Re-envisioning Humanitarianism for a Changing World

JOEL ROSENTHAL: Greetings, and welcome to the 12thannual Global Ethics Day. My thanks to those of you who are here in person and to those of you who are watching online. Last year we had broad participation across 70 countries for Global Ethics Day, including hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals, and this year we are hoping for more.

Given the intensity of world events that are leading to fracture and disharmony, we believe there is a need and an opportunity to take a day to focus on our common humanity, and this is what Global Ethics Day is all about. Global Ethics Day is a moment for us to reflect together on the values and principles that shape our lives. It is a grassroots effort as individuals and organizations plan their own activities and network with us to platform, connect, and amplify their efforts. Over the years we have been inspired by listening to and learning from thought leaders and exemplars of ethical leadership at all levels of society and in every part of the world.

Activities have ranged widely from organizing events like debates, panel discussions, classroom activities, and productions of videos and podcasts to organizing community programs like environmental cleanups and tree plantings. All of the activities have one thing in common: They all illustrate how ethics matter and can empower us to build a better world.

Today here at Carnegie Council with our panel discussion we want to highlight a particular ethical principle, humanitarianism. We all know humanitarianism has endured an especially challenging year. On the face of it, one would not think that the idea of the “equal moral worth of every human being” would be controversial, but the challenge is in implementation, as nationalist and populist sentiments are ascending and hard-power options like borders and armaments are being prioritized over foreign development assistance and relief programs.

Here in the United States, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have been cut while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has increased dramatically. Around the world we see ongoing humanitarian crises in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and Congo, just to name a few.

Despite these tragic facts and strong headwinds great work is being done by humanitarians working in international organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), philanthropies, churches, and other civically minded efforts. Today we want to focus on some of these efforts.

As I was preparing these remarks, I revisited previous Global Ethics Day conversations. One moment with Michael Schur, the TV comedy writer and author of the book How to Be Perfect, stood out for its combination of realism and idealism. As we like to say here at Carnegie Council, “realism plus ethics.”

When asked about his approach to ethics, Michael replied: “Even the purest of philosophers, the most rigorous and intense philosophers, didn’t necessarily believe that you had to be perfect or that you had to nail everything. It was simply, ‘Here’s a way to make perhaps a better choice than the one you were about to make.’ So, yes, those problems don’t get solved if ethics is a more fundamental part of human life, but they are lessened. What are we here for if not to lessen pain, agony, and anguish for people the world over?”

Well said, and we hope to highlight more along this line today with our panelists as they discuss the current state of their work as well as their challenges, tradeoffs, and best ideas of how to find new solutions to the challenge of humanitarianism. Our panelists today are Aurelien Buffler, chief of policy and planning, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA); Nadia Daar, chief strategy and impact officer at Amnesty International USA; Anjali Dayal, associate professor at Fordham University; and our moderator, Melissa Mahtani, executive producer and international journalist.

My sincere thanks to you for being with us today. Over to you, Melissa.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Thank you so much, Joel. It certainly does feel dire at the moment. I don’t think we can escape that, but I am particularly grateful to Carnegie Council for gathering us all here today, those of you in the room and those of you online, to actually put some time aside for us to focus on the challenges, very much how we got here, but also on the solutions, so I really want to thank you.

Since Joel introduced us, I am going to dive straight in. We will be taking some audience questions both from you in the room and again those watching online, so please stay engaged and submit those questions.

To start us off, I am interested to know from each of your perspectives how you have seen attitudes toward humanitarianism change and potentially why. Anjali, you teach young people. They are supposed to be the hope of the next generation. Have you seen this hope increase or fade in recent years? Set the scene for us.

ANJALI DAYAL: First, I will say I am lucky enough to have some students here today, which is wonderful. We can think about a global shift in the way we think about hope as being reflected through students. I first started teaching right before the first Obama administration. My first semester teaching was the lead-up to that election. There was a very different attitude toward hope then I think. It was a hopeful zeitgeist. It was a time when people were looking at the shape of the world and wondering how progressively we could make changes that might better value the life of every person, and you saw that reflected in the classroom.

By my lights, thinking about teaching for all of that time, the big shift that I saw was in 2020, when students living through a once-in-a-century pandemic came face to face, as we all did, with the fact that people don’t always show up for each other. People don’t always make, as Mike Schur said, the “better choice.” Sometimes they make the selfish choice.

That I think made me reconsider meaningfully how I taught because international relations, which I teach, is not by nature a hopeful discipline. It often shows people the worst face of how people behave. It takes the worst argument about the ways that people can be and translates it into axiomatic truth, but that is not the only way the world can be.

I am very lucky. I am not exactly sure what they do at the Fordham Admissions Office, but they tend—and I said they were here because I am going to embarrass them a little bit—to be able to select earnest, thoughtful students who want to be engaged in the world. Thinking about that as being a face of hope is something you can mobilize.

