Sadako Ogata is a remarkable woman – at the age of 84 she runs JICA, Japan’s multibillion-dollars development bank, and is as vital as ever. She was the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees until 2001, leaving behind a transformed UNHCR, one of the world’s greatest humanitarian organisations.

In 1999 she took part in a discussion at the Brookings Institution, with Jim Wolfensohn, at that time President of the World Bank (and my boss). Mrs Ogata lamented the gap in approach between the humanitarian and development agencies, a gap she described as “a chasm” which needed to be bridged.

At that time I belonged to the development world, and did not quite understand the significance of this gap for people whose lives are destroyed by conflicts or disasters. They often are saved and cared for by humanitarian organizations in the immediate aftermath but then feel abandoned. Humanitarian assistance is short-term, but recovery often takes a long time.

So lives are saved, but often there are no schools, or jobs, or better future. And often development not only arrives late but it also doesn’t provide the kind of support that strengthens resilience to future shocks, especially to those caused by mother nature.

I now returned to this gap from the “other” world – in my role as an EU humanitarian commissioner. We are at an event hosted by the World Bank’s current President Bob Zoellick (also my former boss) and co-organised by the European Union and the Japanese government. Mrs. Ogata is also here – together with Baroness Amos, the UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, Raj Shah, USAID Administrator, Helen Clark, UNDP Administrator, and Andrew Mitchell, the UK Secretary of State for International Development.

Some people, among them very senior figures, said the gap that Mrs Ogata first identified would never be closed. So it’s good to see her sitting there listening to us catching up with her thoughts of more than a decade ago!

Our focus is on joining forces across these two worlds, of humanitarian and development organizations, to build resilience to natural disasters. And I believe we will succeed – to do so has become even more important today than in 1999. Why? Because we live in a world in which the number of man-made and natural disasters is rising and our resources to tackle them are not.

This is the first “resilience round table”, where the two communities are represented at their highest leadership levels. We will come together every six months and report on progress and the work still to be done. This is just the beginning, but I am glad that Mrs Ogata was present to witness it.

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