This is the back-end of humanitarian relief work, staged in hotels and restaurants and meeting rooms.
An end to blocking of humanitarian assistance.
But as two people who have both worked for many years at different ends of the humanitarian aid spectrum – as an aid worker and as secretary of state for international development – we agree on one thing: there is nothing ethical about standing to one side when civilians are being murdered and maimed.
Though the famine has ended, a third of the country's population, 2.5 million people, remain in need of humanitarian assistance.
Violence has affected various parts of the south in 2011; by the end of August, the humanitarian community reported that more than 3,070 people had been killed in inter-communal and militia-related violence and 304,400 had been displaced.
"On so many fronts, things were ticking along in a positive way at the end of last year," U.N. humanitarian coordinator Toby Lanzer said.
As we write, there is no mention of palliative or end-of-life care in key humanitarian response and disaster risk reduction guidelines such as the SPHERE Handbook and the Sendai Framework (adopted by 187 governments in 2015).
The cost of getting food and shelter for the refugees was mounting hourly – the UN's annual appeal for humanitarian funding hit £20bn by the end of 2016 – and the humanitarian system was starting to crack under the strain, but somehow the story was not getting through to the public.
Some caveats are in order: There is a blossoming trade in publications, reports, and conferences discussing means and ends inside the field of humanitarian innovation.
Moreover, by focusing on improving end-of-life care, itself a significant humanitarian crisis, we may be laying the groundwork for a more comprehensive, humane and ethical health care systems in developing countries.
