Angelina Jolie visiting one of her charities, the Maddox Chivan Childrens Centre, in Cambodia
Angelina Jolie visiting one of her charities, the Maddox Chivan Childrens Centre, in Cambodia © Getty Images

On my first visit to a refugee camp, in my early 20s, I met a distraught father whose son was desperately ill. At 12 years old, he was suffering from acute malnutrition, and disease caused by a gunshot wound that had gone too long untreated. The clinic staff had done everything they could possibly do for him and he was being discharged.

In my distress, I asked if I could pay for him to be evacuated from the camp and sent somewhere else – anywhere else – to get medical care. The team I was with gently explained to me that not only did the boy have no chance of survival, but medical triage has to be carried out in refugee camps every single day, to try to save the greatest number of lives possible with severely limited resources.

I tell this story because I think the instinct in all of us, when confronted by suffering, is to want to help. But sometimes identifying how to help is more complex than it seems.

In the 20 years since I joined UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, I have been involved in many different ways of giving. I’ve donated to UNHCR and to other UN emergency relief programmes, built schools for refugee girls, and funded long-term health and conservation programmes. I say this not to suggest that I personally have done anything special. Far from it. I have made mistakes and I am still learning. But certain principles seem to hold true.

Jolie visiting West Mosul in Iraq in June 2018
Jolie visiting West Mosul in Iraq in June 2018 © Getty Images

The first is that local people know best how to help their countrymen and women. They know them and understand them, and their context. I’ve learned through UNHCR how local, frontline organisations are usually the fastest and most effective when there is an emergency unfolding and, unsurprisingly, in the long-term development of their societies. One welcome consequence of the pandemic is that, with the world in lockdown, and travel interrupted, we’re hearing much more from citizens of countries themselves than from outsiders. There has been a flood of local innovation to solve the problems presented by the pandemic. We should welcome this and seize the moment to rethink our approach to humanitarian aid and development, from the bottom up: placing displaced people at the centre of our response, and putting more power in the hands of the people most affected.

Second, there is no better investment than support for education. The goal of giving has to be helping people achieve self-sufficiency. No person – no country – wants to live dependent on others. Girls at a school I support in Kakuma camp in Kenya have gone on, through sheer hard work and ability, to achieve some of the best exam results in the country. Yet even before the pandemic, half of all refugee children were out of school, and only three per cent of young refugees were able to access higher education. This is a terrible waste of human potential. In this time of coronavirus, initiatives that help girls stay in school are essential. They are much more likely than boys to fall out of school altogether, and to be forced to work or marry early. Not all solutions are complex. In Kakuma camp, lanterns to help the children to study when not in school turned out to be an effective way to help the girls during lockdown.

Third, it is crucial to fund shelters that help women escape violence, access trauma support and gain new skills. Much more support is needed, especially in making shelters and services available to better assist displaced women and children who’ve been raped or who are victims of domestic violence. The same is true everywhere, including in developed, peaceful countries like my own. But it is impossible to justify that less than one per cent of all international humanitarian funding currently goes towards tackling sexual and gender-based violence. Governments should face pressure to change this but individuals can help too, by giving to organisations that focus on those areas.

Jolie on a visit to Ecuador in 2012
Jolie on a visit to Ecuador in 2012 © Getty Images

Finally, and most important of all, if we think only in terms of humanitarian aid, we’ll always be acting after the event. We can’t just provide humanitarian relief without standing up to aggressors causing the violence and displacement in the first place. Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh don’t just need food, shelter and education, they need to be able to return to Myanmar safely, and for their rights as citizens to be recognised. Aid cannot replace peace agreements, accountability for crimes committed against innocent civilians and the ability of countries to trade freely and become prosperous and independent.

Yet today, instead of finding solutions to conflicts, we expect refugee families to survive indefinitely on shrinking rations, with less prospect of returning home. The World Food Programme recently announced that due to aid cuts, it could only provide food assistance every second month in Yemen, where children are dying of starvation. Look at the UN financial tracking service fts.unocha.org, which shows, as I write, that less than six per cent of the funds requested to provide the bare minimum of relief for refugees in South Sudan this year have been given.

No matter how bad it gets, UNHCR staff say and do everything in their power to support refugees, as they have done throughout the pandemic, often in the most difficult places on earth. But too often our leaders are silent, or worse still, part of the problem. I am increasingly uncomfortable with the inability of the UN Security Council to address this.

The pandemic offers an opportunity to reimagine our entire approach to foreign policy and humanitarian assistance and how we can achieve a more stable, equal world. If you are in a position to give, my advice would be: give direct to local organisations wherever possible, listen to them about what support is most needed, and prioritise education and the protection of women and children. Explore ways you can support UNHCR (unhcr.org/uk/get-involved.html). And if you cannot give funds, then please give your respect and understanding to refugees, who are on the very frontlines of the fight for freedom from persecution.

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