Dominic Crowley: Reflections on the last six years

Dear all,

It has been both a privilege and a great pleasure to have been a member of the VOICE Board and, for the last six years, the VOICE President. I would like to sincerely thank the Board in place in 2018 for proposing me to the GA, and for the VOICE members that year for approving my nomination, and for doing so again in 2021.

I would also like to congratulate Pauline Chetcuti on her election as our next President and wish her the very best as she takes on this role. With a great Board and Secretariat in place, she has a very strong team to work with as she takes on what I have found to be a position that was demanding at times, but always interesting.

It is sometimes hard to coherently represent the diverse views of a network as broad as VOICE. However, the active engagement of our members in the HP Watch Group and Task Force, and the Resilience-Nexus Working Group, and the excellent facilitation role of these groups by the Secretariat have provided essential insight into some of the challenges of our members and the areas that we need to work on with ECHO – either through pushing them to move things forward themselves, or to work with them on influencing other EU mechanisms.

Throughout my time as President, our various position papers, studies, publications and events have been consistently timely and of a very high quality. They have been an essential additional element in our efforts to capture a broad range of opinions and to ensure that the EU continues to support effective and principled humanitarian aid. As we go into a new Parliament in the coming weeks, the need to defend and promote principled humanitarian aid may well prove to be more essential than ever, and we have made this the focus of this year’s Policy Resolution.

Broad Member State support for principled humanitarian aid is going to be ever more critical in the coming years. The humanitarian community’s disproportionate reliance on the US and a very small number of European donors (more than 70% of the funding reported on the UN FTS has come from just five donors in each of the last two years) is unsustainable. We need to do all that we can to encourage our Member State governments to make proportionate contributions to the humanitarian aid budget, ideally copying the strong Spanish example of committing 0.7% of GNI to their aid budgets, with 10% of that being committed to humanitarian funding. The record gap in humanitarian funding that we saw at the end of 2023 seems unlikely to improve this year, with the GHO appeal only 17% funded as we enter the second half of the year. As has been noted in the past, if all G20 states met the 0.7% GNI commitment, there would be no funding gap.

IHL seeks to limit the effects of armed conflict by outlining the responsibilities of states and non-state armed groups during an armed conflict. If we look at the new conflicts in the last two years – Tigray, Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza – it is clear that IHL’s basic principles – including the need for parties to the conflict to protect non-combatants, the methods and means of production and health facilities and staff, as well as ensuring rapid and unimpeded access to humanitarian aid – are all being routinely violated. It is essential that we seek to encourage the EU and its Member States to continue to support all actions that promote IHL and hold to account those who have violated it.

Our achievements over the last six years are ones that could only have been achieved collectively, with the VOICE network working constructively together on the issues that are essential in allowing our members to respond effectively to the needs of disaster affected populations, whether directly or through their engagement with local and national partners.

Finally, one thing that has characterised my time on the VOICE Board is that I have had the pleasure of working with excellent people in both the Secretariat and on the Board. People who have been deeply committed to working in the interests of the people who VOICE’s members seek to support. I would like to thank all of them for making my time on the Board so enjoyable, informative and inspiring.

I wish you all the best in the future,

Dominic Crowley