It means that you can say: “Look, there is not just one way people are with each other. There are all of these different kinds of ways people are in the world.” And, yes, you may see the worst face of people sometimes, but you know from looking at work that humanitarian organizations do, the work that human rights advocates do, you know there are people on the ground whose job it is to try to think about a better world.

In the room we have the luxury of thinking What are the ways that could go better? What are the ways that falls short? In that sense it is a hopefulness. Like the abolitionist thinker Mariame Kaba says, “Hope is a discipline,” or like the feminist thinker Rebecca Solnit says, “Hope is not a lottery ticket where you sit and wait for something better to happen but an ax that you use to beat down the obstacles to a better habitable future.”

MELISSA MAHTANI: That is so interesting. I want to come back and hear more about the ax that you use in a minute, but, Nadia, you are now at Amnesty and before you were at Oxfam America, and a lot of your work involves speaking to people on Capitol Hill, speaking to a lot of the politicians who control the pursestrings when it comes to funding humanitarianism. Anjali mentioned 2020. Was that a similar shift for you, or have you seen attitudes shift in a different way?

NADIA DAAR: Yes, and 2020 is such an interesting year to think about because it was a time when the globe had to come together to face a major global challenge, and there was this pivotal moment: Was the United States going to step up and play its role with respect to, for example, access to vaccines that were being produced at that time? Were the United States and other countries going to come together and provide financing concessions as well as grant financing for countries around the world that were struggling in this dire moment economically in the face of the pandemic?

I think it is interesting when we think about the United States because a lot of people are looking at what is happening today with the abrupt slashing of U.S. funding around the world, and I think it is important for us to put it in perspective. When we look over the last several decades, we look at what came out of World War II.

World War II was a pivotal moment for the globe to come together around humanitarian principles, human rights principles, and multilateralism, and that was an important moment for financing humanitarian assistance as well. Post-World War II reconstruction efforts and the role that the U.S. played were pivotal and set the scene for global financing in that moment. Some of the key institutions that were founded coming out of that moment were institutions like the World Bank and following from that many other multilateral financial institutions that have provided financing around the world.

The United States has also been a leader in many regards over the years. Even in the 1950s U.S. Senator Monroney actually proposed the idea of the International Development Association of the World Bank, which would be a grant arm for the World Bank. This is now the single biggest provider of essential services funding around the world today. These things came from individuals and from collective mobilization around these moments.

In the 1960s USAID was created, and it was bipartisan over the years, so foreign assistance has not been just a Democratic Party mandate, proposal, or promotion. It has had bipartisan support. President George W. Bush is credited with initiating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief initiative (PEPFAR), which has saved millions of lives with HIV and AIDS funding. It is important to understand the central role that the United States plays and how policymakers in the United States have understood the impactful role that the United States can play both for harm—and we have seen the immense harm that this government can cause with its foreign policy—but also its capacity for good.

MELISSA MAHTANI: I am going to unpack a little of what you have been talking about in a minute, but one of the things that came out of the Second World War was the United Nations.

Aurelien, I would love to bring you into this discussion because people did set up these fantastic institutions and that is where global attention was, but as we are reimagining what humanitarianism looks like a lot of these institutions have become so institutionalized that perhaps they are not as effective, as it were.

You are here sort of representing the United Nations. The United Nations has had a bad rap recently. I am interested to know again as we are setting the scene how attitudes have changed. Attitudes have certainly changed toward the United Nations. How are you receiving this because your office is actually planning and implementing aid on the ground?

AURELIEN BUFFLER: You need to hear criticism. Not all of them are actually bad but the world is changing and we need to hear people who call on the United Nations to change with the world. For instance, in the humanitarian field, which I represent here, when you hear communities you serve and governments telling you that the assistance you provide does not meet the expectation of their needs, that they want to be more involved, and that they want to participate in decisions that concern them, you need to hear and adapt to that and adjust your system. That is what we are trying to do at the United Nations. I think there are very positive criticisms of the United Nations.

Then you have criticisms about the United Nations being a bureaucracy and being inefficient. Yes, some of this is true. I think there is a bureaucracy, and we need to reduce layers of bureaucracy and we are constantly adapting to that, but I think we also need to dig a bit deeper and try to understand what this criticism means.

To give you an example, the World Food Programme (WFP) can save a life and feed someone for 50 cents a day. That is less than $200 a year. That is pretty efficient and effective, in my opinion. So maybe the debate about efficiency and bureaucracy is about something else.

I think first there is confusion about what the United Nations is. When I speak to people who are not humanitarians or UN staff but people in my family and my friends, when they say the United Nations is inefficient they speak about the United Nations not resolving the conflict in Gaza or not resolving the conflict in Darfur. Well, that is not the responsibility of UN agencies. That is really the political part of the United Nations and the difficulty Member States have to come together in the Security Council in particular to find solutions. You need to differentiate between the two.

