Human Appeal Statement at World Humanitarian Summit 2016

1. As part of the humanitarian community, Human Appeal supports the Humanity Agenda as a vital framework for action, change and mutual accountability. It’s imperative we capitalise on our collective efforts made over the past years to open up the humanitarian sector to a much wider group of actors through the inclusive process and consultations undertaken.

2. As Human Appeal, we would like to further emphasise our belief that faith can play a pivotal role in meeting this Agenda, specifically in ways that go far beyond dialogue as stated in Core Responsibility one, Part D. Faith has a positive and underestimated role to play in all facets of preparedness, prevention, mitigation, response, rehabilitation, recovery and reconciliation in both natural and human-made disasters. It’s Faith that binds humans together and becomes a true motivating force to achieve ends.

3. Restrictions on direct humanitarian access and the inability to transfer funds to some parts of the world, where the needs are the greatest, without encouraging significant organisational risk and undue scrutiny not only erodes the independent and impartial delivery of humanitarian aid but leads to denying people basic services and oftentimes, their death. Such restrictions need to be eased.

4. We believe in empowering teams and building capacity of our humanitarian aid workers in the field. We suggest joint capacity building measures from humanitarian actors in accordance with the Core Humanitarian Standards if we are to see significant, sustained and positive efforts to save and improve the lives of at-risk communities affected by conflict, emergency and disaster.

5. NGOs often feel their role in the UN clusters is passive, as they take direction from the cluster lead agencies in the overall humanitarian response. We suggest successful, effective and equal partnerships in all aspects of humanitarian response: from assessment, analysis and planning, to implementation, financing and evaluation.

6. As such, if we are to fulfil our collective values, vision and commitments to key instruments, declarations, principles and resolutions we can’t forget the importance of not only our local partners on the ground in the forms of national NGOs and local CBOs but that of the people on the ground who we are supposed to be serving; the beneficiaries.

On behalf of Human Appeal, we suggest that our recommendations be fully incorporated in the outcomes of the World Humanitarian Summit.

Othman Moqbel
Chief Executive Officer