What World Leaders Must Promise at the World Humanitarian Summit

At Oxfam, the humanitarian spirit of our founders in 1942 endures.

In occupied Greece during the Second World War, people were dying of starvation in their thousands. The Allied powers blockaded the country, preventing food from being let in. Oxfam was formed.

We campaigned. We spoke truth to power. We agitated. We put human lives first. Eventually – under considerable domestic pressure and with support from people in Canada and the US – the British government let some food through.

Seventy-four years on, in a world of immense and heightening injustice, inequalities and unfathomable suffering, that spirit is needed as much as ever.

The failure to eradicate the 'scourge of war’, as promised in the UN Charter, is the world’s greatest disappointment.

International political leaders seem powerful enough to initiate and prolong conflicts, but too often powerless to stop them.

The human cost of that is poverty, deprivation and displacement, exacerbated by the impact of climate change – at Oxfam we see this impact every day.

This World Humanitarian Summit is both important and timely.

It must build on the momentum of the Sustainable Development Goals agreed in Agenda 2030, and the Paris Agreement on climate change. Our humanitarian system has a huge number of stakeholders, and the World Humanitarian Summit has reflected this by ensuring a multi-stakeholder process – a rare opportunity for world leaders and affected people to sit together to create a world where no one is left behind. This must be maintained at the Summit itself, with local civil society in particular ensured a space to speak out on behalf of affected people.

And the leaders at the Summit must be concrete and decisive in their commitments, so that the current UN Secretary-General can pass the baton from Istanbul to the next Secretary-General, who must take on the challenge of making real change to help civilians everywhere.

Certainly, we must design a better global humanitarian system, and local actors – like the thousands of local civil society bodies we are honoured to call our partners – must sit at the center of that design.

At Oxfam we are proud to have significantly changed our humanitarian design to match this. We are committed to increasing the amount of our humanitarian funding that goes to local actors to 30 percent by May 2018. The global average is just 0.2 percent.

Fundamentally, however, we need to reverse the shocking erosion of respect for International Humanitarian Law and hold governments and other parties responsible for preventing conflict.

The failure to protect civilians and bring peace is driving so much of the suffering that refugees, displaced people and migrants face around the world. This makes it even more important to counter a rising tide of demagoguery towards the most vulnerable.

We need more than an inspirational message from Istanbul. People need strong commitments enshrined by world leaders.

Istanbul must mark a turning point in building a more humane, humanitarian world.

-----

This originally appeared as a Foreword to Oxfam's briefing note ahead of the World Humanitarian Summit, titled "Commitment to Change".

Photo: Children in Za'atari camp make the dove symbol of human rights and solidarity in support of Oxfam's #withsyria campaign, that marked the 5th year of the Syrian conflict. 

Photo credit: Adeline Guerra / Oxfam