Mr. Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator - Transcript of Press Conference on Launch of the Global Humanitarian Overview 2024

Video file of press conference available here

The full Global Humanitarian Overview 2024 is accessible on this link [ https://humanitarianaction.info/document/global-humanitarian-overview-2024 ]

I represent, for my sins, the global humanitarian agencies, not just the United Nations agencies, but many, many far beyond. Not all of them, but most of them. And I am honoured to lead many of them in their advocacy and coordinate them in their operations, and I will speak on their behalf now, when I talk about the humanitarian picture for next year.

And let's start with the stark numbers because I think that that is the best description. There will be 300 million people in need. 300 million people in need across the world in 2024. This figure has been arrived at by a process in every single country where we operate, where humanitarian agencies operate, by looking at the levels of need, counting the populations in need, compiling lists, analyzing them, seeing who's in need of what, and the arrival is 300 million people in need. Importantly, that is less than the number for 2023, which was 363 million.

And I want to explain that because this is because there has been an enormous effort made by humanitarian agencies in every single one of those countries to limit our focus on the very, very direst needs. And we do this because we have had, as you know, gaps between funding and needs. And we are not innocents abroad. We know that we need to reflect available funding as well as be honest about assessments of need. So 300 million people in need around the world, a sizable number, to say the very least. But less than the 363 million people for this year, 2023.

We will target, for our specific needs for the agencies that I represent, 181 million of those 300 million people. And the difference between the two is not about need, but it is about that there are other organizations, notably the Red Cross and the National Red Cross Societies, the Médecins Sans Frontières and others who go out with their own appeals and their own responses. And of course, a greater part of that assistance to those 300 million will come from host Governments. It's easy to forget that host Governments and local Governments, or perhaps local communities in particular, [are] probably the largest donors of humanitarian assistance around the world. Everywhere you see displacement, and I have the chance to see it in many different parts of the world, the first donor to a displaced group are local communities. They give of themselves. So that's where that difference comes from.

We will be looking for a total of US$46 billion for 2024, and that compares with $57 billion for 2023. So quite a considerable reduction. You can imagine what hard work it has been to reduce those numbers, to persuade agencies to come down, to be realistic, to be focused, to be tough-minded about what we are really going to be able to achieve. So bringing it down to 46 billion from 57 billion has been an effort, a gigantic effort led by, I'm proud to say, my Office [for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] led out of Geneva, but also particularly led by Humanitarian Coordinators in the field.

This overview, the Global Humanitarian Overview, which has all these numbers, covers 72 countries in total; 26 crisis countries themselves and 46 neighbouring countries that have received refugees. You know, in Sudan, we’re all familiar with the phenomenon of the needs of the people in Sudan, but equally of the needs of refugees in neighbouring countries and their host communities, whether in Chad, in Central African Republic, South Sudan or Ethiopia. It is the same in many places. Syria produces a diaspora of refugees, which is also included in this overview.

So those are the figures. Still a massive ask. $46 billion is going to be no easy task with the kind of cost-of-living worries that many countries have, many donors have. We're still relying on a very small number of top donors, and we expect the following: We expect climate to only increase its impact on our work. We've already seen it very clearly this year, haven’t we? We've already seen from the beginning of the year the earthquakes in Syria, in Türkiye. We saw what happened in Morocco. We saw what happened in Libya. We've seen the droughts and the floods, by the way, in the Horn of Africa. We've seen what happens in the Sahel.

Now, we have just come out of [the UN Climate Change Conference] COP[28], where we've had some success in making arrangements for climate funding to come through some of our funding mechanisms to spend on resilience for communities facing climate shocks. But there is no doubt about climate being big, confronting, competing with conflict as the driver of need.

If I'm right, it is the case that climate displaces more children now than conflict. It was never thus before. And climate will grow. Climate will grow.

We will need to invest in new ways of programming for climate shocks. We will need to learn programming, how frontline humanitarian aid workers will actually use climate data to know where best to spend, for example, water planning and so forth. We will need to be agile, just as the climate community has been agile. So that's number one.

Number two, conflict and its resolution. I speak as a former mediator. I was in Yemen for some years. Yemen has been until recently, and hopefully still is, one of the rare opportunities for peace. But the durable solutions, by which I mean solving the problems of IDPs [internally displaced people]; peace, by which I mean stopping wars and stopping conflict and returning countries to where they should be – this is as rare as hen's teeth these days. These are rarities.

We used to expect 10, 20 years ago peace agreements in Latin America and elsewhere. We hoped for Syria to be moving towards a more peaceful situation; it is not. It is still back in war. And these statistics on resolving conflicts give us very little comfort. So conflicts and intractable conflicts will continue.

Number three, we will need to be very, very clear about the efficient use of the rare dollar, money that we are given. And the efficient use of that dollar includes, first of all, and of paramount importance, listening to what the frontline communities tell us of their priorities.

If you want to spend money wisely, ask the people whose needs you're trying to resolve. Ask any shopkeeper anywhere in the world, and they will tell you that this is a banality in the retail business. It should be a banality in the humanitarian aid business. We need to make sure that it is these people who tell us what they want.

