2014 was a tumultuous year. Fresh fighting rocked countries like the Central African Republic, Ukraine and South Sudan, even as ongoing violence in Syria and Iraq lingered. The turmoil left more people displaced from their homes than ever recorded before. More people died in this year’s Ebola outbreak than in all the previous outbreaks of the virus combined.
Major humanitarian organizations saw their budgets exhausted by the relentless stream of war and disaster, and are now grappling with the consequences. “2014 was a year of unprecedented global humanitarian need,” Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, told The WorldPost. “Aid organizations have been pushed to their limits in 2014.”
When funding falls short, the consequences can be tragic. For instance, when the U.N. World Food Program announced in December that it was suspending aid because of unfulfilled donor commitments, Syrian refugees faced the dire choice of going hungry or returning to a war zone. The full suspension was averted by a last-ditch appeal to donors, and food rations resumed at a reduced level.
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Bennett says that since the 2008 financial crisis, humanitarian agencies have been under pressure from donors to increase efficiency. Her group recommends that agencies move away from “reactive” annual funding appeals to “proactive” multi-year strategies, stay focused on the work they do best and abandon a one-size-fits-all approach to emergencies that may take place in vastly different contexts.
Yet humanitarian work does not always fit these business-style tactics. “You can’t always plan an emergency,” Bennett notes. Further, sometimes reaching the people most in need is necessarily expensive. “The best humanitarian response is not always the most cost-effective,” she said.
“No country, no emergency, no person in need should be forgotten,” the UN’s Laerke agreed.
