Yes, certainly. It's not to say that the $2.5 billion is not being well spent. It is going to really important work being done by large UN agencies, and some of that gets to front-line local organizations second- or third-hand. The problem is that this shouldn't be the main thing or the only thing. This is a broader critique that I have of the way that humanitarian work is financed, and that's the background I come out of.
The UN agencies do vitally important work, and they're doing vitally important work on this, but they're not the only ones. Making them the principal, almost sole, recipient of humanitarian financing for COVID, which is the habit that the humanitarian system has had for many years and is now being applied to this crisis, is not going to serve us well here.
Usually there's a comfort blanket in giving a lot of money to the UN, knowing it will look after it well. I think it is very important for donors like Canada and the United States to find creative ways and to take some risks they're not used to taking to get money not just to the UN but also to those front-line community organizations that don't normally get direct donor money, that usually have a lot of intermediary layers among them. Those front-line community organizations are going to do really vital work.
In the lesson we saw in Ebola in west Africa, those organizations were some of the most credible, the most persuasive and the most engaged in their local communities. We need to make sure they're getting the support they need from the big, familiar international groups.