Jan Egeland
Jan Egeland
Jan Egelandis a Norwegian politician, formerly of the Labour party. He has been the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council since August 2013. He was previously the Deputy Director of Human Rights Watch and the Director of Human Rights Watch Europe. Egeland formerly served as director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and Under-Secretary-General of the UN. Egeland also holds a post as Professor II at the University of Stavanger...
NationalityNorwegian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth12 September 1957
CountryNorway
The insecurity in Sri Lanka has claimed over 100 lives in recent weeks with increasing civilian casualties.
Nowhere else on earth is so much at stake as in Africa. It is here where most lives are at stake.
Tens of thousands of people's lives are at stake and they could die if we don't get to them in time.
More is currently at stake in terms of lives saved or lost in Africa than on any other continent. As humanitarian workers, we cannot accept that so many lives are lost every year on this continent to preventable diseases, neglect and senseless brutality.
In terms of the human lives lost, this is the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world today. It is beyond belief that the world is not paying more attention.
Had there been better prevention, better early warning, better schools, earthquake-safe buildings - tens of thousands of lives would have been saved both in the Indian Ocean tsunami and in the South Asian earthquake,
We are trying now to move from saving lives in daily food distribution to doing agricultural work: livestock, water and irrigation recovery projects.
We need more resources to save 2 million to 3 million lives and we need much more resources in the next few days.
The big non-governmental organizations, the ones with which we work all over the world, understood the value of coordination. The same cannot be said about all the newer players on the ground.
The backdrop is a dramatic one in Zimbabwe, one of the most dramatic in the world. Life expectancy has plummeted from around 63 years in the late 1980s and early 1990s to 33.9 years in 2004. This is a meltdown. This is a nearly halving of life expectancy.
That had been one of our fears. I think it has not been the case.
They will now have their sixth, seventh night out in the cold. Perhaps even without a tent. They will also not have water because their spring is gone,
This is a very major earthquake but it's really aggravated a thousand times by the topography. An earthquake is bad anywhere, in the Himalayas it becomes much worse,
It's no good saving people today just to see them killed tomorrow. They need help to escape the vicious cycle they find themselves in.