In case you hadn’t noticed, these are extraordinary times for the global emergency relief system, which has never looked more overstretched. 5 facts lifted from a new paper by my CIC colleagues Sarah Hearn and Alison Burt:
1. 76 million people now depend on the humanitarian system. A decade ago, the figure was 26 million.
2. The number of forced displaced people has more than doubled over the MDG era – from 20 million in 1999 to more than 51 million at the end of last year.
3. The cost of global emergency assistance is now $18 billion – a more than threefold increase from the $5 billion it cost in 2000.
4. Internally displaced people now outnumber international refugees by a factor of 2 to 1 (24 million IDPs versus 12 million refugees – in 2000 it was 6 million IDPs and 12 million refugees).
5. The average displacement of a refugee now lasts for 17 years.
When we talk about ways of assisting the hardest to reach of the people living in poverty around the world, it’s often not governments or development actors but the humanitarian system that are delivering the basic services. So if the world is serious about the SDG aim of leaving no one behind, then this is where we have to start.
Back in 2005, UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland led a massive push to upgrade the humanitarian system. With next year’s World Humanitarian Summit coming up, it’s high time that the UN embarked on a similarly ambitious effort again.
