News Analysis: World humanitarian summit ends with high hopes

"We are one humanity with a shared responsibility," the first-ever World Humanitarian Summit ended here on Tuesday with these words of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon.

"We are here to shape a different future," Ban said. "Let us resolve here and now not only to keep people alive, but to give people a chance at a life in dignity."

The summit has brought together more than 5,000 delegates from 177 member states, including 65 heads of governments for the first time in UN history to re-design the current humanitarian system.

The system has long been proved to be inadequate to address the increasing demand for humanitarian aid for about 130 million displaced people amid hundreds killed in a recent earthquake in Ecuador, thousands more had been fleeing from bombings and war atrocities in Syria and millions facing hunger in southern Africa.

During the two-day summit, participants tried to develop new methods to the system in five core responsibility domains: Conflict prevention, protection of civilians, leaving no one behind, ending the need for humanitarian aid and investing in humanity.

Ban mostly pressed the world leaders to show a political will of a scale and scope not seen in recent years to prevent wars and save the generations.

The leaders basically admitted that the governments failed to turn promises into action from the borders of Syria to the shores of the Mediterranean so far, and the current humanitarian system is not working anymore.

For the first time the world leaders, to prevent conflicts, are determined to focus on the root causes and try to better analyze economic, social and cultural factors while paying more attention to the conflict resolution in the post-conflict sphere.

Andrea Jamburini, the CEO of "Action against Hunger," expressed his optimism that the summit will create profound changes on the humanitarian aid system.

"We not only call on related actors to uphold international humanitarian law, but we also commit ourselves to certain actions to make sure the future will be better for civilians caught in conflict and humanitarian workers," he said.

The head of International committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer also noted that the summit could build a momentum of peer pressure and have a snow ball effect.

"The Grand Bargain is a good example of peer pressure -- you come to this summit and you commit to the improvement, effectiveness and efficiency of humanitarian assistance work and this is a positive step in the right direction," he said.

The Grand Bargain, a package of 51 measures, aims to make the humanitarian aid system more efficient by delivering increasingly flexible and more localized aid in a collaborative way. The UN claimed it would save 1 billion dollar a year.

During the summit, 30 donors and aid agencies signed up to the Grand Bargain.

"This was boosted by individual country commitments to give more aid to those in need," said Ria Voorhaar, the director of Global Strategic Communications Council to Xinhua.

She noted that Belgium was committed to give 25 percent of its funding to local and national groups by 2020, while Switzerland will ensure 50 percent of its official development assistance to states in fragile situations.

The NGOs have long been arguing that "empowering of local communities" would be a better way to cope with humanitarian crises. Their complaints mostly concentrated on the involvement of the intermediary organizations and the high overheads.

"I think the message of national NGOs working in the field has been heard as they seemed very committed to pushing the international community to change the overall system," Erdem Vardar, the head of Turkish NGO "Yuva", told Xinhua.

In the current system, only less than two percent of the total funding goes to local actors, who are in direct contact with the effected people.

Now the UN aims to increase the rate to 20 to 30 percent by 2020 with the help of Grand Bargain.

However, absence of key leaders of G7 countries created a wave of disappointment among participants. Both Ban and Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan told reporters that it is "disappointing" that most G7 leaders failed to show up at the summit.

According to Veysel Ayhan, expert on Syria and Iraq and head of International Middle East Peace Research Center based in Istanbul, the summit has just opened the door to the close inspection of the current system.

"We do not expect the summit to eradicate the current humanitarian crisis once and for all," he told Xinhua, stressing that the crisis is too serious and "day by day the international institutions are falling short of creating a workable support system in the face of such a big crisis."

He urged the UN to develop a more transparent system, which would be open to the audit by third parties. Enditem