When you look at some of the criticism on inefficiencies and why, for instance, assistance is going to refugees and not to people here, I think here we are in something deeper, which is really a battle of values to be honest and battles about whether we want to defend humanitarianism or not. I belong to those who believe that any human being suffering should be supported wherever he or she is and whatever his or her values are. Obviously this is not the consensus anymore. We need I think to engage in this dialogue and try to explain why we think it is in the interests of everyone, of humanity, to take your words from before, to in fact help each other across countries.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Nadia, you mentioned the huge USAID cuts. They happened earlier this year, and it was a watershed moment for international aid because the United States was the biggest funder of global aid and primarily how it had existed, but also a lot of the rhetoric that people heard was that there was a lot of waste. Some of this was clearly taken out of context; you will all remember the condoms for Gaza, which was the Gaza Province in Mozambique and not actually Gaza, so that has not helped the cause.

Starting with you, Aurelien, and then I will come back around this way, do you think it is fair to say that there is so much waste that this should be a reckoning moment when we can address the huge waste that has existed just because it has become institutionalized for ages?

AURELIEN BUFFLER: Is it a lot of waste? To give you an example, the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Health Organization managed to almost eradicate polio over the past 30 years at a price which is two times less than what governments usually spend. For me it is pretty efficient.

Do our systems need to adapt to a new reality? Absolutely, but I think for me and for the humanitarian world the struggle with this adaptation, the equation that we need to solve, is on the one hand we need to hear that people want to see a different humanitarian system with new actors coming in with different values and different ways of working, and open this system to them while preserving the humanitarian values, I would say, and that is not a given.

Given the funding constraints now on humanitarians I think we also need to go back to our original mission, which was emergency relief. That means that we need some other actors like the World Bank, like the international finance institutions (IFIs) and some development actors, to be much more forward-leaning in some countries.

When I started in this business, OCHA used to stay maybe one or two years in an emergency. Today we stay 20 to 30 years because the peace and security parts of international relations is broken and from that development is struggling. We see that today, for instance, in Afghanistan and in Syria, where we want to support communities but we are also saying it is not humanitarians who are going to get people out of that, and we development actors, IFIs, and politicians to reengage so humanitarians can actually get out of these countries and focus on Gaza, Darfur, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where you have emergencies right now.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Nadia, when you are going to Capitol Hill and are speaking to one of these people, waste has been a big topic. A lot of people talk about these USAID cuts. Do they have better ideas?

NADIA DAAR: I think there are a few parts to this. First, is aid and has aid in the way it has been distributed the most efficient? We absolutely need to be questioning and making sure that resources are being used in the best way possible to reach those who need that aid in the most efficient way.

Can there be more efficiencies? Absolutely. Was that a narrative that was consistently used in order to cut USAID and foreign assistance? Absolutely. So we also need to dispel the myth that if we had shown that USAID and aid were being used efficiently that we would not have seen the same outcome.

This administration is also looking at multilateralism and foreign assistance in a different normative way as we were just hearing. It is not just about efficiency; it is about the U.S.’s role in the world and it is about moving toward more of a transactional understanding of the role of the United States and of aid.

There are other narratives, for example, that a lot of U.S. money is going toward aid. Actually in 1970 countries around the world agreed with a UN commitment of rich countries using 0.7 percent of their gross national product in supporting countries that needed it with foreign assistance, with aid. The United States is nowhere close to that. There is this myth that Americans have been fed that a lot of our budget is going toward aid. It is around one percent. It has been hovering around that figure for a long time. So there is a lot there that needs to be dispelled.

I think it is important to also understand the benefits that have come from these aid programs. Coming close to the eradication of polio is one of those examples. HIV/AIDS is another one that I mentioned that is important to understand. Education and girls’ education around the world has progressed significantly over the years. I think it has been difficult over the years to tell that story, and what is the counterfactual? What if aid had not been there?

We are at a moment right now when we can see that counterfactual because we can see what impact these abrupt and drastic cuts in USAID and foreign assistance more broadly are having. Amnesty and many others have researched the impacts. We have seen that girls and women who are survivors of gender-based violence in Yemen no longer have health services or psychosocial services that they had before. We have seen in Haiti similar things. We have seen at the Thai/Myanmar border areas where there are internally displaced populations who had access to services as a result of them facing violence and those services no longer exist. People no longer have oxygen they were relying on and are dying from not having these services anymore. So the counterfactual that we have not had for all of these years we now have, and we are going to have a devastating set of stories to tell, and the United States has a key responsibility in that.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Anjali, you teach international relations. Clearly, as you both alluded to, the will that was there is no longer there, and the U.S.’s role is different. When we look to reimagine the future of humanitarianism, what are some of the solutions or new ideas that you put on the table and discuss with your students?

