2026 Global Humanitarian Policy Forum

Okay, yeah, okay, so let me try to And welcome to colleagues who are attending online. My name's Andrew Thompson. I'm Professor of Global History at Oxford University, where I co-direct the Nuffield Humanitarian Forum, and I'm your moderator for this Global Humanitarian Policy Forum for 2026. Navigating Global Risks: Priorities for the Future of Humanitarian Action. And I'm going to start off by welcoming and handing you over to the Acting Assistant Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Mr. Indrika Ratwate, for some opening remarks. Welcome and thank you for being with us.

Thank you, Andrew. Excellencies, distinguished participants, Dear colleagues, I am really delighted to welcome you today in person for the 15th edition of the Global Humanitarian Policy Forum. The first edition of the Forum took place in 2012, if you recall, and it is no exaggeration to say that the world we live in today is almost unrecognizable compared to what it was then. In 2012, there were 31 wars around the world, and today there are 65, the highest number since the Second World War. These conflicts are lasting longer, growing more complex, spilling across borders, and too often they are being fought with utter disregard for the rules designed to limit human suffering. In 2012, we worried about 1 degree of global warming. Today, we are racing towards 1.5 degrees with devastating devastating consequences already unfolding before us. In 2012, we witnessed a major AI breakthrough: the ability for computers to recognize images and map. Today, we are at the cusp of AI reshaping economies, societies, and warfare itself. Yet, even as crises intensify, we are responding to 2026 levels of challenges with 2014 levels of funding. We meet at a moment when the humanitarian needs are rising faster than our ability to respond. This gap reflects something deeper: a fracture in global solidarity. Many states are reacting from their commitments— retracting from their commitments to international law, the laws of war, gender equality, climate action, and a shared responsibility to collective prosperity. These shifts have real humanitarian consequences, consequences I have seen firsthand in my previous role as the Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary-General in Afghanistan, and before that as Regional Director for UNHCR in the Asia and Pacific. In Afghanistan, I saw these severe restrictions of women's rights and systemic gender-based discrimination deepen humanitarian needs. Across the country, unexploded ordnances injure or kill 70 civilians every month, while millions live with the daily risk of encountering these weapons. We saw in the last 2 years over 5 million Afghans returning to Afghanistan from neighbouring countries where the host countries felt that solidarity and burden sharing was no longer there, and coming back. That was a 12% increase in Afghanistan's population in 2 years. And at the same time, we saw a 33% reduction in funding. So here are the realities we see, and these consequences are not confined to any one country. Across conflicts, the erosion of the respect for international law is making war more brutal, including through the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, a practice that causes devastating civilian harm, and that Member States themselves agreed to refrain from in the 2024 Pact for the Future. At the same time, climate-related shocks, more frequent and intense extreme weather events, are exacerbating humanitarian needs worldwide. Today, 3 of every 4 forcibly displaced persons are living in areas exposed to high or extreme climate hazards. Low- and middle-income countries bear the disproportionate burden, despite contributing least to global emissions. But for all these challenges, dear colleagues, your presence here today shows that the well of global solidarity is far from running dry. At a time when humanitarian needs are relentless, resources are shrinking, and the norms and principles meant to protect people in crisis are under attack, this forum invites us to come together. Together with our esteemed panellists, ambassadors, scholars, frontline humanitarians, you, the audience online and in the room, we have a moment to confront the challenges we face today, to ask how we restore solidarity, how we better protect civilians, and how we adapt our humanitarian system to a more volatile and dangerous world that we see today. The challenges are immense, but so too is our collective commitment. Thank you.

Many thanks, ASG, and I think that was an almost perfect way to frame the discussions today in terms of the immense challenges, but also the strong resolve and commitment to address them. Let me say something, colleagues, about how the forum is going to work today. We're going to have two panels. The first one, this panel, will address risks and trends affecting humanitarian action in the years to come. Then we're going to have a break before we go into a second panel looking at how the humanitarian system should adapt to mitigate those risks. I've been asked to note that each panel will begin by posing a general question to all of the speakers, followed by specific questions to each of them after their talks. We're then going to have an open Q&A and open the floor to questions from the room, and we're also hoping to invite online attendees to submit their questions via a Microsoft form that they should have received by email invitation. Just before I introduce our first panel, we have got quite a lot to do in the time allocated, so I think we need to aim for standards of timekeeping that even the Swiss might be proud of, and I'm going to try and hold our speakers to their allotted time, but also ask all of you to try and ask your questions as concisely as you can, and then we'll be able to field more of them. So let me begin by introducing our panel. In the room, we have His Excellency Ambassador Brian Wallace. Welcome. Permanent representative of Jamaica to the United Nations in New York, a career diplomat who's held several roles at the United Nations Secretariat and also served as legal advisor at the International Criminal Tribunal Rwanda. Also in the room, we have Dr. Michael van Runyen. Welcome, Michael. Founder and director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, he is a medical doctor and also endowed professor at Harvard of Public Health in the medical schools, with field experience in over 30 countries with international NGOs and working as a policy advisor to UN and US institutions. Then joining us online, we have Attilia Anna Mongonitsi, who's Head of Special Projects at the Institute of Security Studies in South Africa since, I think, 2017, and who serves as a member of the World Economic Forum on the Future of Good Governance. Attilia, I assume you can hear us okay, and welcome and thank you for joining us. Thank you. And then we also have my colleague Zora Hauser, who's the Leverhulme Research Fellow at the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge and a research associate at Peterhouse College. Zora investigates criminal governance, organized crime, and illicit markets, and I think is dialing in, if I'm correct, from Brazil. Welcome, Zora. Can you hear us okay? Thank you very much. And so just to begin with, I've been asked to make an intervention on the history of humanitarianism from 1991 until now, and to do this in just 3 minutes, to which I think the French might say to me, 'Bon courage.' But let me try and begin by saying in 3 minutes that it's really important, I think, to emphasize that the history of an international humanitarian system as we know it today has a double history. It emerged in the wake of World War II, it expanded rapidly but untidily and asymmetrically, and it coalesced more through, you might say, the force of gravity than any deliberate design, and struggled therefore to become more than the sum of its parts. So my first question for the Forum is: how far did UNGA Resolution 46182, and the creation of OCHA succeed not only in formalizing this system, but producing greater accountability, standardization, and coherence? Or, as is often suggested, is the humanitarian system still held back by an unhealthy fragmentation and by the ongoing struggles to integrate humanitarianism development, peace, and human rights functions. Next then, from creation to cash. Across the 1990s, and accelerating from the early 2000s, we have witnessed a sustained growth in humanitarian finance across multiple leading agencies. From 2005 to 2020, that was a threefold increase. And alongside that, we've witnessed a marked increase in the UN's overall share— averaging over 50% of the total. So question 2 is: current cuts probably are historically unprecedented— historians don't like the word unprecedented, but they probably are— but are they best read as an almost inevitable correction following a period of marked expansion, or as a product of failing public consensus around aid amongst leading and still disproportionately Western donors, or as a manifestation of long-term underlying shifts to other types of humanitarian funding, such as the $700 billion of annual remittances from diaspora groups. And then last but not least, from cash to conflict. The international humanitarian system has been wrestling for almost 40 years with the proliferation of violent and until recently largely intrastate armed conflicts. The ICRC currently actually estimates 130 of them around the world. Their knock-on effects have been to increase the percentage of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people living in fragile and conflict-affected states, and therefore exposed to extreme poverty and famine. So my final question 3 is that as an 80-year-old global humanitarian— sorry, 80-year-old global world order is collapsing before our very eyes, is the humanitarian system itself at risk of becoming a repository of the world's problems in ways that are only going to serve to reduce its effectiveness, and is that system sufficiently braced for a future in which these systemic conflict-related stressors, we'll see larger numbers of development NGOs repeatedly drawn into crisis situations, and larger numbers of humanitarian NGOs struggling to extricate themselves from late or post-crisis but pre-development work. And that should have been just about 3 minutes. And so we're now going to move over to our panel., and the question that's going to be an overarching question for all four contributions is: what are the risks and trends that the panelists are seeing today, and how will they affect the humanitarian landscape in the coming years? And Ambassador, we'd like to start by handing over to you, please.

Thank you so much, and I will try to be brief on this as well, but thank you so much for the overview. I think it's, it's accurate. As much as I don't like the use of phrases like 'collapsing world order' and very scary language, we have some harsh realities that we have to face, and the fragmentation in the humanitarian sector and, quite frankly, in the entire multilateral system on development, etc., is certainly one of the risks. But I'm going to speak not of conflict, but of Jamaica's own experience, which is primarily related in this context to climate shocks. And obviously, as Indhika spoke to, the increasing frequency and intensity of climate shocks is going to put a significant strain on the global humanitarian architecture. Architecture, not to mention the strain that it puts on individual countries like mine. 57% of our GDP was wiped out by one storm to the tune of $12 billion US. The architecture that we had in place through innovative financing mechanisms, catastrophe bonds and insurance, etc., covered only a fraction of that. So The need for a humanitarian response architecture that is agile and well-resourced has never been, for Jamaica, more important, even as we build our own resilience. So that is certainly one of the things that we have to bear in mind. We have to recognize that there are less resources, and therefore, getting those resources to the places they need to get to quickly and in a more targeted way is one of the challenges that I think the humanitarian system needs to face. Happily, the Humanitarian Reset, as part of UNATI, is seeking to address that. Multilateralism needs to be strengthened, because we are an island, and literally no man is an island. We cannot survive these kinds of shocks by ourselves. We need the support of a robust humanitarian sector. One, to help us to develop and strengthen our own national capacities to respond, but also recognizing that that will never be enough, and when you're faced with a hurricane like Melissa, that comes home as a very hard truth. No matter what we do, it will never be enough on our own. And then, of course, the long-term consequences consequences, which I can speak to separately as well. Those are two of the sets of risks that I see emerging at the moment and things that we have to confront in a pragmatic, realistic way. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Ambassador. Then, Attilio, we'd like to hand over straightaway to you, if that's okay.

