Rising Humanitarian Needs Call for a New Way of Working

portland-communications.com - by Stephen O'Brien - March 14, 2017

Today, a record 135 million people across 35 countries need humanitarian aid to survive. The scale of humanitarian suffering continues to grow exponentially as complex, inter-connected conflicts last for years without resolution, and protracted natural disasters, compounded by climate change, throw vulnerable people into a state of perpetual crisis.

This year a complex combination of human-made and environmental factors has put a staggering 20 million people in four countries alone – Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen – at risk of famine.  To provide sustainable solutions to saving lives and building resilience in these countries and globally, the international community needs to shift its approach by putting vulnerability reduction at the centre of our collaboration.

This requires us to adopt a new way of working, in which humanitarian and development actors, the private sector, governments, regional bodies and academia stop working in siloes to collaborate on risk and needs-reduction.  We must work together to monitor potential risks and pre-plan how to reduce them to better anticipate and avert crises. This will require early action and injections of funding before crises grow so that at-risk people will be able to better cope.

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