Speech: How can we do better for the world's hungry: lessons learned from the EU-WFP partnership

European Commission

[Check Against Delivery]

Kristalina GEORGIEVA

EU Commissioner for international cooperation, humanitarian aid and crisis response

How can we do better for the world's hungry: lessons learned from the EU-WFP partnership

Opening the Executive Board meeting of the World Food Programme

Rome, 3 June 2014

It is a great honour to join you for today’s Executive Board meeting.

Every year, for nearly 100 million children, women and men, the WFP is the only defence against the cruelty of hunger and the devastating force of malnutrition. This defence is delivered by your committed, brave, professional staff. So, Ms. Cousin, what I want to do first is to say thank you to you and to each and every one of the people of WFP.

Ten days ago I saw your people in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina where they were helping in the response to the enormous floods. Indeed the speed with which you responded was hugely appreciated. I saw the delivery in a small village where people who are now displaced by the floods were not long ago displaced by the war. Their lives are crushed a second time around. So the help you have provided really touched - it was not only the physical presence but also the care that has been expressed that people there appreciate very much.

In my four and a half years as Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, I have witnessed unspeakable suffering of innocent people whose lives are crushed by disasters or conflicts and time and again the majority of the victims come from the ranks of the most vulnerable people. Eighty percent of the victims come from 20 percent children, women, elderly, the handicapped with least resistance to cope. Unfortunately we also now see that the trend is to an increase of those who need help because of increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters, as you said driven by climate change, because after a retreat in the 1990s, armed conflicts are on the increase. We face more complex crises that overlap, record you said, four crises which has never happened before. But at the same time we also face more protracted crises; crises that fall out of attention and they still have behind them millions of people who rely on our assistance.

And it comes to the credit of the World Food Programme that you have risen to this challenge to serve more people and serve them better. I am proud that we in the European Union, our Member States, some of them are here, we in the Commission have been your determinedly committed partner together with our Member States we deliver about one billion dollars annually as financial contributions to your work.

What I would like to do today is to share some of the main lessons we have learned together on how we can cope and do better for people who so much rely on us.

The first lesson we have learned is very simple and straightforward: Good policies matter. How we do, how we provide help, matters enormously for the effectiveness of this help. And obviously in a world with increased needs and finite financial and human resources, we must deploy the best possible policies to help people who rely on that assistance often for their survival. We have taken a very crucial step forward as an international community to move from food aid to food assistance. With the new Food Assistance Convention that hopefully everybody here has already signed and ratified and if there are countries that have not, I am sure they are on the way to doing it. Because this convention has moved us away from addressing hunger, by delivering the food the more fortunate of us produce in excess to our needs, to using whatever is the most appropriate tool, whether it is in-kind assistance or cash or vouchers, to help people, but also not to kill the local farmers, as we feed the country. And that shift is one that already is demonstrating results where it is applied and of course we still have a way to go, but I think we have gone a very, very long way.

We, the European Union, have been championing the provision of cash and vouchers. Why do we believe this is so important? There are four reasons for it and they are: dignity, effectiveness, efficiency, empowerment. Dignity, because when people receive cash, it is their choice how they can best help themselves. If you lose, as people just did in Serbia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina, you lose your house, you lose your livelihood, you probably are the best person to figure out how to rebuild your assets. You can be trusted, you must be trusted with this decision. So when we look for the choice of cash, it is dignified and it puts a decision-making opportunity in the hands of people. It is effective because we feed the people but we also contribute to the local food production, we contribute to the local economy. And also what we do is, if properly targeted, we might actually prevent the worst from happening by acting early with cash. Let me give you one example. We have in the Niger a programme that we have collaboratively developed, it is for 1.6 million people, cash given just before the lean season is to hit, and people with cash in hand can not only face this without the negative impact especially on children, but cash in hand means that they can protect their assets rather than losing their livestock; for many this is their economic well-being, then they can use cash. Third, it is efficient, when we can give cash we cut, not only the middle man but also the transportation cost, the delivery cost, that are associated with in-kind delivery. Last, but not least, cash in the hands of women is one of the most effective ways we have to empower women, especially in rural communities. Just talking to you, two memories come to my mind; one is we are in Chad and we have given cell phones to women through which they would receive their monthly cash allocation. These women slept with their cell phones, the cell phone was not just access to money, it made them important in their community, it gave them status that they did not have before. One of my favourite memories from my life as Commissioner is in the Niger where we gave vouchers to women equivalent to about 30 euros and when I visited the village, the women met me, all of them holding their voucher cards up in their hand with big smiles on their faces and the men were also there. And I asked the men: how did you feel about us giving the money to the women and not to you? And one of them said something very interesting. He said: you know, initially I really did not like it, but if you were to give me the money, I would have bought a bicycle and we would have been hungry. So empowering women is not just for the sake of checking a box, it is because women in certain circumstances make excellent decisions for their families and especially in the fight against hunger and malnutrition. They are the foot soldiers on the frontline.