Thank you very much, Professor Thompson. Having heard the inputs already that have laid really the stage around some of the issues that we need to grapple with, I will not focus on climate, which has been ably done by Ambassador Wallace. Instead, I will speak to two categories of risks. The first category are those that are based on the nature of conflict and disaster itself, and the second are around how the world is or isn't responding or adapting to these risks. So, on the first, and some of these have already been mentioned, But it bears stressing that currently over 240 million people require urgent assistance. There are far more that require different levels of assistance, including those that find themselves in conflict settings. Why this number is so large at the moment speaks to risk one, which is that a lot of the conflicts find themselves in urban, overpopulated spaces. This is not only your traditional international or non-international armed conflict, but also, as we are seeing here in South Africa where I am, increasingly violent protests targeting communities who do require urgent assistance as and when that occurs. But it also is because we are in a space in which we see unprecedented displacement. Most of this displacement is increasingly internal. It is in spaces in countries, for example, like Sudan, where the state itself in the midst of conflict is unable to handle the impact of that displacement and in some instances instrumentalizes that displacement and the humanitarian assistance to the people displaced. We're also seeing aid workers in particular being targets in conflict. So not only them having a role to play in addressing the conflict and the issues affecting the most vulnerable, but themselves finding themselves in vulnerable positions. This is fundamentally an erosion of international humanitarian law in that aid workers should be protected, and yet many fear for their lives. Then fourth on this is the way in which the violence is increasingly resulting in large death tolls, um, and this in itself poses inherent risks in the way in which we then go to my second category of risks, which are related to how we respond. Already reference has been made to the fact that there is a need to address current crises and conflicts with far less budgets, but decreasing budgets as well, which forces humanitarian agencies and actors to perform a greater level of triage than they used to. What takes priority? What is immediate? What is medium-term? And what is long-term? Often it is the long-term that is neglected because the focus is really on what I refer to as a firefighter approach to dealing with crises. Get the fire out now and hope it doesn't recur, even though the conditions to prevent recurrence are— have not been put in place. And so as we shift from a more prevention-oriented approach to crisis-focused aid, I would argue that that shift in and of itself poses a risk. Finally, I would say that this creates greater fragmentation. It has already been referenced, but it also puts immense pressure on local organizations to do work that was previously done by better-funded larger entities with far less financial resources, far less human resources, and very little buy-in from the communities in which they seek to, to assist. Thank you very much, Prof Thompson.

Thank you very much, Tilia. And Zora, we would like to hand over to you next, please. Do we have you with us?

Yes, can you hear me all right?

Yeah, we can hear you perfectly. Floor's yours. Good.

My apologies for the problems with technology. We are getting into an age of AI, but still, every now and then, not even a basic connection. Works. So I hope you can hear me well. I'd like to be quite brief in my intervention around what I would say is not a trend or a risk in itself, but it is an actor and a reality which is cutting across all sorts of future trends and risks, and that's organized crime and criminal markets. Just to follow up on what you mentioned, Professor Thompson, which I think is a very important point around the importance of the importance of interstate armed conflict today, in the past, and in the future, I'd like to just mention one statistic produced very recently by the United Nations, which basically tries to account for all the intentional homicides worldwide and came to the conclusion that most of these homicides and killings are actually related to organized crime activity, gang activity, much more so than to armed conflict and terrorism combined. That's an important point which often is not recognized or underestimated. But importance of organized crime and criminal governance, which means the reality that many communities live every day under the rule of the criminal organizations, goes way beyond violence. An interesting study, and I'm going to mention just two other numbers which I think are really important, not because of the estimates or because of how accurate measurements can be, but because they give us an idea of how, um, sheerly important the size and reach of this phenomenon is. And the first number is a study from the University of Chicago that recognizes that 345 million people in Latin America alone live within communities where criminal organizations operate. That's half of the total population in Latin America. Not the whole totality, but many, several millions live under criminal governance. What does that mean? It means that the justice system is not enforced by the state, but by a criminal organization. It means that they have to pay protection fees to criminal organizations. It means that even access to basic services, water, internet, even the streets are regulated by criminal organizations. Today I'm sitting here in a hotel in Rio de Janeiro, and I'm looking outside, I can see directly onto one of the biggest favelas in Brazil. These are hundreds of thousands of people that live under criminal, the rule of criminal organizations. But this is not the case just in Latin America. We do not have these estimates for other parts of the world, for example, Africa, Asia, Southeast Asia, but we do know that that's a reality there as well. Just another data point. 2 billion people, according to the World Economic Forum, are actually employed in the informal economy. That is 60% of the world's employment— employed population. This is enormous. And if you think about this, this is of course not organized crime, but this is a community that becomes vulnerable to organized crime. This is a community that will be exposed to protection fees, that will be exposed to these organizations which are responsible for most of the violence worldwide today. So I made this point not because of how exact, again, these estimates will be. There is an enormous amount of information that we simply do not know about. But to make the point that organized crime is a reality. It is a reality for most communities worldwide. So when humanitarian action and policy is developed and when it is delivered on the ground, it is very important that it takes into account organized crime as a reality on the ground. And I think in that sense, the big risk and trend is to misunderstand how organized crime is in fact shaping humanitarian reality. And I believe that it shapes it in 3 different ways. By regulating access. And I think this is probably, for those working in humanitarian response, is the most well-known reality. So getting access to the people and to the territory. The second way is by actually being a competitor in the provision of protection. So organized crime becomes, even if it is exploitative, even if it is violent, a competitor to all those actors that are trying to provide basic protection in a situation of crisis. Because we don't have to forget the fact that very often these criminal organizations do offer minimum services. They do offer some order. They do offer some protection. And in this sense, they become competitor to all other actors that become active on the field when it comes to interventions. And the third point is how they operate to basically stabilize the system. And I think that's the risk, which is the biggest risk if we look at future trends, is basically having a political criminal economy that develops in situations where there's a lot of need and an emergency, which however then becomes basically a situation of constant need. So what organized crime does within these realities It's mediating between different actors, locking in actors, for example, from the humanitarian side with communities, with local politicians, so that what you become, what you have on the ground is not anymore an emergency, and you have a problem of durability of the situation of need. So you're going to have an emergency situation that for months develops into years and develops into decades and basically remains constant, and it's a problem for the humanitarian policy of exit and of legitimacy within a certain context, which becomes even more, of course, important against what we have been discussing before, which is the fragmentation of efforts and the cutting in aid resources.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Zora. And Michael, over to you.

Thank you, thank you, esteemed colleagues and guests and participants. Appreciate the opportunity to talk today. It's been said already that the global humanitarian system is being dismantled and is under threat by political scapegoating, by donor— lack of donor confidence, and by the erosion of the rule of law that plays out into the field. Humanitarian assistance is being obstructed and underfunded, and it's been co-opted for political and military ends, which means that it's being manipulated as leverage, which makes our situation very complex as we look to adapt a system and work with a system that is chronically now underfunded and acutely underfunded. The humanitarian sector and the finances of the humanitarian sector has been increasingly politicized, and humanitarian funding has been increasingly shaped by national security and foreign policy priorities. As an emergency physician, I suffer from an irritating sense of pragmatism, and so I'm really interested in the way that this plays out in the field. And we've seen it in the current Ebola response in the DRC, for example. If you look at the images and the responses from the field, people are working with lack of everything. So we have people who are literally risking their lives because they don't have PPE, they don't have the ability to organize their efforts, they have lack of community trust and lack of funding from donors in this, what we may characterize as a local emergency, but we should remember, we have to remember, that epidemics know no borders, they know no boundaries, and these are all threats to global health security. The 2026 Global Humanitarian overview confirms that this system is not now adapted to be able to take care of the 240 million people that require care, and that we have to— what we call and have been calling— hyper-prioritize our humanitarian aid for life-saving interventions. I think that's a dangerous word, and I think, well, we have to use it as an adaptation to the work that we need to do in order to make really difficult choices as to who we will not serve. I would not hope that we can get used to this terminology. So I have a couple of questions for us, and then maybe for the second panel we can answer them. The first one is that if the tiny fragment of GDP needed to fund humanitarian assistance was actually met, would we be having these conversations? Certainly, we all know we live in a world that could be optimized, and organizations that could be optimized and made more efficient. And that is— but that is the reduction in funding, especially the precipitous cuts in funding, don't necessarily mean that our humanitarian system is not fit for purpose. The second one is if political and military decisions were made with actually the common— not even common good, but actually the common protection of civilians, would we be in the position where we can can't gain access, or access is politicized, and that there's these major obstructions to humanitarian access that we depend on in order to serve our communities. So as to these two questions, do the mere fact that budget cuts are happening and the mere fact that access is prohibited, does it mean that our humanitarian system is not fit for purpose? I'd argue that that is a kind of a conceptual trap that we've stepped into that we have to be careful not to adapt or fundamentally change our system just for those reasons. And I'd like to get to those questions maybe at the second panel. So thank you.

Thank you very much, Michael. Now, I'd been asked to ask each of the panelists a follow-up question, but I'm keen to allow people in the room the opportunity to come in, so maybe I should just restrict myself to a couple of questions. And Ambassador, I would like to pick up, if I may, on the climate crisis, because I think that casts a very long shadow over a lot of our discussions, and it may be that the SG would also like to come in on this question as well. But if I can start with you, Ambassador, if you read about humanitarianism today, One underlying message that seems to come through a lot of the critical reflection is that the world's challenges seem to be moving a lot faster than the capacity of multilateral systems to address them. But to be fair, we know that since the late 20th, early 21st century, a number of NGOs have moved to sort of make a more explicit commitment to having an environmental mission, and you referred to a number of the things that they've adopted like risk reduction, early warning, nature-based solutions, a lot of which were galvanized by the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. So I just want to turn this into a slightly harder-edged question, which is how much harder do you think the humanitarian community is going to need to lean in to the consequences of climate change if we are going to have a worldwide understanding of the way in which it's destroying people's sources of survival in the way that you just described and gave us a particularly poignant example, making it harder for people to adapt to extreme weather environments, um, and how much more are we going to have to make humanitarianism ecological, and how do we go about doing that?

