OCHA in 2005: Activities and Extra-Budgetary Funding Requirements

Foreword

This report finds me looking forward to my second full year as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and as Emergency Relief Coordinator. Over the past year, the humanitarian community has had considerable impact in responding both to emergencies and to natural disasters and I would like to thank our donors, partners and supporters for all of their commitment and help during 2004.

Although OCHA has dealt with numerous parallel crises, we have seen and look forward to some positive developments as well. There were major emergencies in northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and most visibly in Darfur, Sudan. These complex emergencies resulted in massive displacement, loss of life, and on-going attacks against civilians. The UN has helped to coordinate lifesaving inflows of aid to these crises and we are hopeful that in the coming year many people displaced by conflict or other crises will be able to return home. Such large crises, affecting millions of people, can tend to overshadow other crises in countries with smaller populations and forgotten emergencies, such as the Central African Republic and the Republic of the Congo, where we are continuing to coordinate vital humanitarian aid efforts. Outside of Africa, for example, we are continuing our coordination role in the occupied Palestinian territory and are also hoping to better help the 1.2 million displaced people in Colombia by putting a structure in place for access to the affected populations. OCHA will continue to focus its endeavors firmly on the core functions vital to discharging its mandate in order to best respond both to emerging and ongoing crises in a world of limited human and financial resources.

The occurrence of natural disasters has been on the rise over the past decade and there will be increasingly more violent and extreme events as the world’s environment changes. The massive floods and hurricanes in Bangladesh, Grenada, Haiti and throughout the Caribbean were some of our challenges this past summer, and the earthquake in Bam, Iran in December 2003 occupied us well into 2004. The humanitarian community is working hard to meet the challenges presented by this trend, and next year OCHA expects to devote more of its time and resources toward planning for and responding to natural disasters. We start 2005 with the milestone World Congress on Disaster Reduction, in Kobe, Japan, where the focus will be on developing more comprehensive risk reduction and disaster management responses. Since OCHA believes that disaster response is best done by local personnel, it is expanding UNDAC to cover Africa and strengthening it in Asia and Latin America. OCHA is also working with the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG) to ensure that guidelines are uniformly followed and that more developing and earthquake prone countries become a part of the system. We are also continuing to improve the structures of support for our Regional Disaster Response Advisors (RDRAs).

OCHA strongly values the support of the Member States of the International Humanitarian Partnership in response to sudden onset emergencies and will continue to work on strengthening the partnership.

As we at OCHA know only too well, primary elements of successful aid delivery are access, funding and security. These requirements are daunting, and the entire mission can be compromised if just one of these elements is weak or missing. It remains critical that we continue to work on improving access to vulnerable populations. Today, in twenty conflicts around the world, aid workers’ access to more than ten million civilians in need of assistance is either denied or obstructed. If we cannot access those for whom we must provide aid, then the very foundations of humanitarianism are compromised.

The murder and kidnapping of colleagues in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and elsewhere are contributing to the hardships of civilians who desperately need food, health care and education but are not getting it because NGOs and Agencies cannot reach them.

Over the past several years we have seen a dramatic rise in attacks against humanitarian and human rights workers. Recent military interventions and the visibility of political or military non-humanitarian actors doing humanitarian work has led, unfortunately, to perceptions that humanitarian Foreword This report finds me looking forward to my second full year as Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and as Emergency Relief Coordinator. Over the past year, the humanitarian community has had considerable impact in responding both to emergencies and to natural disasters and I would like to thank our donors, partners and supporters for all of their commitment and help during 2004. organizations are not neutral actors in conflicts. We need to more actively promote our core principles of humanity and impartiality, and work harder to promote a humanitarianism that strictly addresses the objective needs of local communities. The InterAgency Standing Committee (IASC) endorsed in 2004 both the Civil-Military Relationship in Complex Emergencies policy paper and the Field Guidelines for Assessing the Humanitarian Impact of Sanctions, which are designed to provide guidance for country offices, policy makers and others when faced with complex emergencies which may involve military actors. Security of national and international staff, along with recipients, remains an imperative for us in the coming year.

Neglected emergencies have been and remain one of our priorities. In 2005, we will continue to remind the world that for each crisis that makes its way to the top of the media and international agenda there are several more being overlooked. Emergencies are not forgotten – they are neglected. We hope donors will help to counter-balance this neglect. We have a strong need for equitable funding across emergencies and sectors, and hope that donors will help us to focus on under-funded areas as well as on our more visible programs and needs. We must make Good Humanitarian Donorship a reality. We are committed to expanding our pool of humanitarian partners and to the diversification of donors.

I am proud of OCHA’s achievements in 2004, but we need to learn from our shortcomings as well as from our successes. We are doing a better job of putting humanitarian challenges on the international agenda.

We helped place the Darfur crisis on the global agenda in early spring, but what we then managed to mobilize was too little, too late, for many of the displaced in Darfur. Each engagement, however, affords us an opportunity to learn and grow. In 2005, we will assess the real-time evaluation of our performance during the Darfur crisis and more generally, we will review our global humanitarian response capacity. There are other places in the world, however, with problems comparable to those of Darfur that are almost completely invisible to the international community and where the response is totally inadequate. Through media and diplomatic networks, as well as through continually improving coordination with UN Agencies and NGOs, we will continue the struggle to address these neglected and complex emergencies.

Women play a primary role in providing assistance and support during disasters, are important actors in conflict resolution and peace-building, and are primary supports for family and community structures during emergencies. Women are also disproportionately affected during crises, often facing gender-targeted crimes such as rape and sexualized violence as well as discrimination in the receipt of aid and support. To better meet the humanitarian needs of all persons, we are working to prioritize gender mainstreaming in all aspects of our operations.

We are also aware of our own continuing need to change and evolve in the face of the changing nature of the world’s emergencies and disasters. In 2004,
OCHA undertook some organizational refinements in hopes of better servicing the field. These changes have been implemented with two primary goals in mind: to become more predictable in our response to complex emergencies and natural disasters; and to become more efficient in our use of resources.
This process is currently underway, and in 2005 we will take stock.

I would like to begin the year 2005 by welcoming on board Margareta Wahlstrom, as Assistant-SecretaryGeneral and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, and Yvette Stevens, as the Assistant Emergency Relief Coordinator and Director of the Geneva office. We now have a full senior management team in place and are looking forward to a strong and effective next year as a result.

There would be no possibility for us to meet our ethical obligations to the globe’s most vulnerable populations without the strong support and partnership of our donors, and I look forward to your continuing engagement with OCHA in the future and to your continuing commitment to the principles of Good Humanitarian Donorship.

Jan Egeland

November 2004