Jan Egeland Quotes

The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness, and the related Accra Agenda for Action, are useful policy instruments that set out the mutual responsibilities of donors and recipient countries.

We encourage the international community to redouble its efforts to support social and economic development in South Sudan for the benefit of the citizens of the new country.

But the Western countries that link their partnership with the poorest countries with respect for democracy also have to consider that they have obligations towards these countries.

Our assistance in Somalia has been remarkably effective and successful, and we have helped with very small resources - a large group of people and we can now do even more.

We won the war, but we are losing the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq. It is past time for a new approach, one that relies on accountability, responsibility, and phasing down the scope of our military commitment.

But you are absolutely right that when the international community decides to help in a meaningful manner a country like Afghanistan, then coordination between the various actors that are involved in these processes is very, very difficult indeed.

If development is the new name for peace, war and preparations for war are the major enemy of the healthy development of peoples

The Playground of Foreign Aid Experimentation: From 2006 to 2011, development aid from countries and multilateral organizations amounted to more than $30 billion, with limited results, much of the funds fueling mismanagement and corruption.

India will continue to support Afghanistan in all possible ways.

As one of the leading troop-contributing countries, Ethiopia attaches great importance to strengthening the role of United Nations peacekeeping to address challenges to international peace and security.

In Afghanistan, I was talking to Afghan elders who were world-weary of a lack of sustained attention from their own government and from the international community to stop problems early.

Humanitarian assistance, once conceived as a short-term relief effort, is increasingly the only substitute for long-term development work in protracted armed conflicts.

Obviously there is not money enough in the world to relieve the suffering of the peoples of the underdeveloped areas, but ... there is, for the first time in history, enough knowledge to do the job.

If it's radical to want an end to war and an end to violence, so that we can devote ourselves to the challenges of peace, then I'm pleased to call myself a radical.

In peacetime without war, they have destroyed all that could be destroyed. We are standing on one-sixth of the world, a rich country with our pants down and hoping someone will help us.

This organization [the United Nations] is created to prevent you from going to hell. It isn't created to take you to heaven.

The United States must create a permanent nation-building agency.

… the many armed conflicts which continue to afflict the world today present us daily with dramatic images of misery, hunger, illness and death. Without peace, there can be no form of economic development.  Violence never begets peace, the necessary condition for development.

If we can afford tremendous sums of money to win the war, we can afford to invest whatever amount it takes to win the peace

The typical American-funded [foreign aid] project has American contractors who take, between overheads back home and in-the-area administrative fees, 35 to 50 percent. It used to be, by the way, that every developed country did this, but America is about the only one still doing it. And I’ve been trying to break it for a long time …. I hope I don’t have to be buried knowing that we’re still the only rich country in the world that gives this … percentage of foreign-aid money to our own people.

Preventing conflict means going back to basics - strengthening institutions and building resilient societies.

Here we will solve with laws and dollars, problems that too many people around the world still must solve with violence and civil war.

We need to end our country's counterproductive regime change war policies that have undermined our national security, destroyed so many countries, and taken so many lives. We must instead focus on investing in and rebuilding our communities right here at home.

In fragile and conflict-affected states, education can insulate children from chaos and insecurity and better prepare them to bring about future stability.

We cannot leave the Central Africans abandoned. Everyone needs to be mobilized to help this country build a future that Central Africans deserve.