If I had the answers to those questions. So, I think you have so accurately described the existential challenges that we face, not just for us as a country, in the face of climate shocks, but for us as part of an ecosystem, a multilateral system that is, in our experience, doing its best to provide the support that is needed, but at the same time, so flawed that it is not yet as efficient as it needs to be. So the answer to your question is damn hard. Is how hard we're going to have to work to meet the challenges that are oncoming. The hurricane season in the Caribbean has— the Atlantic hurricane season has just started on the 1st of June. The forecasting is that it will not be as active, but, you know, a couple of years ago, we had a full-blown Cat 5 hurricane on the 1st of July. So the forecast doesn't really give us any comfort. And imagine if a year ago, less than a year ago, we got impacted to the extent of 57% of our GDP and we get hit again, perhaps in another part of the island, because the devastation there took up a swath of the island east, north, south to north. If the capital gets hit, for instance, the setback is unimaginable, and I don't even want us to contemplate it, but these are the realities that we're looking at. The global system, the global architecture must become responsive to those realities and must be sympathetic, especially to countries who are not part of the causes of these challenges, these heightened challenges. So this is our reality. For Jamaica, a new disaster is not 'the sky is falling, the sky is falling.' It is just another year of facing these trends. The international architecture has to get into that mode as well. So the reality is, to answer your question, we have to get used to being able to to provide the response. And we have to become much more nimble and able to use the resources in a more targeted way. I know that kind of hyper-prioritization is a problem, but if resources are so limited, then we have no choice. So it behooves all of us to advocate for a more robust a humanitarian budget that supports targeted responses where they are needed, not only to deal with recovery, but to build resilience. Jamaica has been trying to invest in its resilient infrastructure and in a more resilient economy to be able to pivot when tourism gets hit by a pandemic., or if a tourism sector gets hit by a natural disaster, or if oil shocks affect travel and therefore affect the main driver in our economy, which is tourism, to have a more diversified economy that can pivot and withstand. That's also part of the architecture of investment that will be needed, and that's one of the linkages that I think we have not yet made between humanitarian responses and needs and developing economies through access to concessional financing that allows for you to invest in a meaningful way in those areas.

Thank you, Ambassador. And I would like to just, for the rest of this panel and the next, just hold on to that phrase, hyper prioritization, because we have a humanitarian system that for 80 years, and for good reasons, has been hardwired to responding on the basis of need and wherever need is. And I think that does pose particular challenges in highly resource-constrained circumstances for deciding where the priorities are within priorities, because that's not something I think the system is necessarily accustomed or adapted to doing. I would like— before I bring in the room, I'd like to turn to Attilio, because I think it is important to have a perspective from Africa. And Attilio, I was very struck by what you were saying about unprecedented levels of internal displacement on the continent, and I think they probably are unprecedented, at least since the wars of liberation or decolonization. And I think a lot of displacement exists at the intersection between climate and conflict and organized crime. But of course, Africa was on the front foot in terms of legislating for situations of internal displacement with the innovative Kampala Convention. And I just wanted to ask you to what extent to what extent having that convention is helping or not helping Africa respond to the extraordinary challenges of internal displacement, and whether you could just give us some pointers in the room as to what— if more needs to be done, what sort of more things need to be done. Just back to you.

Thank you very much for that. I thought maybe to start with a reflection on what happened when Cyclone Freddy hit the southeastern seaboard of the continent. First in Mozambique, that had previously experienced cyclonic activity that had resulted in damages to property, deaths, and internal displacement. They had developed a community-level early warning mechanism to guide each other on where to go and wait out the storm to survive. A similar model did not exist in Malawi, while Mozambique was harder hit ecologically, so to speak. The deaths from Cyclone Freddy reflect that over 1,200 people died in Malawi, while under 200 died elsewhere, including in Mozambique. Why do I use that example in responding to, to your question? For me as a lawyer, the Kampala Convention is important. It is useful as a tool to hold policymakers accountable for policies that they adopted. For local women in the north of Mozambique that have developed a communication channel to be able to prevent internal displacement, to be able to counter the impacts. In this case, it was climate, but this is also a region that is currently impacted by an insurgency in Cabo Delgado. For them, if you ask them, as ISS researchers did, they don't know the Kampala Convention, but they know the letter of the law and the intent of the Kampala Convention. Without having any idea when it was adopted, by whom it was adopted, and for whom. The same is the case— sorry, the power just went where I am.

We can hear you fine though, keep going.

And yet I'm connected, so this is going to be interesting. But the same is the case for countries dealing with displacement such as Sudan, such as Ethiopia, such as Uganda, confronted both by the internal displacement, but then also— and I'm just going to switch off my camera while I try to figure out what's going on here— but then also by having to manage internal displacement from other regions within their own countries. And what they have been able to do is to really adapt the message that came from Ambassador Wallace but also from Dr. Van Rooyen around essentially around hyper-prioritization. This is a message that I think is important, but it's also a message perhaps that ignores that for some communities, they have no choice but to prioritize their own safety, their own security, and where aid does not come in, methods to be able to ensure resilience. The final point that I would make in response to your question is the importance in this conversation around community-level food security. And the power is back. Around community-level food security and the efforts that have been made at local level to actually ensure that countries or communities are self-sufficient, because a lot of the conflict a lot of the displacement we see as a result of that conflict on the continent leads people into very food insecure contexts, and that in itself reinforces a vicious cycle of want, need, then conflict as a result of that. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much for such a clearly articulated answer, Attilio. We could hear all of it perfectly, and I partly wanted to ask that question because As the ASG suggested in his opening remarks, we are living in an age where we're seeing international humanitarian law treated as an increasingly devalued currency, but it's important to remember within all of that there are still bodies of international law that we're turning to and that are helping us to respond to some of the challenges that we face. I'm going to forego questions to Zora and Michael because then we have nearly 20 minutes for people in the room and online to ask questions. If you could put your hand up, introduce yourself briefly, and then ask a question. Remember to put your mic on as you ask the question, please. So I'm just looking across the room and who would like to get us going? I cannot believe that there isn't someone in the room who wants to ask a question. Over here, please.

Sure, thank you very much. Happy to break the ice. My name is Mahio, I work at the Netherlands Mission to the UN on the humanitarian file. So thanks a lot to the panelists for joining us here today and giving us these insights. It's really useful to have also an outsider's perspective brought in here to the UN. And I wanted to come back to a point that Professor Thompson made in the beginning on fragmentation. And my question relates to the challenge that fragmentation poses, because as all of the speakers have made clear, is that the challenges facing humanitarians in the system are abundant. And my question relates to what role does the fragmentation of that same system play in perhaps the lacking response or the need for a better response to respond to these these crises. And I'm sure we will touch more on this also in the next panel when we talk more about the solutions, but on the challenges side, I think it would be interesting to hear a bit more detail around that challenge specifically.

Thank you. Yeah, I don't know, Michael, would you allow me to turn to you first? I mean, particularly because, you know, fragmentation can have a reality in a building like this, in a headquarters, but, you know, it also has a reality in the field. And so, as you're looking at sort of responses to major health crises, you know, how much of this is or isn't it an issue?

Yeah, thank you. And I think it's a great question. Thank you. I think having worked with many different NGOs in operational humanitarian assistance over many years, and that's been kind of my role, not deep within the UN, but in the field with NGOs, fragmentation is real, lack of coordination is real. We've seen, you know, UN adaptations with the evolution of the cluster system, for example, or systems of gathering people that makes— try to make sense of a response. I actually was part of the formation of the initial cluster system when it happened a long time ago. And it was a hope. It was a hope that actually we could actually get to some sense of coordinated humanitarian response where UN actors, local actors, and NGO actors could get together and coordinate. There's been a lot of threats to the cluster system and a lot of criticisms of it, and a lot of criticisms of the current system whereby it seems to be, you know, sort of fragmenting in front of us. And I think it'd be a real loss to lose the sense, particularly of OCHA's coordination role in the system and how it can assure things that other— that NGOs can't do. They can't assure principled They can't do that. They can't really work in civil spheres to try to gain coordination with military actors, for example, and they need organizations from the UN and OCHA to be able to do that. So I would just urge whether we alter the system, I would not want to break the system of coordination because it's crucial.

Ajit, can I bring you in here? I mean, it strikes me that, you know, before 1991 to '92, there arguably wasn't a fourth humanitarian pillar in the UN system, and the creation of your agency was that. We're now in the middle of a UN80 reform process. Your particular agency perhaps is unusual in the UN system as having responsibilities to coordinate humanitarian relief within the UN but beyond. What can we expect of the UN80 reform process in terms of further strengthening and solidifying that key coordinating role that you have?

Thank you, Andrew, that is a very easy question, but I think a couple of points. As the speakers also have said, the evolution of— in the last couple of decades in particular has been a complexity of all the operational environments we work in, in unprecedented in unprecedented ways, expansion of many actors in the humanitarian space as well, which is a good thing as well, and I think the threads, as Professor was saying a little while ago, of what we looked at in 2005, the cluster system, and now, even that reality has changed so much in the last 20 years. And I think what has happened is in systems we got entrenched in these systems and the agility to adapt has been somewhat retarded. So what is needed, I think, to answer the question, as you said, yes, the fragmentation is in the number of entities involved, the resource allocation also from member states and donors has also been fragmented, that is also part of the problem. To look at, not to sound too simplistic, but three elements. I think one is how can the system look at efficiencies? I think clearly there is these elements of efficiencies in processes, in the devolution of resources, and how can we make it tighter?

One.

Secondly is impact. We talk of resources allocated, people reached, but we also have to be much better in articulating the impact of the resources that has reached the people. And that would— it has an incredibly close link to, obviously, the efficiency agenda as well, that we are impact-oriented. And lastly, I think the bigger challenge for all of us is also the accountability that goes with fragmentation. Are we dissipating that accountability on international law, on humanitarian advocacy, on the protection of civilians? How do we also strengthen the accountability. So these three elements, I think, is what we're trying to work together, UNATI, member states, and the incredible partners on the ground who day-to-day live this reality, so removed from the conference rooms of New York, right, when you talk of access, civilians in danger. So I think these are the three elements, Professor. I know I'm being very telegraphic, but I think these three elements are intertwined and need to be really looked that as we move forward.

I think that last point was a very powerful one that I think isn't often made, that with institutional fragmentation can come dissipating accountability as well. Now, just looking in the room, and it would be nice at some—

Can I have a very quick—

Yes?

On the question of fragmentation, this is something that we discussed in the mandate implementation review process, and One of the things that we discovered there is not only is the lack of funding a causal factor, but the type of funding. So when you have too much earmarking, it leads inevitably as well to greater fragmentation, and that is something that we have to be very cognizant of. Core funding is one of the best ways to streamline activities and better manage efficiencies so that you avoid fragmentation.

Good point. It would be nice to have a question in the room for Zora Hauser at some stage, and if there isn't one, I'm going to ask one. But my colleague over here, would you like to introduce yourself and ask your question?

Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. I'm Yeri Rosales. I'm so delighted to University and had the pleasure of working with UNOCHA last year, a couple of years ago on the community side. And the question, my question then is, to some extent it was Ms. Otilia referred to it, the issue of women as really the leaders or the most energetic at community levels to protect their families, children, and community. And while gender has always been involved in the OCHA program, I wonder now that this kind of crisis is happening and it's communities that really have to solve it initially and make the connections. We found that when women are organized, then they will insist that resources come more equitably to the communities that they know. They don't eliminate the men, but the men are less knowledgeable about the intricacies of networks. So I wonder whether you would like to comment on where— is there more— well, climate also, women are the ones who are most involved worldwide. So is the new policy really going to take much more seriously the reality that women need to be supported to do the organizing for the entire community, which includes men and everyone else.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Zora. I don't want to put you on the spot here, but you and I worked together on the huge challenges that international organized crime presents to human trafficking and modern slavery. Where I would observe that women and children are especially exposed to those egregious human rights crimes. But we also know that women play a prominent role as frontline responders, and I wonder if we could just bring you in on the sort of gender dimension to these discussions, Zohra.

Yes, absolutely. The gender dimension is incredibly important. Aspect within organized crime, human trafficking.

And just bring your microphone a bit, a little bit closer.

Yeah, super. Is that better? Perfect. It's an absolutely important dimension, and as much as it's been talked about within different forums, within different agencies, in the end I think we've been struggling to find responses that are really effective on the ground in order to protect women and children as well from from these phenomena. And I think I'm going to take the lead from this question to actually address another important point that I wanted to make in relation to the three really interesting points that have been raised in terms of how important it is to develop policy around efficiency, impact, and accountability. I'd like to add maybe one last point, which is the one about intentional consequences of on-the-ground interventions. Which means not only we need to prioritize how we use resources, but if we look at the UN as a system, we need to make sure that wherever the resources are allocated, that then not a bigger problem is caused as a consequence of intervention. That can happen as an unintentional consequence when, for example, certain risk assessments are not carried out properly. So it might be an element within efficiency, by not basically creating a problem by solving another problem. And it might be relevant within the gender discussion as well, where you create vulnerabilities that are wider out of an immediate response to an emergency situation.

I'd also just like to link that question back to what the Ambassador was saying. In my experience, the humanitarian responders who are most likely to suffer from earmarked funding that has strings, if not ropes, attached to it are frontline civil society organizations. They cannot survive by just lurching from one project to another. So that vital part of the system which sort of exists below the radar or hides in plain sight is the most exposed to a funding system that is driven and sort of determined by setting priorities for organizations rather than letting them set priorities for themselves. I think we had a question, did we, just midway down here? Yeah, thank you.

Thank you very much to the speakers. I really do appreciate the opportunity to hear these different perspectives from issues of conflict, as it relates to climate, as it relates to protection issues. My question here is more related to the intersections of humanitarian assistance and development and peace and security. We keep on talking about, is the humanitarian system fit for purpose? My question is, is the development system, is the peace and security system fit for purpose? So my question is for you on this front, because to be quite honest, we're responding to need, but what's creating this need? And how do we actually address what those points are? I was wondering if speakers could talk a bit to what the challenges are of that gap from a humanitarian perspective, from a development side, and also from the peace and security side. I know, Ambassador Wallace, you touched on one of the critical points. I know we've had this conversation ongoing about concessional financing, right? If there was better coherence— and this is even a space as member states in terms of how we work with IFIs, in our own development policies on that item. But I'd really, you know, welcome your views on, A, the peace and security side.

I don't know if that can go to Zora or Attilia.

And then on the development side, from a humanitarian actor's perspective, what are those gaps that need to be done? And if there's any practical— I know it touches on our second panel, but what are those current challenges that we face? Thank you.

Thank you. I'd like to start with Michael, and then maybe come to the Ambassador and Attilio. Michael, I'm asking you because, you know, health is not just a humanitarian issue, it's not just a development imperative, it's not just related to security challenges, yeah? And it's not just sort of addressed through championing rights-based issues, it's all of those things, yeah? So how far does a humanitarian system —is it going to be what it can do in the health space? Is it going to be animated and constrained and enabled and restricted by what's happening in those other three pillars of global governance?

Yeah, and to your question, which covers a couple major topics—one is global peace and security and the issue that generates the humanitarian crises in the first place, right? We're responding to that, so we are not the sort of the creators of it or the managers of it, right? Those are issues that are driving humanitarian aid, displacement, cross-border displacement, humanitarian need, etc. And we, as the aid community, are responding to it. Now, the degree to which we can respond to it and still be strategic is tricky, because— and I've mentioned this issue of hyper-prioritization, which I'm not an advocate of, but it's a necessary adaptation— but that erodes the ability of transitioning or creating links to development.. So, and I'll just take the health sector since I live it. The idea of providing emergency humanitarian health aid is a band-aid. It is not what our intent is. It shouldn't be our intent or our motive. Our motive should be building, supporting sustainable systems that can actually transition into supporting the community, addressing areas of profound need, keeping sustainable programs going even in conflict settings. So, from the health perspective, there's a clear need to not get stuck in prioritizing first-line— I'm an emergency doctor and I do first-line life-saving care, and it is inadequate. It's inadequate for the system in the United States. It's inadequate in the global system as well. And we just need to make sure that we can actually expand that to longitudinal services, capacity building, person power building, etc.? Thank you.

Ambassador, would you like to come in on this question?

I'd love to. Thank you so much, and thanks to Canada for the question and for the opportunity to address this as well. Everything that Michael just said about the humanitarian system also applies to the peace and security architecture, especially peacekeeping. We've become used to funding peacekeeping peacekeeping as a forever project, as opposed to peacekeeping being something that is designed to create an atmosphere in which permanent solutions can— it's the same across all pillars of the UN. You ask about some of the challenges. The lack of access to concessional financing for development has a direct impact on our local ability, our national ability to respond to humanitarian crises. And when you have a humanitarian crisis that requires you to bring your debt-to-GDP ratio back up after you've sacrificed for 10 years to bring it down, and also to then divert resources from development priorities to humanitarian recovery and response, then you're pedaling backwards. On a cycle energetically, but you're pedaling backwards. The link between the three pillars, the four pillars indeed, of the multilateral system could not be more stark for countries like mine. I'm very happy for the question.

Thank you. Would any of the— Attilio, would you like to respond on that last question, or otherwise we've got time for one more question? But it's up to you.

I think it's been covered well. So the last question would be good and maybe a comment on the women youth issue that was raised earlier. Yes, please go ahead. The population, the African population, when you consider people under the age of 30, and then all, all women, so both girls and women over the age of 30, is about 72% of the continent's population. That this cohort— and this response perhaps to the final question— that this cohort is not always consulted in the decision-making process means that they are not only excluded from solutions that they can be instrumental in shaping, but it also means that it creates conditions for greater frustration. It creates avenues, particularly for young people, to seek more aggressive means of getting solutions to the issues that they're raising. We are seeing this in countries outside of conflict and countries in conflict. And I think while this has been said over and over again, inclusive approaches do matter. And inclusive not only by categorizing this group of people as perhaps victims or even solution givers, but also as agitators in the process as well, and making sure that those opinions, those views are very much part of the design of interventions as well. Because as was rightly pointed out, the change even of language around peace operations was informed by the fact that temporary missions— look at the Democratic Republic of the Congo— have effectively become permanent missions because the efforts to prevent, to build resilience, to enable an ending of a cycle of violence Those efforts have been overtaken by efforts to address issues as they arise, what I referred to earlier as a firefighter approach. Yes, you can put out the fires, but you also need to make sure that you make the conditions in countries, in communities conducive to peace.

Thank you very much. Um, UN colleagues, do we have Any questions online that we would like to ask? So I think not, so I think we have time for a final question in the room. Do we have anybody? So what I would like to do then, just to make sure that we get our 15-minute break, is I was asked to offer some summative reflections. I'm not going to try and do that in about sort of 90 seconds, but I would like to just sort of throw a thought out to everybody in the room. Hopefully as many of you as possible will come back for the next panel in 15 minutes' time, and it's this, is that I think history at least shows that for Humanitarians want to make an impression on the world surrounding them, but sometimes they have to be in a position to change themselves before they can do that. If there is one change that you'd like to see to the humanitarian sort of system as you know it, you observe it, you perhaps work within it, yeah, you experience it today, having listened to our panel, What would that one change be? And I'm asking that in a very singular way deliberately, yeah? If there's something that you think needs changing more than anything else, what would it be? Hold that thought and bring it into the next session. And thank you very much for your participation, and thank you very much to all of our panelists in the room and online as well. And Zora and Attilia, we could hear you perfectly throughout the whole session, so thank you. Hello there, everyone.

Again, this is DUNN technician in New York. The meeting should begin in

Okay, colleagues, welcome back, everybody.

I'm pleased to say that the Swiss would almost be proud of us, but we're 5 minutes over, so not quite, yeah? And we're going to get going again, and we're going to do the same thing. We have 4 distinguished panelists. I'm going to introduce them briefly. They're each going to speak for around 3 minutes, and then we're going to go into a Q&A session. We have 3 colleagues who are joining us online who I'm going to introduce in a minute, but thank you to all 3 of you. For coming into this session. But let me start off by saying, in the room, we are very pleased to have His Excellency Ambassador Salehudin Noman Chowdhury, who's the Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the United Nations in New York. He's had a diplomatic career spanning more than two decades at various Bangladeshi missions abroad, including in Nepal and India, I think. We're very pleased to have you with us and thank you for generously making the time. And then joining online, we have Gloria Somer Modong Morris, who's Executive Director for the Titi Foundation NGO in South Sudan. She's a steering committee member of the South Sudan NGO Forum and represents NGOs as a member of South Sudan's humanitarian fund, and she's an activist for women and children. And Gloria, we are very pleased to have you with us. Welcome. Also joining us online is Abdulsalam Mohamed, who's a humanitarian practitioner and researcher at Action for Social and Economic Progress, or ASEPP, in Somalia. He's experienced in climate adaptation, community engagement, and locally-led response. Abdulsalam, welcome, very pleased to have you with us. And then also joining us online is Louis Seder, who's the co-director of the Humanitarian Learning Centre at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University. He's the author of evaluations including the Flagship Initiative Evaluation and the IASC Independent Review of Internal Displacement. Lewis, we're very pleased that you've been able to join us, and welcome. But first, if I may just give you the question that's sort of overarching all four contributions, which won't surprise you, which is firstly to ask our distinguished panelists whether the risks and trends that we were discussing what we were discussing in the first panel resonate with them and whether there might be other risks and trends that they want to bring to our attention and highlight that perhaps we didn't get onto in our earlier discussion. And then secondly, what you see as the most pressing measures for humanitarians and multilateral systems right now to mitigate some of the risks that we've been talking about over the coming years. And with that, I will turn to you, Ambassador, and ask you for your opening remarks.

