Questions about how best to shrink the gap between humanitarian relief and development are nothing new.
Twenty years ago, when Izumi Nakamitsu, who is now the director of the United Nations Development Program’s Crisis Response Unit still worked at the U.N. refugee agency, people were asking the same question. Nakamitsu credits her old boss, U.N. High Commissioner Sadako Ogata, with first bringing up the issue of the gap between relief and development in the mid-1990s.
“Twenty years later I came back to this issue, and that means you guys still have not solved it,” Nakamitsu said.