And by the way, when they are telling us, they should not be telling simply the humanitarians, they should be telling our partners, our development partners. We should be sitting there, and we plan to do so, and we have been talking to the World Bank and development agencies.

True partnership with development parties comes not from formal agreements negotiated in New York with high-level panels of the leaders of these organizations and exciting discussions in the margins of annual committees of these organizations. It comes from listening to the same people when they tell us what they want because they will not be looking at us as a development person or as a humanitarian person. They'll be looking at us and saying, we need a road. I don't care who gives us a road. We need a road. We need a clinic. We need some shelter.

So let's start with improving the efficiency of our money through listening to people. That's not easy. That's not simple. We need to do it much better. We are actively involved in doing so at the moment, but we cannot do this job that we are going to face in the coming year without true partnership with development agencies, true partnership.

Now look, beyond that, what we need is a reminder of the obligations of states. Gaza, God help us, has reminded us of this, as has Sudan. We need to remind Member States of the obligations of international humanitarian law and protection of humanitarian aid workers and of their delivery.

What can you imagine are the statistics of the response to the killings of humanitarian aid workers? One of my predecessors was killed in 2003. The people who killed him have not been investigated and certainly not indicted. And he's just one of many, many. As we know, in Gaza, we have lost over [130]. And I don't suppose for a minute there is investigations. There need to be investigations.

Number two, there is a pandemic of attacks in conflict on hospitals and clinics and places with that red cross, which signified safety, but which now signifies target practice.

We have to remind the world of the obligations that come under the Geneva Conventions, that comes through international humanitarian law, and that have to protect us to enable us to do the job with the little money available. Without these protections and this support, we will not be able to change the day.

And one final point, if I may. And that is this, and I say this as we come out of the COP[28]: The climate community is a community of enormous activism and energy. It is a community which insists on its rights and the importance of its objectives, existentially for the world. We need to be like that. We need to partner with them. We need to learn from them. We need the humanitarian community to be as activist and as insistent and as unrelenting as those who promote climate change. We need that.

So we need money. We need safety. We need international humanitarian law. And we need activism to remind people that actually, humanitarian operations are a sign and a signal and a symptom of the greatest humanity.

Thank you.

Q: Thank you. Where do you see the needs being the most acute in 2024? And secondly, are there any countries or situations that you feel are going under the radar and should be in the spotlight a bit more than they are? Thank you.

Under-Secretary-General Griffiths: I don't have a list of the countries in front of me […] about the specifics of the totals, but we could get that to you. But the countries of the greatest need in 2024, I am quite sure, are going to be the Palestinian people, Sudan and Sudan westwards, Ukraine – it ain't over yet. Afghanistan, we worry a lot because of the increase in instability and the possibility of outflow. And I think the ones that are being forgotten are parts of Africa, which are traditionally, you know, in the front of our attention. Syria, Yemen, the Middle Eastern countries will continue to play their important role. I think the needs for Syria in the last year have been about $10 billion for the year. I expect it has gone down a little bit but not much. That's including the regional needs.

So I think the Middle East as a whole, adding Gaza and West Bank in, is probably going to be the area of greatest need. But Ukraine is going through a desperate winter and a war that will restart in full swing next year. And it will need a lot of attention.

There are some countries, I hope Venezuela is one, where the political dialogue that has been existing between the opposition groups and the opposition platform and the Maduro Government unlocks Venezuelan assets, frozen assets, for the people of Venezuela. It could be a really good example of where dialogue actually leads to welfare rewards.

Afghanistan, if we can pay attention to the issues of business and economic investment and economic prospects without losing sight of the needs of rights, we could make Afghanistan also a place where we need to invest less to defeat potential famine.

Very worried about Myanmar because, of course, its war is increasing a great deal, and it is so far away from us that we rarely think about it.

But I still think the epicenter is going to be the Middle East, the greater Middle East now, and Sudan, and Sudan westwards. […]

Q: Yeah, I'd like to come back on that enormous effort that you mentioned and that was made by the different organizations to reduce the appeal. Don't you fear that there might be comments within Governments to say, why didn't you do that before? And that you might not be able in the future to increase much the volume of appeal you're going to launch if needed because of that? And then quickly, just as a follow up: So now we have seen this year much of public attention around a few crises, that means Sudan, Ukraine and now the Middle East. Is there a correlation between that and the difficulty in the future to attract funding for the other crises?

Under-Secretary-General Griffiths: There are about 10 top donors who provide about 60 to 80 per cent of the total amount. They have been very clear with us, as you might imagine, in recent times, to try to bring the totals down somewhere closer to the amounts that they're able to give. So that we don't go around the world saying, you're only 35 per cent funded and good luck with that. Because it doesn't help anybody.

So we have heeded them, to answer your question. We have heeded them, and what we have been doing, in fact, which is by no means an easy or simple thing, as you could imagine, is we've been saying to our colleagues in the field, what you have to do is to narrowly focus on the most key life-saving needs – life-saving.