Thank you, Professor Andrew Thompson, for your generous introduction. This morning we had a very exciting discussion on these humanitarian action issues, and the questions that you ask, this panel is whether these risks resonate with us. Yes, of course, as one of the largest refugee-hosting countries, this resonates with Bangladesh's realities. But before that, let me give a little background of why this humanitarian action is increasingly becoming very challenging for many of the countries. The armed conflict the armed conflict that continues around the globe. We have like 135 armed conflicts around the globe and there are 20 conflicts which have lasted for more than 20 years. So there are generations of people in some countries who have seen nothing but war in their life. Then we have this— we all know that the Climate-induced impacts is causing humanitarian action around the globe because of the global emissions which were man-made, and now this— the issue of geopolitical tensions rising in countries because countries are more focused on political alliances rather than on development issues, and we have seen that defense budget is increasing, as you mentioned, and getting priority more than the development budget in many countries. So the consequence is very stark for us countries like Bangladesh, that we are seeing constraints in funding. And this— and another issue that which we are very concerned is we are seeing that the bilateral funding is getting priority over even pooled funding. So that is an issue of concern for countries which were dependent on funding for managing their crisis. So we see that humanitarian actions are are many times linked with the interest of— the strategic interest of countries. We see that national security and foreign policy priorities are linked with humanitarian actions. And secondly, we are concerned that there is no consistency in focus. We solve— we do not solve any problem. Actually give focus to one problem at one time, and when another problem begins, we lose our focus on it. We do not go for solution of one crisis. This selective approach and the fading of importance is a matter of great That is a concern for us. Secondly, what we think, that one crisis actually gives birth to another crisis if that is not solved. If humanitarian financing is not adequate, then it causes desperation in communities, in the refugee communities, greater vulnerability of that community for trafficking, for— other security impacts, that could be one of the causes. The exploitation issue is also there. So the refugee situation sometimes gives rise to law and order situations. It may create regional instability. It may create terrorism. It may create security hazard for countries. What we also need to focus is that the local host communities are the worst sufferers because there is pressure on land, pressure on services, livelihood, environment, and social communities— social cohesions in the host communities. So we have to distinguish between the assistance that we give to the refugees and the assistance that we give to the host countries, and there should not be any double counting of this assistance that we give to these communities. Lastly, what I need to point out, that the humanitarian humanitarian situations in countries like ours have a forward linkage and a backward linkage. If we concentrate on giving relief to some situation, that will not— that will not be the end in itself, because sending relief is not the solution; it's only a part of the solution. If I give an example of our situation in Bangladesh, the refugee problem started in Myanmar because of the systematic oppression by the Myanmar military, because they were depriving a certain ethnic group of their citizenship. So that is the root cause. So that, that was something very very sad for us that a systematic— systematic issue of depriving a certain community based on their ethnic identity of the citizenship of their country actually caused these problems, which was actually flouted all the international and human rights norms. And so that root cause we could not address. And the last point that I want to make, the forward linkage— sometimes we actually try to solve issues by some actions which actually do not solve the solve the problems. Say, for example, the third country settlement of some refugees, in our case, the Rohingya refugees, actually could not solve our problem because third country settlement is only given to a very few people. So this limited resettlement has created some unrealistic hopes in the communities in the Rohingya camps that they will also get the opportunity to going to Western countries if they can endure the environment in camps. So that is not a good thing for them because they need to return to their own country because they are having an unrealistic hope that they can be settled outside. So these are the points that I just wanted to relate with my country's situation. So thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Ambassador, and sort of having visited Jamaica and Africa, I think it was important to get to South Asia in this and to Bangladesh in this conversation. Thank you very much. Gloria, we would like to bring you in next. I'm hoping that you can hear us okay. And the floor is yours.

Thank you very much. I hope you can hear me too. Um, maybe just to bring it to context is that yes, we experience this risk in South Sudan on a day-to-day basis, so it's not really strange. However, I think, um, from a local organization perspective, I won't be bringing in a lot of the problems, but solutions currently that we have put in place as local actors and the humanitarian community in South Sudan that I think could be scaled up into the future. One is that, for example, around security risks, um, there's a lot of coordination amongst partners that includes spaces such as UNDSS, the NGO Forum, organizations like INSO. And so with that kind of coordination, we're able to really give timely information on security issues that may arise from one location to another. Of course, the limitation with many of such agencies would be around the resourcing and the reach across the country. Um, we also look at, of course, issues such as joint advocacy. We have a strong, I would say, humanitarian coordination mechanism across the country and advocacy around security-related issues, given that You may all know that South Sudan has one of the highest death tolls when it comes to targeting of humanitarian workers. So a huge advocacy conversation has been happening within the sector and among partners. However, I think another solution that we could be putting forth is for bilateral governments to use, you know, their power and ability to be able to, you know, talk some level of sense to the South Sudan government so that, you know, such risks are really reduced. And above all, of course, encourage them to opt for peace as a long-lasting solution for the sector overall, but also for the civil population. When it comes to questions on climate shocks, one of the things that we are looking at, given of course the entire humanitarian sector crisis that is happening, is around working with private sector organizations such as insurance companies. We are dealing on issues to do with parametric insurance, for example, to support flood-affected beneficiaries and locations in the country. And so this could be part of the solutions that we bring on board and ensure that, you know, bilateral organizations and funders will be able to, you know, um, promote that. We're also looking— we work on engaging and raising awareness around environmental education to ensure that the simple population across the country is able to understand some of this basic information, but also working very closely with county governments, which is the lowest level of governments in South Sudan, to ensure that we support them in development of simple materials and policies around their DRR systems. When it comes to questions around the funding, cuts that of course is crippling down the sector overall. We are looking at locally led solutions. They have emerged, they have proven a concept that they work. We have seen it in Sudan with the mutual aid, and thanks to bilateral funders like FCDO that is invested hugely on mutual aid work across that region. And I think such kind of examples could be some of the things that, you know, we take into consideration And, um, again, the cost-benefit analysis is really beneficial for everyone, but ensuring that communities don't lack any services at the end of the day. And I think it's a better space to start looking at and investing in with local organizations as we move forward, because I don't think the question on funding is anytime soon going to go back to normalcy. Um, on the issues surrounding crimes and organized crimes in South Sudan. Um, locally, what we are doing within organizations and encouraging different local actors on is, of course, one thing, in a few times, because we understand the complexity of the country overall. But then beyond that also is establishing simple things like hotlines. In case I'm in problems, I'm able to really, you know, make the call and tell someone that I am in problems, and then we all find solutions. To urgently inform the organizations such as INSO or UNDSS or the NGO Forum to be able to be more proactive in terms of reacting to some of these circumstances, really. And a final one really is around looking at the health shocks on ground. What we have encouraged our local organizations to do, and we are promoting this model more closely, is the equivalent of a community health worker. However, in South Sudan we call it the Boma Health Workers, um, where we train them, we equip them, but then send them to the deep field villages, which of course a health center in Juba is not able to reach. And it's compulsory that at the end of the month you should have reached at least 40 patients and ensured that, you know, treatments occur. And I think such models may look simple, but I think they could be able to advance some good in our context given the current funding situation. And I think it's a space that we could heavily invest into. So mine was just to bring, you know, local solutions, local to solving local problems. And I think at a very low cost that if we all listened to and adapted to, we'll all be seeing better progress into the future.

Over to you, Gloria. Thank you very much for grounding some of, if I can use that word, discussions that we've been having. I'd like to hear you later come back to at least two of the things that you touched upon. One is where locally based solutions seem to be working. I mean, you've mentioned coordination, yeah, improved coordination amongst several. What is the scope or the opportunity to sort of to upscale them and to move them into sort of other contexts. And then secondly, quite rightly I think, the first person that has sort of paused on the attacks on aid workers in South Sudan, as you say, you know, a very high level of sort of death toll. We're seeing that in a number of other contexts, not least Gaza, but Afghanistan as well. That is a big risk to the humanitarian community at the moment that we ought to try and get back to in conversation. But before we do any of that, thank you, Gloria. And Abdulsalam, can we turn to you next, please?

