ISTANBUL / agencies
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Monday called upon the world leaders to fix the gap in humanitarian funding and share the burden of helping people in need across the globe.
Speaking at the first-ever World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul on Monday Ban said: “We need to provide more direct funding to local people and communities and fix the persistent humanitarian funding gap and investing in building stable and inclusive societies.”
In 2014, the UN reported that around $540 million of the roughly $135 billion global aid budget was spent on decreasing disaster risk.
“I call on humanitarian organizations to work more closer together based on shared priorities to meet [the needs] of millions of people in crisis,” Ban said.
The summit comes as the Syrian civil war enters its sixth year, as Europe is facing the worst refugee crisis since World War II, and as global social inequality has reached a peak amid a rising population.
“We declare we are one humanity with shared responsibilities. Let us resolve, ourselves, here and now, not only to keep people alive but to [give] people a chance at life in dignity,” Ban said.
Hosted by Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, world leaders of UN member states, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, are gathering in Turkey’s largest city Monday and Tuesday.
During the summit, attended by 125 of the UN’s 193 member states, at least 50 heads of government will announce several commitments to reduce humanitarian disasters.
These include: preventing and ending conflict; respecting the rules of war; addressing forced displacement; achieving gender equality; responding to climate change; ending the need for aid; and investing in humanity.
Ban Ki-moon, who urged the international community to cut the amount of internally displaced people by 50 percent by 2030, is also expected to push for an increase in world spending on reducing disaster risk at the summit.
According to another 2013 Global Humanitarian Assistance report, the top five donors were the U.S. with $3.8 billion, followed by EU institutions ($1.9 billion), the U.K. ($1.2 billion), Turkey ($1.0 billion) and Sweden with $784 million.
Turkey urges world to act on humanitarian crisis
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan today said that the current humanitarian system as “inadequate for solving urgent problems”.
Speaking at the first ever World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, Erdogan said that only certain countries were sharing the burden of the humanitarian crisis.
“Now everybody should take on responsibility on this issue,” he said.
The Turkish president said that while needs were increasing day by day, the funds were not increasing at the same rate.
“We see some difficulties and tendencies of evading the responsibility by the international community over aid financing,” he said.
“Turkey is a country that knows this weakness and experiences it in a bitter way,” he said, adding that while Turkey has spent around $10 billion on humanitarian aid for around 3 million refugees on its soil since the beginning of the conflict in Syria, the international community spent around $455 million.
He said that the humanitarian summit should be a turning point in aid financing.
Erdogan also said that the United Nations Security Council needed urgent reforms in order to fulfill its functions.
Moreover, he called for the use of veto by the council’s five permanent members to be limited.
“As Turkey, we have done our best to contribute to the five core responsibilities that Mr. Secretary General [Ban Ki-moon] mentioned,” he said.
These responsibilities include: preventing and ending conflict; respecting the rules of war; addressing forced displacement; achieving gender equality; responding to climate change; ending the need for aid; and investing in humanity.
But Erdogan urged a change in the UN Security Council, of which the five permanent members are Russia, China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each of these members has the power to veto, allowing them to block draft council resolutions — even when these have broad international support.
“For the Security Council to fulfill its main functions, we need urgent reform,” Erdogan said.