For Human Dignity

The World Humanitarian Summit: the challenge to deliver

The UN Secretary-General has called the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 ‘to make humanitarian action fit for the future'. Tens of millions of people receive humanitarian aid every year, but millions more suffer without adequate help and protection, and their number is relentlessly rising. One summit cannot change everything. But the key tests of its integrity and success are that the World Humanitarian Summit:

  • demands that states are held to account for their international obligations on assistance and protection; and
  • sets out genuinely new ways to support local humanitarian action, to reverse the growing gap between the amount of aid needed and given, and to reduce the risk of future disasters.