number of Internally
Displaced People (IDP) has increased and now 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 covers only 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 co-ordination.
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.
I welcome the work that is already under way
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 the
speed and effectiveness of our response, 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 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 co-ordinators
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 co-ordinators
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 co-ordinators.
— Second, I believe that UN humanitarian
co-ordinators, with the support of a better-resourced OCHA, should
take lead responsibility for sharper needs assessment, planning
and allocation of resources. The humanitarian co-ordinator should
produce a Common Humanitarian Action Plan which costs the achievement
of targets and standards. I believe donors should put their money
through the Co-ordinator. 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 Egeland, into which
donors pay and from which humanitarian co-ordinators 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 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
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 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 effects 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.
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 10 years ago, Rwanda experienced the
equivalent of three September 11ths a 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's activities on peacebuilding
need more coordination and coherence. The 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 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 (SRSGs) 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—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
United Nations Organisation Mission in the Democratic Republic
of the Congo (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 conflict across
the region. Despite the increasing resources committed to MONUC,
the situation in Democratic Republic of the Congo and the region
remains very fragile. MONUC must interpret its mandate more actively
and make more of the people and equipment available to it on the
ground to ensure that there is not a repeat of the appalling loss
of life that we have seen in recent years.
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
encourage the European Union to continue to support African initiatives
and build African capacity. 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 lacks basic 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. 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, preventative and peacebuilding 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 call upon UN member states
to commit to a Transfer Controls Initiative at the UN review conference
on small arms and light weapons in 2006. And in the longer term,
I strongly support an Arms Trade Treaty as proposed 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 I 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.
15 December 2004
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