It seems self-evident that, if people have good living conditions, are less at risk of a natural disaster and actually have access to jobs, they'll want to stay in their country. Most people have no intention of leaving their homes. They don't want to leave their homes, but we're seeing that, with the rise of conflicts and of climate-induced disasters, a lot of international aid is going to humanitarian response.
Our concern at Oxfam, and that we're experiencing ourselves, is that there's a bottoming out of financing for development work. We're running from one emergency to the next, putting a band-aid on and then going to the next place. Ultimately, the programs that invest in job creation, technical and vocational training, women's empowerment, climate-smart agriculture—all those things—are no longer being invested in because all we're doing is rushing around, trucking in water, emergency food aid and cash distribution. We're not investing in what keeps people safe, healthy and at home.
I am concerned about trends I'm seeing where, first of all, global solidarity with countries that are being hit by disasters is strained. Development budgets aren't growing around the world, by any stretch, but on top of it, the fact that we have so many emergencies means that more money is going to humanitarian causes, which we need. However, if you're not doing both in tandem, we're just chasing our tails.
We've talked a long time—and I think I spoke with many of you before—about the need to fund across the humanitarian development peace nexus. What that means is that we need to be connecting the dots so that, when we're going into a community that's been hit by an emergency, we're not only trucking in water for today but we're building, for example, solar-panel desalination plants in that community so that they will have access to water in the long term. It means also that we stop seeing efforts to empower women as non-life-saving and therefore non-fundable under humanitarian programs, which currently is the case.
Humanitarian program definitions are very narrow, so any work that has to do with gender equality or women's empowerment does not meet the definition and can't get funded. If we got rid of these strict barriers between what we consider to be humanitarian response, long-term development and, then, peacebuilding efforts, we could have a more seamless integration of the work that we do.
To give one example that I might have shared with you in the past, Oxfam supported a really interesting program funded by the Government of Canada, a women's voice and leadership program in Pakistan. The whole purpose of the program was to build up the capacity of local women's groups to advance their communities, whether it was with economic development, justice or women's political participation. When the floods hit in Pakistan, many of these organizations we were working with said, “We want to be part of the humanitarian response,” yet we weren't able to use the funding, which we had for programming for these organizations, to allow them to do humanitarian response. The line is so rigidly drawn that it would have required a whole new renegotiation of our programming. That's because the way development funding is generally set up is that it has this clear delineation and you can't move from one to the next.
We're really recommending that, at Global Affairs Canada, we have two things: First is more funding across that nexus of development and humanitarian, and second is that we include things that we refer to as “crisis modifiers”. Basically, when you develop a project, you already know that something is likely going to go wrong, so you anticipate that. In a country that's prone to flooding, for example, within your development program you have crisis modifiers to say, “If flooding hits the region where the programs are happening, then we'll pivot to these sorts of activities rather than having to go back to the drawing board.”