Intergovernmental and UN agencies are highlighting food security and data on migration as challenges that must be addressed in the lead-up to the May 2016 World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, Turkey.
8 April 2016: Intergovernmental and UN agencies are highlighting food security and data on migration as challenges that must be addressed in the lead-up to the May 2016 World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul, Turkey.
At an informal UN General Assembly (UNGA) event on ‘Humanitarian Response in Africa: The Urgency to Act,’ on 8 April in New York, World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director Ertharin Cousin stressed the role of food and nutrition shortages as contributors to conflict and displacement, noting that the impact of changing climates and the El Niño effect have exacerbated ongoing humanitarian crises. She warned that funding constraints and the increased scale of need in East and Central Africa have forced WFP to cut food rations by up to 30% in five out of seven operations.
At the event, UNGA President Mogens Lykketoft called for: taking a long-term approach to financing and building resilience; investing in disaster risk reduction (DRR); breaking down the barriers between development and humanitarian responses so as to move forward together on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of humanitarian work.
On 5 April 2016, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) held a briefing in New York, US on ‘Migration Data for Humanitarian Response and Development,’ as part of its New York Migration Series of information events on contemporary migration issues. The event comprised two panel discussions on challenges of collecting and using migration data in development and humanitarian work, respectively.
Robert Powell, Economist Intelligence Unit, discussed the Migration Governance Index and its policy benchmarking tool, which seeks to identify improvements in migration policy in five “domains” – institutional capacity, migrant rights, migration management, labor economics and investment, and regional and international cooperation and other partnerships. Francesca Perucci, Statistics Division, UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA), said it remains to be seen how migration data can be incorporated into governance systems, noting there is no clear agreement on some aspects of the global indicator framework for monitoring of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Speakers also discussed the role of migration and displacement data in humanitarian response planning and operations, and Sarah Telford, UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, noted the exclusion of data in the discourse surrounding the World Humanitarian Summit. I-Sah Hsieh, SAS Institute, said there has been under-utilization of data to inform disaster response programming, with reference to Typhoon Haiyan and the Nepal earthquake. Speakers said there are insufficient “trust frameworks” and corroborative mechanisms to guard against the potential misuse of data, and drew attention to the IOM’s initiative to develop data protection guidelines. [UN Press Release on Humanitarian Response in Africa Event] [IOM Event Web Page] [IOM Event Summary]