Jo Bonner Quotes

C-17s should be ready to go at various military bases around the world packed with water, food, medical supplies, sleeping bags and tents, all prepared to be air dropped in alongside soldiers and doctors to begin relief efforts.

I think we are challenged in how we define humanitarian action today and how we relate to long-term needs. We are also confronted with legitimate expectations from the people who want us to respond far more thoroughly to their basic pleas than we would have done in a much more contained form of conflict.

When we had the hurricanes - Hurricane Harvey - we gave 80,000 pillows down there.

By pouring money and goods into devastated regions, foreign aid workers sometimes compound the disruption and debauch the survivors.

It's sort of well-known that anytime any catastrophe happens anywhere in the world, they can count on the United States for help.

Governments of rich countries spend some $6bn of tax money a year on disaster relief and development aid overseas, while each new earthquake, famine or tidal wave can attract 1,000 aid organisations, from the United Nations Children's Fund and Oxfam to the 'Jesus Brigades' of the American south and other charitable adventurers.

Just a little help, a small security force, a bit of food, can save lives.

My father did a lot of disaster relief work, and he was always in places where there was a lot of pain.

In a world full of competing emergencies and disasters, it really helps if there is an international locomotive that can help us bring attention - help us bring resources.

Apart from the emergency aid we provide to alleviate the sufferings of victims of natural disasters, calamities and crises, we worked for transforming U.A.E.'s charity activities into an institutional activity with an aim of making them more effective and sustainable.

I have been working, as emergency relief coordinator, on an international scale, very hard to build a wider alliance of partners in assistance efforts.

We're creating an attitude that disaster relief is an entitlement program like Medicare of Social Security ....

The first law of disaster relief could well read: every political decision has humanitarian consequences, and every humanitarian program has political implications.

Responding to a natural disaster is a complex problem.

Access to humanitarian assistance and information are all the more important during the Covid-19 pandemic.

During my time in Pakistan, I was asked to lead an expedition to Azad Kashmir following a devastating earthquake in 2005 that claimed the lives of 80,000 people.

To respond to people's needs, humanitarian action has evolved from a temporary fix to a long-term safety net.

As conflicts last longer, as the scale of needs increase, we are having to adapt. There is an increasing blurring between immediate humanitarian assistance and long-term development needs.

Water is necessary, and then generators, and then food, and then clothes.

You saw the traumas that people lived through, and wondered what it will take to move us as a human community, as humanity, to help in these dangerous situations.

We have already provided a strong humanitarian response to the problems in the Middle East and that response will be stronger within coming days.

Many access roads are too dangerous for relief workers, preventing them from carrying out assessments or reaching people in need.

We are looking at what more we can do. As well as a strong security response we need a strong humanitarian one.

We need to be able to demonstrate that what we do in today's world, in humanitarian aid, the enormous effort to minimize the tragic situations that we see all over the world, I think, without the U.N., people would suffer much more, and the situation would be much more terrible.

News reports can overwhelm us. We can be appalled, we can sympathise. But what is hard to grasp is the sense that, at this moment, people are working, organising - not just at an executive level, but on the floor, in the warehouse. A man is packing a box of oral rehydration tablets; maternity kits are being prepared; education kits are being packed. And somewhere, tomorrow, those boxes will be unpacked and a child with life-threatening diarrhoea will be saved, a baby will be born in more hygienic circumstances, a girl will receive her first exercise book and her first pencil.