Stepping Out with the UN OCHA Donor Support Group

This week I had a great opportunity to participate in a meeting of Australian NGOs with the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Donor Support Group which was held in Sydney on Monday 7th June.

The Australian Government has been chairing the ODSG this year which is great for the humanitarian community in Australia. The ODSG comprises the main government donors to the work of OCHA and therefore some of the big hitters in the humanitarian world, including the UN’s Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, John Holmes, were attending the meeting.

From a totally personal perspective this was a great opportunity to engage with the international donor community and to discuss some of the big challenges the world faces in preventing and responding to crisis.

It was also familiar ground.

When I was in New York with the UN I used to regularly engage with the Mine Action Donor Support Group (MASG) and I represented UNDP in a MASG Field Trip to Sudan in 2005 which was truly memorable. We were 15 people in Sudan and this included donors from most of Europe, Japan and the States and te group spent a week traversing Southern Sudan by foot, by cars, by bus, by Armoured Personnel Carriers, by helicopter and by aircraft such were the logistical challenges associated with this sort of visit.

Catherine Bragg, who is now the Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator at OCHA was part of that trip to Sudan representing Canada and she was in Sydney this week so it was great to see her again as well as other former colleagues from my time with the UN.

So after all that, what were we actually talking about?

One of the big issues on the table was the need to focus more on preventing conflict and building resilience to disaster rather than respondingto conflicts and disasters. This is particularly relevant in dealing with the vulnerability that is emerging from the Global Food Crisis, Climate Change and the Global Financial Crisis.

In the discussion group I was in , which included a number of governments as well as John Holmes, there was an emerging consensus that we are dealing with multiple challenges of governance, mutual accountability and “chronic acute vulnerability” and there is a need for humanitarian actors to frame their work in this setting. In other words, there is a need for the State to be at the core of reducing people’s vulnerability and for the State and other actors, whether they be the UN, donor governments, or NGOs to be accountable to poor people.

There is  a need to bring together humanitarian and development actors to focus on this challenge and to move away from a focus on the trigger provided by a natural disaster, for example the Haiti Earthquake, to respond.

So in winding  up, there may be more questions than answers, but this was a really valuable opportunity to share thinking and perspectives and a big thank you to ACFID and AusAID for pulling this forum together!