And there has been a long discussion in our community between the virtues and values and priorities between life-saving, which is, of course, the classic focus of humanitarian operations, and the need for resilience, the need for support for livelihoods. And what we have been forced to do in the past years is take up some [of] the needs [of] resilience and livelihoods because nobody else has been there to do it.

We have started to take over and do some of the sorts of things that development agencies are actually much better at doing than we are. Afghanistan was very much a clear case in point, not the only one, but as you know, there was a big debate about who's going to run the hospitals and so forth.

So what we're doing is we're saying, okay, we'll focus right down on life-saving, but let's be very clear: If we do this, first of all, you need to respond as well. You need to make an effort just as much as we have. And secondly, you need to help us make sure that we have what I was describing earlier as that living partnership with host Governments, host communities, national Governments, and development partners. Otherwise, it won't work.

I personally feel very strongly, having visited many, many, many IDP camps, for example, that when you talk to people who've been in those camps for 10, 12 years – and there are many of those such people, I was in Myanmar in August and talked to some Rohingya in one of those camps who'd been there for 12 years – and they say to you, we've had no help with livelihoods or with resilience more broadly, and you know that they want that because it's a sign of respect for their own agency, for themselves, it's very difficult to walk away from that. It's very difficult to say sorry, I'm sorry, we're just going to do life-saving.

It means that we can't have an optional partnership with the development community. It means that we have to have a necessary, complete partnership.

And I’ll make one more point, remind me on the second question in one second. But I’ll make one more point, which is this: What we discover in places of crisis – where there are pariah regimes, where there are difficulties of access, where it's not easy to move from A to B, to get structures moving, to get basic services going again – we're often told by many very good donors who would say, we will protect humanitarian aid, don't worry about it, but of course, we cannot provide development assistance. And for every humanitarian who hears that, that is exactly not the answer they want. Development assistance is as necessary in crisis as humanitarian, and we can't wait for it.

If you go to Syria these days, as I was being told by my colleague who runs the UN in Syria the other day, you will find that even civil servants in Syria – in other words, people who have a salary, a rare and wonderful thing in Syria – are barely able to afford transport of their children to school because the amount of money that they're receiving is so much less now because [of] the way in which their economy has contracted and contracted and contracted. The levels of poverty in Syria as a result of this contraction of the economy, as a result of lack of development assistance and other reasons, the war and so forth, means that there is no safety net for people.

And what happens? They join the queue to get aid from us, whereas in fact they'd be a lot better off never coming anywhere near us and keeping going with people who run basic services better.

ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross] in Afghanistan, you'll remember this, it was about a year ago, had decided because of lack of choice, really, to start funding a number of hospitals in Afghanistan because after the Taliban came in, where development funding stopped completely, do you remember that? And ICRC and WHO [World Health Programme] and UNICEF [UN Children’s Fund] all went in to start paying for that. ICRC recently had to stop doing it because the money wasn't there. It wasn't sustainable. For sustainable funding, don't look to the humanitarian community because that's not what we're supposed to do. Look to these others. So we have to do partnership. The second question was?

Q: It was just about the correlation between the fact that we have three big crises with public attention and the ability to attract funding for other crises.

Under-Secretary-General Griffiths: Good question. Sorry, excuse me. I remember saying when the Ukraine war started in its first months that the immediate impact of the Ukraine war on other crises was not actually financial, in terms of humanitarian aid, it was attention. Well, you know that. I mean, you live it daily.

We can't get Sudan onto the news. It's impossible to get Sudan stories out because it's competing with Gaza now, Ukraine before. Even Ukraine now has a bit of difficulty getting on the news.

So the first casualty of these spinning of crises is attention. And without attention, you don't get support. And it's become more and more difficult to get attention. It's become – and this is an invidious thing for me to say – it has become like a hit parade of where's the worst place now?

Do you remember Tigray? Two years ago, wasn't it? It was all Tigray. I remember, I went there myself. Nobody's talking about what's happening in Ethiopia at the moment, and there is a lot happening in Ethiopia at the moment. The Horn of Africa never quite made it. Why? Because it didn't declare famine. Thank God it didn't declare famine because it didn't come. But it is very difficult to get attention to the places of the greatest need and to spread it out. And that does have ultimately a financial impact. It does indeed. It means that we are very underfunded in Sudan.

Ukraine is much better funded than elsewhere. I mean, we still need more money in Ukraine, don't get me wrong. We still need funding increased there. We’re still what, 30 per cent funded, I think, in Gaza for the Flash Appeal, despite all the attention.

So we do need to think creatively ourselves, I’m speaking to the humanitarian community, of ways in which we are able to draw the attention of the world to places where money can be wisely spent.

That's why I mentioned the climate community. They've actually blazed a trail clearly in COP[28] this year in which they have achieved great things in terms of moving the world towards where they want it to be. Only as a beginning, don't get me wrong, but it's an extraordinary achievement. And we need some of that talent to shine a light on these other countries.

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*An embargoed press conference was held on 7 December 2023 in Geneva.