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“The summit is a way of saying let’s come together, let’s really understand how we can work better”
– Stephen O’Brien, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator
The World Humanitarian Summit has come to a close in Istanbul. The summit occurred at time in our history when there is a population in need of humanitarian assistance bigger than the number of people living Italy and the UK combined. The summit established a bold agenda—bringing with it the genesis of a new thinking on how to address humanitarian crises. A longstanding goal of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s, the need for a World Humanitarian Summit has been in the works for quite some time. The discussion is bigger than Istanbul. The conversation is a global conversation. Let’s take a look at some of the conversations that are helping draw attention to the work that the Istanbul summit helped move forward.
1) Refugees, Displacement, and Development: What Should The World Do
President Jim Yong Kim of the World Bank and President David Miliband of the International Rescue Committee discuss how to countries hosting refugees can still promote their national development agendas.
2)Humanitarian summit: Why #ReShapeAid?
Robert Glasser, Head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR); Maarten van Aalst, Director of Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre; Helen Szoke, Chief Executive of Oxfam Australia; Naser Haghamed, CEO of Islamic Relief Worldwide; and Luis Artur, Professor at Eduardo Mondale University, Maputo deliberate on how to manage risks and crises better, as natural disasters become more frequent and intense in a warming world.
3) The 5 Ws of the World Humanitarian Summit
Jenni Lee of the United Nations Foundation on the Who, What, When, Where, and Why of the World Humanitarian Summit.
4) 10 Key Takeaways from the World Humanitarian Summit
The UN Foundation’s own Susan Myers reflects on the events of the World Humanitarian Summit.
These have been big conversations for an even bigger question: How can the world best deliver humanitarian assistance? The answers may not be clear, but what is clear is we have a global community trying to find the answer.
[PHOTO: UN Photo/Rick Bajornas]