ANJALI DAYAL: First, I want to pick up quickly on one of those points. When we think about efficiency and waste, if every person’s life matters equally, which we should believe, the projection is that USAID cuts will produce 14 million excess deaths in the next five to ten years. That is waste of the worst kind, waste that cannot be rectified. There is no repair for that.

When we think about that we also have to acknowledge the fact that the way the aid system was built was never sustainable. It was always pegged to the idea that the United States would always play the same role in the world. The contemporary aid system that we have today is built around the idea that the great power of the American military and great economic might of the American state would always be turned toward this particular kind of liberal institutionalism.

However, we have known that since the beginning because there has always been a countercurrent in American politics that that might not always be the case, so when we think about reimagining aid we have to imagine a world in which sustainable aid systems are not tied to the idea that the most powerful country in the world will always be exactly the same. We have to imagine a world where what we see is more community-focused aid, aid that comes from the needs and incentives of local populations that are sustained by the efforts of wealthy countries but that is driven by the people who will have to live with the consequences of those decisions.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Suggesting that deaths are waste is a very, very good way of looking at it, which people do not think about, and this comes back to storytelling, communicating, and getting that narrative out there to quieten the one we are hearing that potentially is not always correct coming from various officials.

I want to talk about storytelling in a moment, but in terms of community focus one of the reasons that we are seeing this shift in words is because of the rise of populist leaders, not just in the United States but around the world. It is being presented—and, Nadia, you alluded to this—as an us-versus-them game, like: “Giving money to them isn’t enough for us.” But this isn’t true, as you laid out. If this is how people are feeling, how do we combat that?

NADIA DAAR: I think it is a good question, and I think narratives are difficult, especially when some of us have access to controlling social media companies and others may be sitting on a stage and having a conversation, but it is important that we are all part of that conversation and playing our part there.

There is this narrative, as you were saying, of us verus them, and increasingly what we are seeing with these populist leaders is this idea of zero-sum rights: “You can’t all have universal human rights.” It is an anti-universalist understanding of the world, and promotion of this idea is: “If you want to have foreign assistance, that is going to impact our healthcare system. If you want to have foreign assistance, we can’t really afford postsecondary education.”

It is not because of aid that we don’t have universal free access to healthcare in this country. It is not because of aid that we don’t have worker security in this country. It is not because of aid that we are now facing a migrant crisis in this country and what is actually being posed as a migrant crisis, another zero-sum narrative that is being pushed out, that if you want to have economic rights we cannot also have migrant rights.

I think we need to get back to this idea of universalism and this idea that every single human life is a universe, every single life has value, and everyone is deserving of dignity and human rights. When you step into that universalist idea I think it reframes the story.

MELISSA MAHTANI: At the moment the U.S. government is shut down. Yet we saw yesterday that President Trump is bailing out Argentina. There was a meeting at the Oval Office.

When you are talking about money being directed in different ways potentially people just do not understand these various mechanisms—what goes to aid and what is allotted to this? Is that part of what you are teaching, Anjali, or what you need to explain, actually how the various mechanisms work?

ANJALI DAYAL: We live in a world where this stuff is often opaque. People who are even very well informed do not necessarily know how the mechanisms of aid or the mechanisms of distribution work. In that sense it becomes important I think for people with deep expertise to become good at public communication.

That is tough I think because it is not a given skill. It is not necessarily something that everyone has who has deep expertise, whether on the ground or academic, is trained to do, but a lot of the situation that we find ourselves in is because the people who have deep expertise are not necessarily in a position to make it most transparent and most available.

We live in a world where understandably deep expertise is paywalled, and this information is free. In that sense trying to think about ways that you can facilitate a world of open knowledge and communicating is difficult: “How does this work? How much is the average U.S. citizen actually spending on this? Where does this money go? What is it doing? Why does it matter?"

People have lives. They are busy. They have to get through the day. They need someone to help them see what the mechanisms of this are because it is necessarily from of lack of interest or selfishness that they don’t see it. We all have lives. This just happens to be the way that we make our particular living. In that sense that becomes our task.

MELISSA MAHTANI: As a journalist I can say as a fact that fake news travels much, much faster than the real news that follows once you do the fact-checking and correcting. Nobody is reading the small print, which is very frustrating, but I will save that for another time.

When we talk about community funding and different ways of funding, coming back to the USAID cuts, one solution that has been presented, and I am interested in getting your thoughts on this, is philanthropy. We have seen a lot of philanthropic institutions pour in money to try to fill this gap. A lot of people might not know, but even all that money is no match to what the United States was spending. Again, a lot of people don’t appreciate how much money that was.

Can philanthropy replace it, when we think about different ways of funding? Talk to me a little about implementation because money is one thing, but why the United Nations has been so successful is because it actually has these relationships without which it is very difficult to implement aid on the ground?

