Markku Niskala, Secretary General, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
June 30 was the last day of work as Secretary General of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for 62-year-old Markku Niskala. He began his career in the Red Cross as district manager for the Finnish Red Cross and steadily moved up the ranks. Eight years later, he left for Africa on a three-year assignment as representative of the League of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies – as the International Federation was called then – for Zambia, then Tanzania and Zimbabwe. After a stint as Head of the Federation’s Europe department in Geneva, from 1985 to 1987, his Red Cross career brought him back to southern Africa for a series of missions in several countries, which included Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia. In 1988, he became secretary general of the Finnish Red Cross. Markku Niskala began serving as CEO of the Federation as interim secretary general on July 1st, 2003. He was named permanently to the post in November the same year.
On the eve of his departure, Mr. Niskala reflected on 38 years of humanitarian work and five years as secretary general.
As my mandate is coming to end as Secretary General of the world’s largest humanitarian network after five passionate years in Geneva, I am well aware that the world is changing at enormous pace.
Within the humanitarian sector, this acceleration is perhaps even more noticeable. Yesterday’s world seems to have been replaced by another much more disturbing one, which is fraught with uncertainty and upheaval.
During my five years with the IFRC, I have seen at first hand how natural disasters have increased in frequency and intensity.
We all remember the earthquake that shook Bam in Iran in 2003, the tsunami in 2004, and the earthquake that devastated Pakistan in 2005, or Hurricane Katrina the same year. More recently, Myanmar was hammered by Cyclone Nargis, and Sichuan in China was ravaged by a deadly earthquake.
These major events are, however, merely the visible face of an exponential increase in disasters over the past decade. While the year-on-year increases may not always be significant, the overall trend is clear: the number of disasters has almost doubled in ten years, rising from an average of 230 a year in 1988-1997, to 380 a year from 1998 to 2007. And while it is the vulnerable people who are most often affected, nobody is safe.
Another sign of the times is that the biggest killers are not earthquakes or floods, but droughts. There is mounting scientific evidence that planetary alterations are occurring as a result of climate change. The signs are already palpable for tens of millions of people, whose way of life is being irreversibly threatened.
In the wake of such disasters, a spiral is set in motion which results in greater suffering and risks: the swelling tide of migration from the South to the North. Centres for refugees or displaced persons turn into urban settlements, as the provisional slowly becomes permanent. In 2007, for the first time in history, the world’s urban inhabitants outnumbered its rural ones. This is a trend that is unlikely to lose momentum, with vast belts of poverty and violence forming on city outskirts.
On the health front, the battle against HIV and AIDS is far from over in spite of intense mobilization in recent years. Significant progress in combating malaria, polio and measles cannot obscure the emergence of other major risks, such as multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, the spread of malaria to higher altitudes, and the spectre of deadly epidemics such as the threat of avian influenza being transmitted to humans.
The spiral continues at a dizzying pace. Food insecurity has come to the foreground in recent months as an international concern, with the reappearance of food riots in different parts of the world. It is not just a issue of food security, but a matter of human security.
Climate change poses a new challenge. Humanitarian agencies such as the Red Cross Red Crescent, in contact with the day-to-day reality of the families most in need, are in a front-line position to witness these growing hazards, sound the alert and propose solutions.
Response alone is no longer enough. There is now a pressing need to invest heavily in the area of prevention - to provide the most exposed communities with the means to protect themselves from crises, anticipate disasters and universalize early warning systems, so that people can take control of their lives.
Today, less than five per cent of public aid is spent on risk prevention, while the bulk of it is swallowed up by emergency response. A more even balance must be achieved. For every dollar spent on prevention, there is a saving of between four and six dollars in emergency response. For example, Red Cross Red Crescent disaster preparedness programmes in Mozambique and Bangladesh have saved thousands of lives in recent years.
The Red Cross Red Crescent is working hard to improve the lives of vulnerable people worldwide. But a single humanitarian operator, however powerful, cannot make a difference alone.
In order to achieve the impact required to meet these challenges, it is necessary to forge powerful alliances uniting actors in the field, government agencies and the private sector.
Adaptation has become the key word in the process of change now underway. There is an urgent need to join forces to create new mechanisms that capitalize on synergies among global actors in order to achieve a large-scale local impact.
It is at the level of communities, families, villages and neighbourhoods that a lasting solution can be formulated. This has been demonstrated by the millions of Red Cross and Red Crescent volunteers around the world who provide support and comfort day after day and enable tens of millions of people to get on their feet and look to the future with dignity and hope.
It is these volunteers, with their energy and dedication to helping others, that give me hope and allow me to leave this office with feelings of gratitude and appreciation. Serving them has been a rare honour. In the face of the current upheaval, the world needs them now more than ever.