"We need better coordination on the international side, just as they need better and more effective efforts on the Somali side. We have too many reconstruction and development assistance plans"
About this Quote
Aid work lives or dies on logistics, not sentiment, and Jan Egeland is blunt about the most taboo problem in humanitarianism: the helpers get in each other’s way. His call for “better coordination on the international side” isn’t a diplomatic nicety; it’s an admission that the aid ecosystem can behave like a crowded marketplace of mandates, branding, and competing timelines. “Too many reconstruction and development assistance plans” reads like an indictment of a system that produces documents faster than it produces clinics, roads, or credible security.
The sentence is structured to distribute responsibility: “just as they need” signals a deliberate symmetry between foreign donors and Somali institutions. Egeland is pushing back against the lazy storyline that failure is purely “local corruption” or purely “international neglect.” The subtext is harsher: without Somali capacity and political cohesion, international plans become performative; without international discipline, Somali efforts get fragmented into pilot projects and short-term wins that don’t add up to a state.
Context matters. Somalia has long been a graveyard of well-funded intentions, where emergencies blur into “reconstruction” and every new actor arrives with a fresh framework. Egeland, as a senior humanitarian figure, is speaking from the inside of that apparatus, where coordination is both moral and strategic: duplicative programs waste money, but they also undermine legitimacy by making the state look irrelevant and aid agencies look like the real government.
He’s not asking for fewer ambitions. He’s asking for fewer competing scripts, and for the courage to subordinate institutional ego to a shared plan that Somalis can actually own.
The sentence is structured to distribute responsibility: “just as they need” signals a deliberate symmetry between foreign donors and Somali institutions. Egeland is pushing back against the lazy storyline that failure is purely “local corruption” or purely “international neglect.” The subtext is harsher: without Somali capacity and political cohesion, international plans become performative; without international discipline, Somali efforts get fragmented into pilot projects and short-term wins that don’t add up to a state.
Context matters. Somalia has long been a graveyard of well-funded intentions, where emergencies blur into “reconstruction” and every new actor arrives with a fresh framework. Egeland, as a senior humanitarian figure, is speaking from the inside of that apparatus, where coordination is both moral and strategic: duplicative programs waste money, but they also undermine legitimacy by making the state look irrelevant and aid agencies look like the real government.
He’s not asking for fewer ambitions. He’s asking for fewer competing scripts, and for the courage to subordinate institutional ego to a shared plan that Somalis can actually own.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
|---|
More Quotes by Jan
Add to List