Yes, thank you very much. It has been a wonderful experience listening to, to the panelists there and the reflections on the risks and the trends that we see in the humanitarian sector currently. And I would like to start by saying these risks and trends are existing. They do resonate very well and profoundly in the context where I'm working, that is Somalia. But over the years, the work that we have been doing with the communities, listening to their stories and understanding how they experience things, really allowed us to learn and get a lot of insights from their perspectives. So I would like to, to respond and speak here from the perspective of what the communities themselves have been telling us. First of all, communities do— the climate shock, the conflict, the crime, the budget cuts, and are very much aware of the budget cuts and health risks, but not as separate sectors, not as separate categories, not— they experience them together as one pressure, a one pressure that impacts their overall community welfare. So one point I would really like to reflect on here is not necessarily the risks themselves, the risks just on the surface level, but how the communities experience them and what is the humanitarian sector is doing rightly or wrongly according to the communities to respond to these risks. Budget cuts, I think, is one of the biggest issues, but the future question here is not only how we deliver aid with less money, it's whether we can use scarce resources differently to strengthen the systems communities already use to move on because From our experience with the community, our dialogues with them, communities are adapting. They have capacities, they are strong. Whenever there is a gap, they fill it, and often they are the first responder to whatever shock or crisis they are facing. Reflecting on, on the risks that was mentioned, first of all, to start with the Climate shocks, that's something that we are seeing in Somalia. And unfortunately, climate risk is no longer a seasonal emergency or an emergency that comes in once in a time. I mean, the background condition of humanitarian action in Somalia, they are not isolated events. They are recurrent, but also have infrastructure, social, and other dimensions. The main humanitarian implication here is that climate cannot be treated as technical or natural disasters only. It's connected to land, it's connected to governance, to community knowledge, to coping mechanisms, mobility, conflict, stability, markets, and infrastructure. Communities we have worked with On this point, we're not only asking for relief after disasters, they were actively asking for the assets that can help them protect their livelihoods and lives before the next shock arrives. On the point of conflict, especially in Somalia, it has a huge impact on communities. It does not only create displacement, But also we are seeing how it dismantles the assets, the markets and trust systems that communities need to survive other shocks, including climate and economic shocks. So therefore, conflict and climate resilience cannot be separated. The assets built, people built for drought survival, may be destroyed by conflict. Conflict also in Somalia contributes to generational loss. Youth miss out on education and communities on valuable collective response and solidarity. Livelihood collapse also becomes a conflict or a protection risk in certain contexts. When the economy disappears, local employment opportunities and livelihoods, then youth recruitment and militarized survival becomes more likely. Uh, also on another point, that's— or another, it's risk that's also related, which is crime. Uh, in Somalia, what we see is that it's also driven by the extreme deprivation pushing people and youth into harmful survival economies. Where there's displacement and weak governance, communities are exposed also to predatory actors who can manipulate land, aid registration, and information. So the humanitarian system on this point must really understand the political economy around aid. Assistance can be captured, distorted, or weaponized if local power structures are ignored. And also crime on this— in this case should not be treated as a side issue. Because it also shapes whether it reaches the right people and whether it increases or reduces harm, just like the panelists before me spoke on this issue. Budget cuts is also something that the community commonly is experiencing. The humanitarian sector, as you all know, is facing a historic financial contraction. Needs are rising, but funding is also falling. The system can no longer assume that repeating the same emergency narrative will unlock the same level of resources, because shrinking funding should really give us incentive to force a change in the way we are working. In the model, not only a reduction in coverage or in over-prioritizing things, because sometimes even this hyper-prioritization takes us to the wrong direction. If aid cut is done without transition planning and also capacitating the communities, they are left to carry out, to carry the cost of these collapsed services. And we have seen this in many villages and communities where NGOs exited without transferring or giving that capacity to communities to run these basic services. On this point, we should also— must stop measuring success only by the volume of relief delivered and start asking whether scarce resources are helping communities become less dependent over time, because that's also another theme that communities Africans always are asking for, to become more resilient, to become more independent. Finally, on this point on conflict, there is an opportunity, and we have seen this opportunity very visibly in Somalia, in unlocking community potential. Communities in times of crisis, they mobilize resources, including financial resources, labor, human infrastructure, to deal with the crisis in their own ways. And we really need to capitalize on that to deal with this funding crisis. On the health dimension in Somalia, it's not only seen as a sector. For the communities, it's where climate, conflict, displacement, loss of human resources poor infrastructure, economic shocks, water contamination, and budget cuts become visible in their bodies. So humanitarian analysis should ask what's producing the health risk, not only what medical supply is missing. It could be a road, it could be a bridge, it could be a clean water system. If basic services are not optimal and protect— or sufficient, in such crisis, then the risks shift directly onto families and communities. I would like to share with you here just one example or one story from one of the communities we have engaged. In that village, their top priority that all community members voted for was access to a medical facility. But the surprising thing was that that village or that community was only 3 kilometers away from the town or the center where a health facility was existing. So upon deeper dialogue and discussion with the community, we have discovered that it was not about the health issue alone, it was about infrastructure. While the nearest hospital was only 3 kilometers away, when it floods and when there is, uh, and during the rainy season in that village residents are forced to take, to maneuver and take alternative routes and travel approximately 15 to 20 kilometers just to access that health center which was nearby. So health is the final expression of all other failures that we have talked about, and we really need to look at it from that holistic perspective. So to summarize, yes, these do profoundly resonate with what we are seeing and what we are discussing with the communities. And I think my time has finished. So when it comes to the mitigation, I can answer that during the questions.

Thank you very much. And I hope for colleagues in the room, this issue of a progressively sort of locally led humanitarian response is something that we're going to be able to pick up on questions, not least because OCHA's made a big commitment to that as part of your humanitarian reset. And I think, Abdulsalam, it links to a question that you began with earlier on in your presentation, which is, can we use skills and resources differently? And I think that triggers another question, is whose skills and resources are we actually talking about here. And Ambassador, I think you mentioned that, you know, in many situations, those are displaced or refugees. The primary response to them is actually coming from local host communities, not necessarily the international sort of organizations. There's a striking piece of research in social science research, and my Oxford colleagues suggest that the African refugee crises in the second half of the 20th century are 75% responded to by local communities and 25% by international organizations, and many people may assume those percentages would be the other way around. So I'd like us to see— come back to locally led response, but before we do any of that, Louis, we're very pleased to have you with us, and the floor is yours.

Uh, thanks, Andrew, and thanks, colleagues, and Great to be on such an interesting—

Louis, we've lost your sound. And of course the Ambassador from Bangladesh. Louis, I don't know if you can hear me, but we've lost—

sorry to interrupt, we've lost your sound.

Yes.

The technology was too good to be true, wasn't it, colleagues? Yeah, at some stage. So what I think what I'm going to do is I'm just going to ask the— if I may, the ambassador a question while we're trying to sort the sound out for Louis, and then we'll go back to him. And Ambassador, I was— if I may— have we got you back? Can you hear me now? Yes, super. Yes, I— can you try talking just to see if we can hear you? Louis, if you try talking, we'll see if we can hear you.

I can't hear you now. Can you hear me now?

I don't know if he can see me.

Yes. Okay, so I'm in Damascus, and so greetings from Damascus, but apologies for the internet connection because the Wi-Fi is a bit flaky. I'm going to give it a go. If I drop out too many times, then I'm sorry, and I'll try and keep to time. So I think you asked two questions. You asked whether the risks resonate, and I think you asked what we can do about them. I'm going to answer maybe a third question as well, which is around the lessons that we've learned from various research and evaluations over the years. So I think the risks, of course, I mean, we've heard about conflict. It's clear that we are in a more turbulent world than we have been for a very long time. We've had almost famine conditions in both Sudan and Gaza in the last year. We've got elevated risk of conflict in the Horn of Africa. We've got crises that the colleagues have talked about. So I think, yes, of course, the threats and the risks resonate. And And I think— I'm sorry, I keep dropping out. So I think it's also fair to say that we have never needed the humanitarian system as much as we do now. But when we talk about what we can do differently, and I think it's, you know, we've heard very eloquently from both Gloria and Abdulsalam about locally-led responses. The system that we currently have has hardly changed in the last 20 years. It, despite the world changing around it, despite everything that you've been discussing in the last panel and that we know, whilst there have been technical improvements, whilst there's been more resources, whilst the system has arguably become more complex, the fundamentals of the system have hardly changed since 2005 when the cluster system was introduced after the humanitarian reform process, and arguably hasn't really changed very much since 46.182 in 1994. And yet, what we have also seen is not just as a deepening of crisis, but the emergence of protracted crisis. So in 1994, or even in 2005, we hardly talked about it. It hadn't become a phenomenon, the idea of protracted crisis. Today, we're spending 90% of our humanitarian resources on these contexts. So So the system does need to change, the system does need to do differently because everything else has changed around it apart from the system. I've been working with ODI and the NEAR Network on something called the Future— the Panel on the Future of Humanitarian Aid, and one of the things the panel talks about in its analysis is is a loss of legitimacy, so a loss of legitimacy with donor publics and countries who, you know, you talked about focusing on kind of hard power, but I think they've also lost confidence in the humanitarian system to deliver in these protracted crises. But also we've seen a loss of legitimacy amongst the people that we aim to serve,, as Abdelsalam has talked about. And the panel really talks about bringing into being an ecosystem, or rather accelerating the ecosystem approach that has already started to evolve outside of and alongside of the formal humanitarian system. And they identify 5 shifts, and then, you know, if you'll bear with me, I'm just going to talk through those very quickly. So Shift 1 is to build a humanitarian system with more than one center. Shift 2 is to support context-specific humanitarian governance, so government-led when they're willing and able, regionally led, civil society led, and temporary international protection in acute protection crises. Shift 3, to refocus in Shift 4, to build a pluralistic data system. Shift 5, to rewire the financing around continuity, not crisis. So in places where the authority, resources, and risk are being borne by local and national actors, then they should have the corresponding decision-making power and the flexibility. I just want to finish when I talk about these shifts and an ecosystem approach by saying You know, the response to the funding cuts has largely been to look within ourselves, and yet, you know, arguably the world needs the humanitarian system more than ever. So our leadership should be focusing on addressing those challenges. We should be rising to the challenge, not withdrawing into ourselves. And now is a moment to embrace the evolution of humanitarianism across the globe. So let's do what we've been saying that we intend to do for the last decade, and let's bring into being a more pluralistic humanitarianism, more rooted in all of the communities that we wish to serve, because that's the only way we're going to survive. Thank you.

Lewis, thank you for persisting. You did drop out a little bit, but just to reassure you, I think we got all of the general trust him. Okay, thank you. And we got a lot of the detail, even if we missed one or two pieces. So generally, we were able to hear you. Okay, so what we're going to do now is move towards our sort of Q&A. I will start off with one or two questions. I am hoping that you are actively thinking through your questions and poised to go, but I would, Ambassadors, like to come back to something you said that I found quite striking, which is that, quote, "Nothing but war." That in many parts of the world, in conflict situations lasting for 20 or 30 years or more, generations have known nothing else. And it takes me back to a conversation I had several years ago with Peter Maurer when he was president of ICRC, and he said that in the top 12 or 15 places that we're working in ICRC in the world, we've been there for 20, 30, or 40 years. And I see colleagues, you know, on the panel and in the room sort of nodding about that. And I really wanted to ask you, sort of, Ambassador, if that is a conditioning reality of much humanitarian action in our time. What does that mean, in your view, as Bangladesh's ambassador here in the UN, for what we're going to need the humanitarian system to be geared up to do, yeah, over the coming decades?

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I refer to what I mentioned in my initial remarks that there are generations of people who have lived in refugee camps in many parts of the world. They know nothing but a refugee life in their lives. There are many countries where this conflict situation is persisting and generations of people are in war. Warlike situations. So we have to address that. What we need at this point of time is that we must not be selective. Sometimes one crisis actually fades other crises. So suppose we have a situation in certain country we are very focused on, but one situation has, has emerged, and then we lose the focus on the earlier situation, and that previous situation continues to persist while we engage our all energy on the new situation. So this selective focus, we must avoid that. So that's what I wanted to emphasize, that we must solve one crisis after another. We cannot continue to— I'm going to continue to continue to deal with crisis after crisis and not solving anything.

Thank you, Ambassador. And Gloria, if I can come back to you, is I'd like to ask you a question about what more UN multilateralism in general, but OCHA more specifically, could do to empower the sort of local and national humanitarian actors and NGOs that you were talking about in your presentation?