AURELIEN BUFFLER: I was about to echo your point. It is of course welcome that philanthropies get more and more involved in supporting aid in this sector, but in terms of proportion we are talking about maybe a couple of billion dollars altogether, while the total industry of humanitarian assistance only, not including development aid, is about 40 billion dollars. Without states, including the United States but also others, it is difficult.

Having said that, I think it is great that philanthropies are coming in and sharing experience, ideal, and capacity. I think the United Nations and humanitarian organizations can benefit greatly from that. I think philanthropies can also benefit greatly from our decades of experience working in environments like armed conflicts to assist people, where they are not used to working.

I don’t think it is either/or. I think it is how we work together and build a system, to Anjali’s point, around people affected in communities where different organizations come together around common objectives.

For us, while we do that, it is important that we do not lose sight that different organizations come with different identities, frameworks, and principles. Particularly on the UN side, on the humanitarian side, we do not want to lose sight of the humanitarianism part of our work because aid is not only taking goods from A to B. That is logistics, and logistics is an important part of assistance, but it is only one tiny part. It is the what.

What is also important is why we are doing it, and the why, like Nadia and Anjali said, is because we believe that any person on this planet should be protected and assisted if he or she suffers, and we should do this for free. No person should have to pay.

The second point is how we do it. We work in extremely complex environments. Think about Gaza now, think about Darfur, think about Somalia or Haiti. You can really hurt people, and we saw in Gaza a couple of months ago how an operation—which in my opinion was not well thought through—resulted in thousands being killed.

How are we doing it? How do we make sure, for instance, that it is not the strongest who get assistance first but actually the most vulnerable? I am thinking about kids. Kids will not come to you asking for assistance. You have to have the expertise and experience. I think that is where the partnership between philanthropies, UN agencies, and NGOs becomes important. There is a place for everyone. It is not either/or, and I think there are resources in this world for everyone.

MELISSA MAHTANI: If you were to redesign the UN system as it currently is to partner more with philanthropies, how would you set things up differently?

AURELIEN BUFFLER: That is what we are thinking about now as part of United Nations Appeals Tribunal and the whole humanitarian reset that my boss, Tom Fletcher, mentioned.

The starting point is very often this: If we started from scratch now, how would it look? Well, we’re not starting from scratch. I am living in the real world. There are some institutions that are not going to disappear any time soon, so we need to deal with the cards we have right now.

The key aspect for me, and I do not have exact details, to put it simply is, how do we go from a supply-driven and template-driven system to a system which starts from the people active in the communities affected, and where these people are not seen as only recipients of assistance but are seen as decision makers and people who are taking care of themselves, and thinking about how we can support them. That sounds very theoretical, but it is a real flip in the way we think about our programming in international assistance.

MELISSA MAHTANI: It is more not just aid but investment, and this is what we are seeing a lot of philanthropies do.

To be fair, and you talked about it, Nadia, all of these were set up after the Second World War. If you think about just the advancements in technology—none of us had mobile phones and none of us were using artificial intelligence (AI) then—the world has changed, so now a lot of these systems need to change to meet the moment, not just because of the lack of desire but this acceptance that this is just the way things have been done.

A lot of this does come down to communication and storytelling, as both of you have said. Whenever people think about aid, we think, oh, there is such a big need, oh, it is too much, but there actually is a lot of good going on in the world. I am interested to hear from each of you a good success story of humanitarianism that people might not be familiar with, and then we can work backward to think about how better storytelling could have helped.

ANJALI DAYAL: Let me pick up on a point I think both of you made about polio eradication. In 1988 there were 350,000 cases of polio in 125 countries. In 2010 there were 1292 cases in four countries. That is a massive success produced by vaccination campaigns, efforts coordinated through the World Health Organization and funded by wealthy countries, and the technical expertise of people on the ground.

Because that worked, nothing happened, which is the fundamental challenge of trying to dramatize humanitarian aid and assistance. When it goes well, what you produce is peace and stability, something that looks like nothing.

We have a whole language for war, death, crises, and things we can count. Because this campaign was successful, your child is not going to be exposed to polio. Nothing happens. That means that at the end of the day probably what has to happen is to dramatize the act of assistance and then be able to tell stories person to person and place to place about what the difference makes. It is tough I think because people who do this work we hope don’t do it for the valor of it, but at the end of the day dramatizing the action is probably the thing that is going to make it front and center.

We actually see the effect of not publicizing this success: People take it for granted. They don’t understand that they live in a world where protective measures produce peace and security. They think health is the baseline condition because they cannot see the massive systems of aid, assistance, technical expertise, and willingness on the parts of people to let their children be vaccinated that produces this kind of outcome.

