confidentially speaking
The Africa Confidential Blog
Fixing the global system failure
Blue Lines
Close to 300 million people are reliant on humanitarian aid as a consequence of the 55 civil conflicts raging across the world, a handful of them in Africa. The UN and other international agencies complain about donors' being reluctant to fund the necessary volume of humanitarian aid. But the problems are more structural.
David Miliband, who heads the International Rescue Committee in New York, argues that we're facing a three-sided system failure, of states, diplomacy and aid. The worst conflicts in Africa – in Ethiopia, Libya and the Sahel – bear this out. Ethiopia's 14-month civil war has underscored the costs of this system failure. Over 5 million people are reliant on food aid in the Tigray region alone but Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed's government has been repeatedly accused of preventing food aid and vital medical services from reaching them.
Both Abiy's government and the Tigrayan forces have refused to join serious negotiations. Neither regional players nor western powers have been able to prompt dialogue. Without illusions, Miliband calls for two key reforms: establishing an independent office for the protection of humanitarian access; and backing France's proposal that the veto in the UN Security Council should be scrapped in cases of mass atrocity such as Ethiopia and Sudan. Both reforms fall short of what is necessary but could begin to address the worsening system failure.