Well, um, having been on the advisory board from since 2017, which is a very long time, I would say that, um, one thing is we need to be consistent because with local organizations being brought on board to the pooled funds, it's always dependent on an individual. So when we get a very good individual at the pooled funds at a, at a particular season that is so passionate about advancing local organizations within the pooled fund mechanism, then we see these numbers rise drastically. However, when these individuals move, then We go back a few steps behind. So I think the level of consistency around that needs to be reconsidered. In a very ideal scenario at the moment in our context is that we have not yet even hit the 25%. It was of recent, and it's of course an issue that we're still talking about as a steering committee. Inequality in that the recent US funding, the $100 million that we have all been hearing about, a logical situation is that $60 million went to the UN, about $34 million went to the INGOs, $6 million came to local organizations. You can already see, you know, the inequality around the funding itself, right? Suddenly the localization question has shifted because everybody seems to to be, you know, wanting to resource mobilize in one way or the other. So conversations are only helpful when it best suits a circumstance at a time. And I think that lack of consistency needs to a little bit change within us and as a sector, as we have these conversations that are even ongoing on the humanitarian reset. That would, you know, we wanted to see a better example out of this, but has failed to play out. We are seeing only about 3 national organizations out of the so many that received the 6 million. And then you tell me that I have achieved 80% localization, 80% of a certain fund went to local actors, 3 of them. I don't quite understand that arithmetic, maybe because I'm not a mathematician, but those are the realities on ground. Thank you very much.

And in the same vein, I want to carry on with a similar question for you, Abdulsalam, because I want to take you back to that remark that you made at the beginning of your talk, which really struck me, which is that we have a lot of skills and resources available to the humanitarian system, but can we, or how would we, use those skills and resources differently? And I just wonder if we could give you an opportunity to expand on that a bit. And as you do so, see if you— wherever your mic is, if you can get yourself a little bit closer to it, because we could hear you, but it was a little bit of a struggle when you were talking. So if we can get a bit more volume on your side, that would be good. But over to you.

Yes, thank you very much. Yes, indeed, communities have these capacities, skills, and resources, but most of the time it's the barriers that we create around them in the form of the humanitarian system processes and procedures that stop that. I personally had the opportunity to be part of the Flagship Initiative in Somalia. We have experimented a lot there when it comes to locally-led humanitarian aid and working with the communities. In that project and in many other projects that I have seen personally, you will find that there are non-negotiables that the system designs that sometimes becomes barriers for local NGOs and also the community. Communities. Also, this idea that we have of sectors, areas, and clusters and so on, it stops that community skill or the capacity or the resources to come out because you come with predefined agenda, a mandate, a specific mandate that you work. And sometimes the communities go with your mandate because they need whatever resources that they get, but that's not their priority. And then finally, what we see is that most of the time the funding of the humanitarian aid projects is short-term, is also short in timescale. So I'll give you one case. We went to a village in one community. They had a priority, and then that priority, an organization came and did the feasibility study of it. It was not feasible, so they went back to the community to communicate to them. It was a water, a water infrastructure. So we asked them, what else do you want, an alternative activity? So they said, we want a borehole. And the NGO said, no, but we only have this amount. The community said, we can top up the remaining amount that you have to, uh, we can top up to construct that borehole. But the response that they got was No, we cannot wait. This project is ending in 2 months or 3 months. We cannot wait. So choose something else. Let's do something else. So I think we have to be flexible. It's about flexibility. And also you have to be careful. I agree with Lewis when he says we have to have a humanitarian system with more than one center. The crisis that we are in or the challenges that we are we are facing sometimes might tempt us to create a duplicate or a copy coordination structures, but now at lower levels, at district levels and so on. But this also takes away the focus from having that connection and the link with the communities directly. Communities have many initiatives. You'll find some of them even hiring engineers to survey a canal, and they would fund this kind of canals and so on. So the humanitarian sector can also, when it comes to localization, go beyond local NGOs. It does not only have to be local NGOs, but you can directly also finance communities and the initiatives that they have. There are many initiatives there that can be identified and we can fund the last mile.

Colleagues, I just would observe in relation to that comment, this is not the first time this morning that we've hit on the whole question of humanitarian financing, is it? And, you know, you do not need to read Karl Marx to know that economic bases can sometimes influence political superstructures, yeah? So there is a big question here, you know, what would it mean to rewire humanitarian finance system? You know, it would be interesting any questions in that regard, or is it simply being sort of rewired for it with the diaspora I mean, 700 billion of annual funding dwarfs the ODA budgets, or with a reversion back to bilateral aid, or Michael, you know, the rapid growth of global health funds that we've seen over the last 20 years. And at that point, I am going to step back because I'm expecting some of you now to ask some questions. So who is going to get us going in the room? Can I— Yes, please do.

Thank you. I'm— community-level initiatives, which of course OCHA supports, but what I think civil society organizations working in communities find that It's often the local government or government that's the problem. It's that there's a disconnect between what NGOs working with communities honestly are promoting, but they're seen either as troublemakers— depends on whether the government is authoritarian or democratic, but where there is at least some give in governments which are trying to be responsive, there's still the notion that NGOs are problems because they raise problems. So what I'm saying that for OCHA or the UN system has been very good about championing civil society, but maybe in the specific programs, develop the program so that it sort of forces government officials involved in these kinds of programs, whether national or local government, to come with the UN program officers who also know the situation, are in contact, to experience it. Let me just say that we have done this, and for the local, for the national officials, they are so amazed when they see that people really know a lot. And one of the reactions we get, you know, they're not really different from us. They're, because they always have this view that people They're not educated, blah, blah, blah. But bringing that process to the national and local governments who deal with these communities in humanitarian and development to get them to maybe spend time with communities where the instruction is, don't tell them anything at the moment. Just listen. Of course, the communities have to be programmed or encouraged You choose communities which are already active and have evidence, and you show the officials how effective they can be, especially when they have resources that support their initiatives. So that's the changes I would make. Much more connect— how do you say— revitalizing or confirming to national, local officials who are often suspicious of CSOs and organized communities, that this is a plus, it's not an attack on them.

Thank you. So I think just for those of you who are online, we have a question there about, if I sort of, if I may, the way in which the UN system and OCHA might be able to work with local authorities and national governments to empower civil society. And I think during COVID sometimes that worked well and sometimes it definitely didn't work well. And Michael, I wonder whether we might turn to you on that one.

No, I think— I mean, I think you stated it nicely, that there is a role for OCHA in this case and advocating for access, advocating for sort of programmatic adoption, but at the same time really leaning or depending on the implementers. The implementers, the best implementers, as we know, and the most efficient implementers are our local organizations. So it's a— the interplay between the two, I think, is a really crucial move that we can't divorce from one from the other necessarily. But also, as we look, and we'll talk a moment about the reset, the idea of building local capacities to actually make those really long-term moves in in the country would be really important.

So thank you. Gloria, Abdulsalam, did you want— if you heard that, would either of you or both of you like to come on that question? Gloria?

Well, I think it depends on context to context, right? In the context of South Sudan in particular, NGOs have become some demigods. Let me use that word for for lack of better words. And whether it's the UN or NGOs, we have placed ourselves as gods and saviors of the people of South Sudan. And sometimes there's a level of, you know, we are on this side, we know it better, and the government is then left, you know, at the sidelines of things without necessarily being engaged. And in a lot of circumstances, it's always top-down conversation. We are the solution people. We know it better than the local South Sudanese. You know, the government and its populations may not have a lot of, you know, something to offer. So I think, um, we could re-change that mindset and try and work and appreciate that we all bring something to the table. I think that would be a good starting point. Over to you.

Yes, please. Yes. Yeah, to also address that question, I think, if there's another question, please, I can stop there.

Yeah, go ahead.

Take the question in the room and then we can let Abdulsalam come back later.

Thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the interesting interventions. I'll start by answering your question on whether if we could make one change, what would that be? And I think for me, it would be to focus more on risk and protect civilians rather than what has shaped the system the last decades and focusing so much on needs. And that would maybe allow for a reduction in needs. And then following Following with a question, we heard about more pluralistic system that is needed. What about a more pluralistic donorship and how we could allow for that? And also then linked to trust in donors, we've heard there's a problem with trust in donors, but then how can we make sure we build trust from non-donors? I feel like that's one of the conversations in the system that needs to happen. Thank you.

That's a great question. I mean, it's very easy, isn't it, to think about a system that's got to reform itself, but do the donors who fund that system need to reform themselves too? So I want to come to the ASG on that, and Ambassador, you know, I would like also to come to you as, you know, not the voice of all members states, but ultimately the UN is dependent on its member states for financing. But SG, can we come to you first?

Thank you for that question. I think maybe just a couple of reflections. I think one is the fundamental way we look at donors. We equate donors with— let's take the member states— a member state contributing to humanitarian or development action. And to my mind that is flawed in and of itself. Let's take Ambassador Bangladesh. Bangladesh has 1 million Rohingya on its territory. You're a donor. You're already contributing, right? So the fact that it's a dollar value that comes in an envelope, whether it's bilateral, multilateral, earmarked or unearmarked, it's one part of the equation, but I think first and foremost when we look at humanitarian action for, in this case, or development for that matter, I think we also have to be a bit more realistic in what is donorship. It's not a dollar value. That's what politicizes the space. I give you money, so I have clout, I have influence. No. Member states also are donors. I heard this a lot when in my last assignment in Afghanistan, where the two neighbouring countries says, 'We've had millions of Afghans for 40 years, so we've also contributed the impact on our country,' so etc. Bangladesh is more recent again. For many years, the Rohingyas have been on the territory of Bangladesh, for decades. So again, donorship, first of all. Second, we have guidelines and others for good humanitarian donorship. There are these things articulated, but we see, as you rightly said, the concept of earmarking of those resources also in a transactional world where multilateral connectivity is not necessarily joined up on these things becomes very transactional. I put resources and then I want that— I want a return on my investment. So I think there also member states also have to revisit, and if you look at needs, prioritized or otherwise, how does that go? Thirdly, I think in donorship as well, in the broader sense, many of our colleagues here have outlined also that— and I think it was Dr. Michael who talked about the fact that humanitarian action is, at the end of the day, a band-aid. You put you take the patient out of ER but you haven't let the patient recover, and that is where the— to use a terrible word, cliché again, the UN loves acronyms and clichés, as you know— the nexus. That's where I think development and humanitarian action has to be really joined up. In many instances where we see these challenges, these are systemic challenges. It's multidimensional poverty, it's structural issues, so that cannot be resolved by humanitarian humanitarian action alone. So where does that jive and that joint-up action come? Because if you are still in the system, as our colleague said before, if you are in those silos—humanitarian action, development action, peace and security—we've been talking about this nexus for a long time, but where can that system be much more tighter and joined up, relatively seamless, where humanitarian action stabilizes and then you go addresses fragility and then you look at stability. If you look at the continuum from fragility, humanitarian action mitigating that fragility, to stability, which is more linked structural support, systemic support, whether we frame it as SDGs or otherwise, I think that helps and that's, I think, where we need to get our collective act together.