MELISSA MAHTANI: It is such a great point to think that success is when nothing happens. This fuels a lot of the us versus them because again the United States, a very wealthy country, is funding all of these poorer countries because perspective matters here. It is very common to hear a lot of people complain about the United Nations because they do not see it in action in the same way. For example, as a child growing up in Zambia, the United Nations was seen as the saviors who were coming in to treat people, so they were appreciated because there was a need.

I am interested in your take on that, Nadia, but also I would love to hear a success story from your point of view with Amnesty.

NADIA DAAR: The word choice that you used there in terms of “savior” I think is another perspective. We are talking about the say different people see aid, and that is one of them. You put it in a positive light, but many see that also in a negative light in terms of the post-colonial way in which aid has been distributed, and it is something I think is worthwhile interrogating further: How do you localize aid and make aid more meaningful for those on the ground, picking up on what you were talking about earlier? How do you make sure that those communities that are most impacted or that need it most are taking part in the decision making, going back to that idea of what kinds of reforms?

Again, aid is not perfect. It is important that as we are sitting here defending and talking about it, it is hard for us to even criticize it because we are scared of how that will be manipulated, but there is a lot to critique, and it is important that we are not talking about it as a perfect system but one that requires us to keep editing and refining, not abandoning.

In terms of success stories, there are many. I think it is important for us to understand that it is not just about counting the number of wells dug or counting the number of schools built. It is about dignity and human rights that have progressed over decades in many of these countries, but I want to focus on one area that I think many do not know too much about, this idea of civil society and organizations that have been funded around the world to do human rights defense work, anticorruption work, and to actually make sure that their governments are using these resources more efficiently and more effectively.

A lot of the foreign assistance that the United States and the Europeans as well have been providing has been going toward civil society organizations and allowing civil society to thrive in ways that they would not have been able to without that assistance. It is one area that we do not talk about a lot, but there is a whole ecosystem that has been disrupted through these cuts, and civil society’s and organizations’ ability to hold their governments accountable is one that I think it is important people are aware of.

MELISSA MAHTANI: That is a good point. Actually this year has been the deadliest year for humanitarian workers around the world, and Gaza is a prime example of that. These people are doing very brave work under terrible conditions, which also needs to be communicated.

I think, Aurelian, a lot of people don’t understand the obstacles that exist in trying to get aid into a lot of places that you are working in and also the big risks that people are taking. How can the United Nations do a better job of communicating?

AURELIEN BUFFLER: When you asked for a good example, we spoke about polio, I spoke about the WFP, and I was thinking about the big system OCHA built with Member States to respond to natural disasters. We can deploy teams around the world within 12 hours of any natural disaster and unblock millions of dollars within 24 hours. Nobody else can do that. It was very practical during the earthquake in Syria and Turkey. That is what saved thousands of lives.

To your point, I think we need to tell the human story. I used to say to my colleagues, “Aid is real.” I remember working in the DRC in the North Kivu, and I remember a terrible situation where a community was trapped between armed groups for weeks. They were displaced into a field without shelter or medical care. Finally after weeks we could access them, and you can imagine what the sight was, to see these people who had slept for weeks with no shelter, food, or water. It was a very difficult situation, and I remember these kids were literally about to die.

We arrived and started our work, and I went back two weeks later and you could see these kids who were about to die literally playing soccer. That is what aid is. It is about saving lives. It is about saving these kids so that they can continue to play soccer, have a life, and have an education. I think that is the story we need to tell.

Even for those who are very critical of humanitarian assistance and the United Nations, even some of the values in the United Nations, they also have their own values. They have their religious values. I have never heard anyone in the United States, Europe, or any country where I travel say that we should not save the kids.

MELISSA MAHTANI: It is true that we have to come back to the fundamentals that there is so much more that unites people rather than divides them.

I am very conscious of the time, but I am going to take two minutes. This is rapid fire because I want to get some concrete solutions in the room. I am going to ask you each a question, but you need to give me a one-word answer.

Hypothetically, if you had a magic wand, Anjali, what is one thing you would like to see governments around the world do today to move the needle on the next chapter for humanitarianism?

ANJALI DAYAL: Focus on funding community-based initiatives like the emergency relief rooms in Sudan.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Nadia?

NADIA DAAR: Other governments around the world should step up and step in with foreign assistance and not look at the model that the U.S. administration is setting at the moment.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Aurelien?

AURELIEN BUFFLER: I have my organization’s talking points: Allocate just 1 percent of the defense budget to humanitarian assistance, and we will address all humanitarian needs in the world.

MELISSA MAHTANI: That was hypothetically. Realistically what is one thing your organization can do right now, today, to move the needle?

AURELIEN BUFFLER: Right now to move the needle we need to do very concretely what I said before. We need to open our doors, let people we serve in and drive the system with us supporting them, not the other way around.

