UN Relief Chief urges the world to follow the US in backing humanitarian aid

Opening remarks by Tom Fletcher, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator at the signing of US-OCHA Memorandum of Understanding on humanitarian assistance

 Geneva, 29 December 2025 

Video of entire event, including Q&A, available here: 

https://www.unognewsroom.org/story/en/2956/ocha-us-mission-at-geneva-joint-press-conference

Well, thank you so much, [Under Secretary of State for Foreign Assistance, Humanitarian Affairs and Religious Freedom] Jeremy [Lewin], and thank you colleagues for being here on this cold December day. 

I want to start by paying tribute to the humanitarian movement for all their work over this last year. It’s been a very, very tough, tough year for everyone engaged in humanitarian action, but we’ve come through it well, and I’m feeling, particularly with this announcement today, more optimistic about getting out there and saving tens of millions of lives next year. 

Over the past 12 months, I’ve been in Darfur twice, in Gaza, twice. I’ve been in Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Myanmar, Haiti, [the Democratic Republic of the Congo], and so many of the other crises where we work.

And I’ve seen close up the amazing work out there, but also the scale of the needs, and I’m thinking, at this moment, of the young woman I met a month ago in Tawila, just outside of El Fasher in Darfur, who had fled the fighting. She had scooped up the two-month-old child of her neighbour, having lost all of her own family to the gangs. She’d fled along the most dangerous world road in the world, been attacked, raped on that road, had a leg broken, but had somehow made it to our clinic, and she was getting that support. And as a result of what we’re discussing here today, millions, millions more will get that support that they so badly need, and that gives me hope and optimism. 

So, this is a landmark agreement. I’ll let Jeremy dig into the numbers, as he’s given you a teaser already that that’s coming, but a number that really matters, really, really matters here is that millions of lives will be saved across 17 countries.

And I want to add my thanks to President Trump, to Secretary of State Rubio and to Jeremy for this contribution and for the thought leadership as well as we’ve discussed the reforms ahead of us and how we can ensure that we maximize the impact, the life-saving impact, as Jeremy says, of this work.

And let me just mention a few of the aspects of that. 

Firstly, this is in support of our 2026 plan to reach 87 million people next year with life-saving support. And we have hyper-prioritized that plan to make sure that it is as efficient as possible, that we are reducing and removing the duplication and the bureaucracy from the system.

We call on others now to step forward and back this plan in the year ahead. It is a plan that can bring hope to tens of millions of people. 

The thought leadership that Jeremy and others have brought to this reform program is also a vote of confidence and trust that we will reform and we can reform, that the Humanitarian Reset that we’ve set out over recent months is real: prioritization, efficiency, reform, regrouping and renewal of the humanitarian system. 

And Jeremy’s been very clear throughout our conversations, and I expect that we’ll have tough conversations still in the months ahead, that US taxpayers expect accountability, and part of the programme ahead of us is a mechanism that will deliver that accountability for every dollar we spend to make sure that it is saving lives.

I’d also like to underline the point made about this being an opportunity for peacemaking in this period. We’ve seen this surge of diplomacy in recent months – nothing will do more to bring down the numbers of people in need than that peacemaking.

And we need to really make 2026 a year of diplomacy and peacemaking. We’ve got to show that diplomacy is not dead, and that we will indeed end so many of these conflicts that rage around the world, and I hope that this humanitarian commitment and our life-saving plan will be part of that. 

So, we have a plan.

We need the world, as the US is doing here, to get behind it, and then we will go out there and we will deliver it in 2026 because, of course, the life-saving announcement is not the end of the process. It is the life-saving which is the beginning of the process, and we will be held to account for doing that in 2026, and you have my commitment that we will succeed.

Media contacts: 

In New York: Eri Kaneko, kaneko@un.org, +1 917 208 8910 
In Geneva: Jens Laerke, laerke@un.org, +41 79 472 9750

OCHA press releases are available at www.unocha.org or www.reliefweb.int