Which is really important for, you know, a UN reform process in the sense the challenge is a double challenge, not just rationalize and coordinate within its pillars, but to get the integration across them. But Ambassador, would you like to come in on this question?

Let me thank ASG for raising the issue of the donors. I mean, we have been suffering for this Rohingya crisis for last two decades. 2 and a half decades. They have been there for a very prolonged period and we do not see any solution in sight. The current level of funding is $8 per month per person, so that's a very, very tiny amount, at least you need $50 to $60 for sustenance. So where does this funding come from? It comes from actually Bangladesh. So we have to recognize that you have very rightly pointed out that Bangladesh is also a donor, but not giving them cash money to the system, to the event. but some kind of bearing the burden of it. So we need that international community must come together to solve an international crisis which took place outside Bangladesh. There are countries suffering more than Bangladesh. There are refugee situations which have been continuing for 3, 4, 5 decades. In many parts of the world. So we have to give that into— take that into consideration. Thank you.

Thank you. And maybe, ASG, there is a bigger and broader point that comes out of what you were saying, that, you know, any meaningful and serious and lasting reform of the humanitarian system is going to be predicated on a better recognition of who is actually performing what roles within it, including those roles that for long have been far too under-recognized. Now, I think we're sort of edging towards going back to Michael, who I'm afraid has got the unenviable task of being given 5 minutes 3 minutes to try and sum everything up, so you're going to need as much bon courage as I did, I think, in trying to cover 30 years of history in 3 minutes. But Michael, over to you for some reflections about what you've heard.

Oh, you've been a master timekeeper so far, so I'll depend on you. And actually, my remarks will be brief because I think our panelists and our online panelists have done a really lovely job of sort of bringing up the major issues. I'll say a few reflections and then I'm going to contextualize them. So, the— I think the panel and especially the online panel has been an important litmus test about how funding and access constraints play out in the field and what they look like. And it's been a really important thing to have our NGO colleagues tell us what it's really like because that reality is actually where we all serve that reality. And we know from Andrew's discussion before that there's been many adaptations in the humanitarian sector over the years, and the system has had to adapt to major challenges. This is maybe a more profound challenge, and Lewis notes that, you know, there's not been really systemic change since 2005 or thereabouts, and I think we need to look at what does that really mean. The ASG notes, I think, really well that there's a compelling argument for looking really at financing and what that looks like and how we diversify our financing and make it sort of better representative. And then Louis's suggestions make inherent sense in that the note of diversifying the centers of humanitarian assistance and how it is managed, creating context-specific humanitarian governance, pluralizing the data systems, and then again rewiring the finances, which is a common theme that we're hearing. So what makes sense going forward? And I'm going to take this incredibly dangerous move and try to link some of the discussions we've had to the humanitarian reset, or the main— or the sort of 4 Ds of the humanitarian reset, and see how it all fits. The first being define, and that stands for kind of focusing on areas of greatest need. Now, the changes in the funding climate, and we've said it before, force this issue of hyper-prioritization democratization and a moment that is really difficult to take that, I wouldn't— I think that's a temporary and needed adaptation, but shouldn't carry the day in terms of strategy. I think Abdusalam and Gloria spoke really nicely about the way that they've had to face adaptations in the field, and the restrictions in the funding climate really play out into the field. So I think that, as we know, that there's a new reality and funding constraints is not going be removed or changed immediately, but it's important for us to keep our mission of what actually the totality of the mission really is, not just hyper-prioritization. The second issue is devolving, and you know, this is devolving decision-making, which is really localization. Localization is not new. We've talked about localization for a long time. We know it to be sensical, right? It makes the most sense to have the organizations with the greatest those with the greatest stake and the greatest knowledge and the greatest context doing the work. And again, I'm looking at Abdusalam and Gloria on the screen because you do this stuff, right? And so I think that that makes great sense, and to continue to build structures that really advance that in a much more deeper— a deeper and more sophisticated way is crucial. And you spoke also really well about the credibility of your organizations and what you do in the field. And again, these are missions that ultimately we in New York or Geneva serve, and that is to create what happens locally on the ground. So I think that it also— hyper-prioritizing goes against building the sort of capacities for localization, though. So in other words, we can't just simply transfer risk, and we can't just simply say, you've got the ball. We actually have to be able to make sure that the finances match the responsibilities that we are assuming and hoping and coordinating organizations to take. The third is delivery, and that is ensuring the response is faster, more effective, and impactful. A lot of that is on our own internal systems as well. We have a lot to fix in terms of efficiencies, a lot to in terms of governance efficiencies as well. I think, again, Gloria described it nicely that she's considered some work in the private sector. I will argue that I think our— you can't depend on the private sector. And while there may be some interesting partnerships, the private sector is not going to be the solution for this. It's going to be better and more diversified donor sources from government governance, as the ASG mentioned. And finally, defending, and that's sticking to the humanitarian principles and upholding civilian protections and humanitarian protections. Well, this is the hard one, right? We can't put the genie back in the bottle as it relates to how we— the attacks on healthcare workers, or the impunity with which actors are acting, or the way that civilians are used as tools of conflict. I don't think that we can necessarily assume that we're going to somehow as a humanitarian enterprise change that. We're responding to it. So I think that one is where there's got to be some kind of unified bigger political presence to actually help force norms. We can't necessarily force local militias, but we can certainly really push on the norms and practices that allow for principled humanitarian access, that allow for protection of civilians. And that work is crucial. But it's somewhat outside of the issue of reform, but it has to be done. So then I'll wrap up and then turn it over to Andrew. We have work to do. The organizations that really are dedicated to humanitarian assistance and making this all work has to adapt to a new environment, yes. We have to adapt to a new funding climate, yes. And we have to adopt new efficiencies, Yes, but I think we still have to be very clear that we're the experts here and that we actually are the ones that have to determine how we work together, how we best work together, how we can be most efficient, and how we can get the sort of not only the, the singular prioritized work but the longitudinal work that needs to be done accomplished. And so as we look at adopting these new tools and techniques in the future, I just would advocate that reforming, adapting, preserving, and optimizing in the humanitarian sector is our common goal, and we're the experts and have to advocate for it.

Back to you. Thank you, Michael, and that was very skillfully done. And I think, like Michael, colleagues, the thought I would like to leave you with is also hung on the peg of the humanitarian reset that OCHA's engaged in, and the thought is just simply this: In the middle of Louis's talk, I think he made a remark that we've never needed a humanitarian system as much as we need it now. And does that system need to reform itself? Does it need to change? I don't think there's anybody in the room probably that would answer that question negatively. Yes, it does. Has it, over its history, sometimes been Resistant to reform, even stubbornly resistant? Yes. But is it capable of reforming itself? Emphatically, it is. But even if you allow for all of that, whatever that process of reform delivers— and let's hope that it does deliver something substantive and meaningful and lasting— it will still leave us in a situation where we have to be reasonable, maybe more reasonable and more realistic about what an international humanitarian system can be expected by the world to deliver. It is only one of four pillars of global governance, as we've been saying, alongside development, alongside security, and alongside human rights. And if those other three pillars of governance in an area of great global backsliding sliding on international commitments, are allowed to fail, I think the almost inevitable result will be that we expect too much of an international humanitarian system. It will be thrown into that constant firefighting mode, and it will be difficult to see any amount of resource, whatever that amount of resource is, being enough then to cope with all the situations that it faces.. And so I finish with a comment, and it was offered to me by a senior politician in the UK, which is that in the age in which we're living at the moment of great geopolitical upheaval, there is a risk of a humanitarian system becoming a repository for all of the world's problems in a way that will only set itself up to fail. So I think a balanced and nuanced conversation that is come out of this room is, is there a huge imperative around reform? Yes, there is, and reform needs to be done, but at the same time, however much a humanitarian system reforms itself, it needs the UN to work as a whole and to fire on all of its four cylinders, and for states to allow it to fire on all of its four cylinders for that humanitarian system to succeed. Thank you ever so much to all of our panelists. Thank you to you. I think we've got to close now. To people in the room—

Sorry, but could you add in the summary that the driving forces of this future are going to come from the youth? That has been mentioned. And from women, by and large. They are the forces whose stakes are most at risk. And I think if it's not in the summary as an active program initiative, you're going to lose in the long run. Thank you.

Thank you. We will make sure that both gendered and intergenerational perspectives— we've still got people who want to keep going, but please, yeah, come in.

My name is Gaffred from Ampuma Foundation. My basic question about this is, so we keep talking about funding and The thing is, how long are we going to keep funding things, you know? Because how can international humanitarian actors better integrate local-led NGOs into humanitarian and developmental frameworks so that grassroots organizations can contribute directly to scalable reintegration, livelihoods, and long-term resilience programming. I strongly believe that if humanitarian financing ends at survival, we will continue to fund vulnerability. However, if we invest in education, livelihoods, and local partnerships, we will create true and lasting opportunities and resilience, especially for the youth, as she was talking about.

Which I think— I want to come back to the ASG's point about the humanitarian and development arms needing to work in tandem, but I think behind your point, if I may, is there's been a great circularity to debates about localization, yeah? It is now a huge opportunity to stop going round in circles and to break out of those debates, but as you're implying, perhaps it's just simply not possible to break out of those debates without rewiring the finances of both both humanitarian and development aid. We're spilling over time, but I'm just— I don't want to deny anyone the opportunity of jumping in. You was quite quiet on me early on, and now you've suddenly woken up a little bit, so the Swiss timekeeping's out of the window. But is there anyone else that would like to come into the conversation?

Yes, please. Beth Delgado with Kinder Energy, and I just wanted to reiterate the importance of Rethinking the idea of education of children as an investment in disaster risk reduction because it's a long-term policy. And if children are given the opportunity to help and to implement the SDGs on their own in a very significant way, which we are proving through our educational initiative called Move Brain, Save Earth, Earth, children are actually designing solutions to problems. So I think the greatest investment that a country can do to their nation and to the world also is through education. That's a long-term project and it's relatively inexpensive compared to the huge billions of dollars that are needed in the short run. So this is a long-term project and I think it's ideal for all nations, but particularly those who are at great risk of disaster, and it's a matter of resilience. So I thank you all for this wonderful conference and for hearing me out. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Anybody else? If not, I'm going to thank all of our panelists, but I'm going to also thank all of you in the room and everyone who joined online for this 2026 session of the Global Humanitarian Policy Forum, and I think we now bring it to a close. Thank you very much.