The 6th annual Global Humanitarian Policy Forum (GHPF), organised by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), took place on 13 December in New York on the theme “Reaching for the future: Humanitarianism in 2030”. The event explored the following overarching question: “What is the scale and depth of change required by the humanitarian sector to contribute toward lifting the most vulnerable out of crises between now and 2030?”
With introductory speeches by the UN Deputy-Secretary-General, Ms. Amina Mohammed, and the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Mark Lowcock, the Forum focused on several key topics from the World Humanitarian Summit and the commitments of the Grand Bargain, such as localisation and the humanitarian-development nexus, and on protection issues, particularly in new forms of urban warfare, which have a terrifying impact on civilian populations.
The debates helped to reinforce awareness of the seriousness of the issues at stake and the scale of the challenges ahead. For Groupe URD, this will imply focusing more on the management of complex and protracted crises – for example, through the development of our agile management tools to help the sector to work better in these fragile contexts – and on war contexts and humanitarian crises in urban environments. Because of these challenges, our role as an independent think tank that is able to produce methods and tools is all the more important.