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I am going to do five things in the next five minutes. I am going to tell you why this issue
of humanitarian need will remain on our agenda even after Haiti has faded from the headlines.
I am going to tell you about the track record of the World Economic Forum on this issue.
I am going to tell you about the work that the Global Agenda Council has done, and what
we want to do next. I am going to ask for your help in making that happen. Haiti is
on all our minds, but it is far from an isolated case. 200 million are affected each year through
natural disaster, through war, through drought. That number is going up, and it is going to
go up faster because of climate change, and because of population increase – all these
things are connected. We expect a caseload at least 25% higher by 2015.
Now, the World Economic Forum has known this, and has worked on it for some time, and there
have been a series of initiatives. When there is a famine, or a disaster, as in Haiti, the
Forum rallies. People ring up; they offer things. The Forum acts as a broker on this.
The partnerships are in place. The Forum collaborated with the UN in order to provide guiding principles
for the private sector working in emergencies. It has put together teams across companies
in different sectors, for example on logistics, so that logistics teams can go out and manage
the airports, manage the communications. There is a construction team; there are health teams.
There is an overarching framework known as the Disaster Resource Partnerships. What they
have demonstrated through this work is that the private sector can be a useful partner,
provided that it has the right approach, is managed right, and works well with others.
Now, at the top of this list is the work that we have been doing in the Global Agenda Council.
We’ve called it in order to try and focus minds on a new business model for humanitarian
assistance. It’s about moving away from the Haitis, and making disaster response look
a little bit more like China. China didn’t need a massive internal injection of people
and resources in order to deliver change because it was prepared, because it was organised,
because it had the stockpiles, because it had the command-and-control structures. What
we want to have is a six-step reformulation of our approach to humanitarian assistance,
which will mean that we never again have another Haiti to deal with.
We need to start with risk. We need to understand where the risks are. This is just an example
of the UK National Risk Register. What’s the likelihood? If it does happen, what is
the possible consequence of any kind of shock to the stability of the system? We need to
then rebalance the spending so that we have more on prevention and more on preparedness,
and of course more on recovery. We want to make this enormous and rather cost-ineffective
explosion of emergency relief less necessary in the future. That means having good people
in place in advance. Investing in national and local capacity: that’s the thing that
China has, and Haiti doesn’t. Then we want the private sector engaged in this, because
you have the skills and you have the resources that the public sector and the NGOs don’t
have. Of course, it’s part of a much wider conversation about how we embed humanitarian
relief in wider social and economic development. A new global partnership, therefore, linking
the governments, the private sector, and civil society nationally and internationally; locally
driven, embedded in chambers of commerce, with mayors, in regions, at local level, and
then built up, and coordinated, and supported globally. We think we can deliver that. We
think we can make a big difference to the way in which future emergencies are managed.
We have written this in a challenge paper that we published at the end of last year,
and in the proposal that we circulated.
The question we are now addressing – and this is where we need your help – is where
do we take this next? We think we know what needs to be done, and we’d like to be challenged
on whether it’s right. Now we need to go to ground, and try it out, and then begin
to scale it up. We’ve talked in our council about various places where we might do this.
Of course, Haiti would have been on our agenda, although now I think to talk about long-term
preparedness in Haiti is a bit of a stretch, given the scale of the current need. South
East Asia, though, has been battered by repeated shocks: of course, the tsunami, but also the
typhoons and the cyclones, and the problems they have had with mini-tsunamis this year.
There is a big earthquake zone, of course. There was an earthquake in the Philippines
only yesterday, and there is capacity and there is interest to do more about this subject
in the ASEAN region. We think ASEAN is a high priority for this kind of work, but there
are others. We would like to see work in Southern Africa; we would like to see work in South
Asia, and of course, along the Andes – indeed, everywhere. We can’t do this without
new friends, new partnerships, new support, new resources. We think we can deliver that
together, but we want to be pointed in the right direction, and we want you to help.
Thank you.