Let me say two things on that.
First, private sector organizations play a very big role in the delivery of assistance—in logistics, in supply chain, and in procurement. Lots of what reaches people in the middle of these crises comes through private sector routes.
Second, let me also, though, say that I think there is an opportunity for a growing private sector role in financing humanitarian action. I basically see three significant new opportunities—against the caveat that most of what needs to happen, I think, will need to continue to be done on a philanthropic, grant, pro bono basis. But I do see three significant new opportunities.
The first is that more crises that we're dealing with are insurable. You recall the hurricanes that hit the Caribbean in September 2017. With assistance from donor countries, a number of those islands had taken out insurance policies, and some of those policies paid out within days. For some cases, maybe 10% of what we're dealing with, insurance is a vehicle. Insurance works well when there is a low chance of the event happening but the event is very costly. For things like hurricanes, if you're an island, there is low chance but they are very costly. That's the first area.
The second area relates to work we're doing, in particular with the World Bank, to try to move the humanitarian financing system away from one that is essentially reactive—by which I mean that we watch the crisis build up and we see people in need, and then people like me go around the world and ask for money, and then we respond, and all that takes time—to a position that is more pre-agreed on and that involves arrangements being put in place in advance, which can be automatically and instantly triggered once disaster strikes.
The World Bank has various products to provide contingency financing, which can be released automatically when disaster strikes, rather than going through that process to mobilize support in advance. Of course, the World Bank is backed, basically, by the purchases of its bonds, as well as by donor countries. That creates an additional source of finance if they do more of these contingency financing products than they've done in the past.
The third area in which I think there are some opportunities relates to the role of impact investing. In lots of fields of public policy at the moment, impact investing involves private sector investors who are willing to invest in something that has at least a small return if there's some social impact. It's a growing field of activity in public policy internationally. There is scope for that in humanitarian action as well. For example, the International Committee of the Red Cross has issued a bond to raise resources to enable them to accelerate activity, to bring forward activity, to help disabled people in crises.
That impact investing possibility, I think, does have an important role to play, but it's important not to pretend that everything we're doing can be financed in that way. Ultimately, most of the problems we're dealing with involve people with absolutely nothing who need help on a pro bono basis.
Nevertheless, in those three areas, we can expand our collaboration with the private sector on financing issues.