Action Against Hunger calls on world leaders to go beyond the UN chief’s report, and create an accountability mechanism to ensure that World Humanitarian Summit commitments turn into action to end suffering and ensure new global goals can be met for all.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon today releases his much anticipated report for the World Humanitarian Summit. Action Against Hunger welcomes the report and many of the ideas within it that place the people we seek to support at the very center of humanitarian action.
As an international humanitarian and development organization working in 44 countries, Action Against Hunger is all too familiar with the multitude of challenges facing the humanitarian system: the lack of political will to resolve humanitarian crises that last for decades and the inability to prevent new ones, the lack of protection for the people we support and our staff, the lack of appropriate funding to enable us to partner with local communities for the long term. The Secretary General of the UN recognized the world’s collective failures to effectively respond to the growing number of crises when he proposed the World Humanitarian Summit three years ago.
Ban Ki-moon’s report outlines his vision for a world free of human suffering, as well as a corresponding Agenda for Humanity. The report’s title, “One Humanity: Shared Responsibility,” encapsulates the essence of the vision—the world must collectively act to alleviate human suffering, ensure respect for humanitarian principles, and work with communities to ensure that the most vulnerable people receive the assistance they need. The ideas presented in the report will be taken into the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul on May 23-24, where world leaders, civil society, and other stakeholders will make commitments to implement the various recommendations presented in the report.
The UN Secretary General outlines five core responsibilities that the world must take on in order to transform our approach to humanitarian crises. Unsurprisingly, the first responsibility focuses on the need to prevent and end conflicts. For far too long, the collective lack of political will to solve conflicts has placed an enormous burden on humanitarian actors to respond to the suffering of people living through war and violence. As protracted, sometimes decades-long, conflicts rage on and new ones begin, the humanitarian community is stretched to the point of breaking.