NADIA DAAR: As Amnesty International, tell the stories of those human lives and get people to care.

ANJALI DAYAL: Be loud about upholding our values and be transparent about what we know and don’t know.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Last question. I have 60 seconds before I hand it over to the audience: What is one thing people in the audience can do right now, today, to move the needle on the next chapter for humanitarianism?

ANJALI DAYAL: Have a conversation with someone you know about why aid and humanitarianism are important. Most people don’t want to live in a world where they are set against their neighbor. They want to live in a world where they live in comfort with their neighbor.

NADIA DAAR: Where you can, tell your government that you want them to play a particular role in the world and want to feel pride in your country, whether it is the United States or another country, being part of a global society and being an actor for good and for human rights.

AURELIEN BUFFLER: I have three. First, make your voice heard. In this world, where very extreme discourse is dominating, it is important that you make your voice heard and share your values.

Second, if you want to go a step further, fund us. You have many good organizations, the United Nations and others.

Third, if you really are committed to this, join us. Take a job with us.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Excellent. We have covered a lot of things. We have talked about money, power structures, and attitudes, and people feeling disempowered. I hope you all feel that you have more power.

I have many more questions, but I am going to open it up to see what we have from the audience.

ALEX WOODSON: Lots from the in-person and virtual audience today. I want to read a list of countries where this is being watched right now: Sierra Leone, Sudan, Kenya, Canada, India, Uganda, Morocco, Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ukraine, Zimbabwe, Kazakhstan, Somalia, Colombia, Egypt, Vietnam, Ghana, and Liberia.

Here is a question from the audience that has come up a couple of times in a few different contexts: “What new approaches to humanitarian aid do you see as the most promising in the context of increasing climate crises?”

AURELIEN BUFFLER: I think two things we are working on right now are really promising: First, how we use AI and new technologies to do disaster forecasting. That is a revolution. It is how we predict disasters but also the humanitarian consequences. That is important.

Related to that is how we establish systems to manage these risks, including, for instance, working with insurance companies and others to make sure that people who may be impacted get supported well before disaster even strikes.

QUESTION: I would like to thank you guys again. You mentioned shortening the span of humanitarian work before passing it over to development organizations, so I wanted to talk a little more about the “triple nexus.” I know a lot of things have been signed and there is a lot of rhetoric and talking points, but what has actually been operationalized on the ground in this transfer? Additionally, how does peacebuilding and adding that part of the nexus complicate humanitarian and development work as well?

AURELIEN BUFFLER: There has been a lot about Niger and the Philippines where humanitarians, governments of the countries concerned, development actors, and communities have come together and rethought completely the way aid was being structured.

I think the challenge with the triple nexus is the type of environments we are working in. If you take for instance IFIs, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, it is extremely complicated for them to start working in very unstable countries, and this is the bread and butter of humanitarians, so we have this problem of being stuck in context with no development prospect and no peace and security prospects, which makes humanitarian crises last much longer than they need to.

I think the direction we should take in the discussion with development actors, governments, and Member States is how we become a bit more flexible on the development side and IFI side so these actors can engage a bit earlier or a lot earlier, in fact, in this context.

NADIA DAAR: Let me make one more point on peacebuilding and humanitarian aid in that context. I think it is important to understand, going back to Gaza, that humanitarians cannot be a target, and this was something I think sparked outrage around the world when we saw that humanitarian assistance was being used as a weapon, that humanitarian actors themselves were being targeted, and that international humanitarian principles and laws were not being upheld.

I just want to remind everyone of these principles that do exist and that in times of conflict and times of peace humanitarian aid should be getting to those who most need it and should be able to function regardless of what that environment looks like, obviously with security in mind.

MELISSA MAHTANI: I am so glad you brought that up because I want to ask you all a question.

We need to talk about accountability, and a lot of people feel very hopeless, not just with Gaza but looking at everything around the world, and we have talked a lot about some ways that we can make things change. We have talked a lot about other areas of the world where things are going on in a good way, but in Gaza specifically people feel like their voices are not being heard where they are trying to actually take rights of redress. Whether you agree or not with the International Criminal Court, it is still a court of law that needs to follow a procedure, or even when people are calling their congressmen.

We have seen international law violated for various reasons. How can we make sure that actors are held accountable, and if not, then what happens to the actual structure of aid?

NADIA DAAR: I think it is important to see how international law has been undermined so dramatically, how actors have been able to act with impunity in this moment, and what the impacts of that are. We have seen the impact of this genocide in Gaza in particular, but we also can understand what the impacts are for other actors. What does it tell Russia that there is impunity when there are war crimes? What does it tell other actors around the world? Impunity has knock-on effects. It is not just about the one particular context.

