A simplified and more efficient humanitarian system

by Jan Egeland and Joyce Msuya

Introduction

We live in an age where the gap between the available funding and humanitarian needs is widening. Meanwhile, the international emergency response if often slow to arrive and inefficient. While this may partly be due to factors outside our control, as humanitarian we must ensure to maximize the impact of our limited funding and existing capacity for people in crises. As such on 18th November, we were tasked by the Emergency Relief Coordinator, Tom Fletcher, to revert within a month with high level recommendations for making the humanitarian system and OCHA more efficient.

This report lays out our proposals for how to ensure faster and more decisive humanitarian decision-making while wasting fewer resources on bureaucratic processes. In a nutshell, there is scope to reduce internal process, rationalize overlapping and large coordination bodies, prioritize between indispensable and optional international meetings and ensure our in-country presence is located where it is most effective, with focused leadership at national, regional and global levels.

If put into practice, the recommendations could yield substantial savings in money and staff time for the humanitarian system and OCHA, that could be spent more directly on serving people in need.