John Holmes: New “business model” for humanitarian aid

IRIN: You are on the WEF Council on Humanitarian Assistance. What specific ideas have you brought to the council in terms of climate change and food insecurity?

JH: What we were discussing was the need to do two things which aren’t exactly new ideas but we were trying to formulate them in a reasonably coherent way. One is to spend a lot more time and effort on what you might call the upstream side - the prevention, the disaster risk reduction, the preparedness side so that there is more effort and more resources and more thought going into that, rather than concentrating too much on the response side after the event - which is necessary because you need to help people when they’re in their moment of need but it is not a very good investment because you can’t solve any problems that way. And the second related thought is to try to empower national governments, local communities, maybe regional organisations - to make them have more capacity, be more empowered, so that the international community doesn’t need to intervene so much and can reserve itself for cases of really major need. So those two things go together if we can get that combination right. It is what we try to describe as a new business model for humanitarian assistance. These thoughts have been had before but we are trying to encapsulate them in a new way.

IRIN: But what has hindered this development? Kofi Annan when he was UN secretary-general talked about the need for humanitarians to move from a culture of response to a culture of prevention. This has not happened yet.

JH: I think it is something to do with human nature. In our personal lives we know that prevention is better than cure, prevention health is better than response afterwards, but we don’t actually behave in ways which correspond to that. I think similarly governments and international institutions know in theory that it’s much better to invest more and do more on the prevention side but they don’t actually do it. You have to convince finance ministers, you have to convince presidents and prime ministers that they need to invest in something the results of which will only be seen in 10 or 15 years when they may no longer be in power. That is quite a tricky thing to do. So you’ve got to have your arguments marshalled. You have got to be able to prove to them - as we hope to be able to do in the new study which is under way - that this is actually a really good investment because there are going to be more and more disasters from climate change and hence the importance of the disaster risk reduction agenda because of the link to climate change.

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