A second example of why policies matter is the commitment to resilience. We have re-thought quite significantly how we do humanitarian aid and development in places vulnerable to recurrent shocks from natural disasters and also from conflicts but especially from natural disasters. How can we help individuals, families, communities, countries, to better withstand these shocks so there are fewer people that fall into despair and the need for humanitarian aid? And obviously for this we do have to link relief and development, we do need to look at how collectively we can build the early warning systems, the targeted early action and assist local communities to have the strength to cope. You have done something remarkable over the last years, you are now purchasing the equivalent of USD 844 million of food from developing countries, from local markets. This is a contribution to resilience. In our programmes, you have done an amazing shift from in-kind to cash and vouchers, the share of cash in our partnership has gone up from 8 percent to 32 percent just over 3 years, this is remarkable and it is all about building resilience. And actually I would put in parenthesis, I do not want people in this room to think that we in the EU value cash and do not like in kind, no we like everything. Our message is, it has to be appropriately placed. If we can do cash, we must do cash but sometimes when we cannot, obviously we have to deliver in kind. As you have said, I am now headed for the Philippines and indeed this is exactly what we have done there.

My second message is that policies matter but only if we have the organizational capabilities to apply them. And in this sense, we are very, very supportive of 'Fit for Purpose'. Taking your institution to a higher level of efficiency, bringing your national and international staff to be one team with one goal and one set of rules. This is enormously important for us to be able to implement policies coherently and consistently everywhere. Your commitment to cutting costs and improving transparency and accountability - this is also music to the ear of everyone who puts money in the World Food Programme,. But I want to stress that we in Europe, we walk our own talk, we ask you to do it but we do it ourselves. In our directorate, ECHO, we have undertaken a functional review resulting in between 15 and 20 percent efficiency gains by eliminating little procedures that do not add value for money but rather distract from it. And we also have reviewed our own field network, we have offices in about 40 countries, some 440 people are there, international and national staff. How can we make this one team, one goal, one set of rules, as a donor, as funders we have an obligation when we demand to also do, and I want to stress that we demand from you because we do as well.

My third message is on partnerships. We can have the best policies and the operational capabilities and resources, but in a world changing towards more fragility, none of us, none of us, can succeed alone, we need to work together, much more than before and this notion of partnerships is actually today not a good thing to do, it is paramount if we are to succeed. We are very supportive of what you do with the Rome-based agencies, working with the national governments, working with NGOs, looking for the private sector, and we believe that this has to result in a higher degree of integrity of operations everywhere. I will give you one example. In Lebanon, UNHCR and World Food Programme have gone, and rightly so, towards using the middle-income status of the country, the well-developed financial system, to deliver assistance using cash cards. And obviously this is great but we can do better because instead of having two cash cards we can have what, one. So that is we have to continue on every angle, at every opportunity, to look for ways where we can achieve the benefit of partnership. And again, we hold ourselves accountable to that too, I look at your new Board member, the world’s new Board member, here from Brazil, we have done a twinning arrangement with Brazil, Brazil had the food but not the cash to transport, we came up with the cash and Zambia benefitted from it at the moment when they really needed it. This mind set of partnership is something that we all have to embrace and of course I know your commitment and I am very pleased to be here to listen to you talking about it.

Finally, money - in the EU, we hold ourselves accountable to delivering on our promises. We have made a commitment for this year, we have had some cash flow problems just because last year was extremely harsh on everybody and this year we stepped into a new financial perspective, into a new financial period. But I just want to say we promise, we deliver, we are coming up with the funding for you. I was recently in the Central African Republic and in Cameroon. I know what you are talking about when you say Cameroon needs help. A very generous country, but it has never had to cope with humanitarian crises, now they have the Central African Republic crisis upon them and up in the north they also have Boko Haram, which is pressuring the country. So I just want to say we would not fail you, we would not fail the most needy people on this planet.

I want to finish with the following. I have many memories from my term as a Commissioner, but there was this one scene that I would never ever forget and that has a very strong moral core to it. I was in my home country in Bulgaria with my granddaughter, at that time she was eighteen months old - a healthy kid, big cheeks, very happy, smiling and crying sometimes. The next day I was in Chad in a clinic for severely malnourished children where you deliver the miracle food to save their lives. And I walked into this room full of children, at least 40, and the room was quiet. These kids were so weak, not only could they not laugh or play, they could not even cry. This deafening silence of a room full of children is what makes me - as a Commissioner but also as a grandmother - absolutely committed to do all I can to fight the unspeakable horror of hunger. In this room some time ago, I saw a sign in a movie that you projected and it said: ‘Hunger is the world’s greatest solvable problem’. I will finish my term but not my determination that we can solve it.

I will pass the regards of this group here to the President of the Philippines and I am assured of the support the country has striving to overcome all the impact of Typhoon Haiyan. So thank you.