I think there has been so much global outrage, and we should see that as a positive thing, and for people to understand and place their outrage in the right places. It is outrage at the governments that are allowing that impunity and not supporting accountability rather than outrage at international laws themselves. How can we translate that outrage into meaningful action and get governments around the world to support accountability for international law being violated wherever it has been violated, whether by Israeli authorities, Palestinian militant groups, or Russian authorities, and hold a common standard so that we can go back to that idea of universality and the rule of international law that applies to everyone regardless of who they are?

ANJALI DAYAL: This also goes to the triple nexus question, I think. Ultimately international law is political. When we think about what produces both accountability and lasting solutions to conflict, political solutions produce both of those things. International law only works when powerful actors want it to work.

As a result, what we essentially need is to help leaders understand that the calculus they have to make is one in which there are going to be political consequences for not abiding by international law, but then of course the problem becomes that we have to find a way to produce those kinds of consequences, and that is obviously a varied playing field around the world and sometimes even domestically.

MELISSA MAHTANI: How can the United Nations help enforce those consequences?

AURELIEN BUFFLER: I agree with Nadia that what happened in Gaza will have ripple effects across crises, and it already has. We already hear parties to conflicts in other contexts saying, “Why are you coming to us? This is what is happening in Gaza.”

Accountability is a key tool both in terms of serving justice but also preventing further violence. We need to work on that.

I used to say that international humanitarian law was buried somewhere in the ruins of Gaza or Darfur and that we need to resuscitate it. I think there are two angles we need to take from the UN side: First is our work with Member States at the political level. Clearly multilateralism is reshaping right now and there are different views. We need to make sure that the conversation of international law is not lost in the middle of that and that Member States remain convinced that it is in their interests to have international humanitarian law, especially at a time when the risks of conflict between states is rising very rapidly.

Related to that is the role of citizens like us to make this understood to our governments. I think especially in Western society we have lost sight of the fact that tomorrow it could be us. It could be your family, it could be my family, it could be us who have to leave overnight with our kids and cross a continent because a house was bombed and our father was detained. That is where we need to take the discussion. We need to have an agreement, a consensus that is in everyone’s interests, states and citizens, to have some boundaries in the way wars are being waged.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Which comes back to people taking it for granted because they have not had to actually face that themselves. Citizens do have power. It is so easy to feel hopeless, but I think we would not have seen some of the progress we have seen if it was not for the outrage and people’s voices being heard. I hope you will be encouraged by that.

QUESTION: You all talked about localization and with reimagining aid systems, and I think about the Rohingya people where localization may be more difficult. However, with administration changes and potential donor fatigue, do you think localization will play a larger role in reimagining aid systems in the future, and what would be the potential positive or negative effects of that?

NADIA DAAR: I can start by saying that I think it is important that we keep that idea because we are at a moment where at least in this country the administration is seeing aid as more transactional and more about an America First approach: What do we need as the United States?

While aid for this country and policymakers throughout U.S. history have always had an America First mentality as well, it was America First and—and let’s do good. I think that is a big concern when you look at it against localization.

If you take back that idea of philanthropists now coming in, imagine every single agency of philanthropy, the U.S. government, French government, UK government, Canada all coming in with their own agendas. What would that do for efficiency in a country? What would that do for ensuring aid gets to the people who most need it?

I think it is more important now given the trends that we are seeing that we are centering the ideas of localization, transparency, accountability, and community participation.

AURELIEN BUFFLER: I completely agree with you, Nadia. Some states are becoming more assertive about their sovereignty. As Donald says to each state, “Well, you should take care of yourself.” I think localization is the way to go. It is also a demand from communities themselves, so we need to hear that, and our systems are already adapted.

For instance, at OCHA we are already directing funds toward local organizations. We also need to change the way we work on the ground. These are very practical things. In many contexts meetings between international organizations are not translated into local languages. It is a tiny thing, but it is very important if you want to include locals into that, and maybe we can use new technologies to do this better.

While we do that, again I think it is important first not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is not locals against the international organizations. I don’t think that is the way it is. I think there is a role for everyone. We also need to acknowledge that some local organizations in some contexts, particularly in conflicts, are more vulnerable than international organizations and that it is good sometimes to have international organizations help them make their case.

Then I come back to this idea of values and a moral compass. Our job is still to make sure that those who suffer the most receive assistance and protection, so any assistance driven by local actors also need to integrate that, and that is what we need to work together with these actors.

MELISSA MAHTANI: Also it is important to address the underlying reasons for why this huge inequality exists in the first place and coming back to the climate question, which causes a lot of these things rather than just trying to treat the symptoms of it.

We are at time. I want to thank the panelists. Humanitarianism is such a huge topic because it is so different, not just in each country but in each specific situation, and we have touched upon a wide variety of things and have some little solutions that have been dotted in there. I hope you guys know this is just the beginning and not the end of the conversation. They are all accessible. If you have ideas or questions, I am sure they would be adaptable. I thank you all for listening.