The Current - Doctors Without Borders CEO, Avril Benoit steps down

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

The former CEO of Doctors Without Borders, Avril Benoit, reflects on her twenty years at the medical humanitarian organization, and what it was like to work in some of the most dangerous places in the world. She talks to Matt Galloway about the challenges of leading the organization during a time of great turmoil, and the future of foreign humanitarian aid amid cuts to funding.

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Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. Over the past two decades, Averill Benoit has traveled to some of the most challenging places in the world. As a project coordinator with Doctors Without Borders, her Medicines-on-Frontier, she helped distribute humanitarian medical aid in places like Mauritania, South Sudan, and South Africa. She was in Haiti after the catastrophic 2010 earthquake, where MSF delivered one of the largest emergency interventions in that aid agency's history. Her work has taken into conflict zones, from Sudan to Iraq, Ukraine, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, just to name a few. For the past six years, as CEO of Doctors Without Borders USA, Averill Benoit, steered the humanitarian operations during a global pandemic and the war in Gaza. She is now just stepped down from that position, and Avril Benoit joins me.

in our Toronto studio. Avril, good morning. Nice to see you, Matt. Nice to see you. Welcome back to the CBC. Yeah, it's nice to be back. What is it like to leave this job, given the state of the world? I was going to say that the world is on fire because that's how it feels sometimes.

I mean, what is it like to step away in this moment? I have to approach it like a passing of the torch, that it's time I ran my course. I did a lot. It was many, many years. And it's for somebody else who has fresh legs to take it forward. But the state of the world obviously preoccupies me a great deal. The nice thing about no longer being with a medical humanitarian organization that's right in the

middle of all these horrible conflict zones and disaster areas and outbreaks and so on is that I am not responsible anymore, that I can sort of take a little bit of a distance, which I think is healthy. I want to get to the state of the world in a moment. I said welcome back to the CBC because people will know you here, the public broadcast. This is the studio or a studio that you broadcast from. Absolutely. How did you, just remind people, how you made the leap from journalist to the work that you have been doing for the last several years? I had been a journalist, a broadcaster for 20 years and was reaching a point where I felt like I had been around the block a few times. I was volunteering all the time in local community organizations, helping

them raise money and whatnot. And a position opened up at Doctors Without Borders, Mids and Saint-F or MSF, as were known internationally. James Orbinski, who in the past, had accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the organization, he was kicking around Toronto at the time and encouraged me to apply when I was talking to him about what could I do next. And so I ended up being Director of Communications of the office in Toronto. What do you remember about your first international deployment with MSF? The first big one, really big one, because I'd done various assignments in Darfur and in South Sudan and whatnot, in Democratic Republic of Congo. But the first really big one was that earthquake in Haiti.

We had an opportunity being from Canada to really get there very quickly. And I was asked to be emergency communications coordinator for us. And for us as an organization that first of all, I just did it. I said us, we, as if I'm still speaking for the organization, I'm not. I'm no longer with MSF. But we, they had a huge operation, huge response, very important. But besides the medical operational work and treating people and saving lives and delivering babies and all of that stuff, MSF has this imperative to bear witness, to speak out, to describe what we're seeing, what we're doing, and to be accountable not only to the public that supports us, but also the people that we're helping.

What was most, I mean, again, covering a story, and it's different now, because we have social media and live videos and what have you. But when you went to Haiti, you could use that for an example. was most surprising to you about what you actually saw through your own eyes on the ground compared to what we might have seen from a distance? The circus. The circus. The AIDS circus.

You had credible organizations that already had a presence in the country that knew their way around, that knew what to do, that had great staff. And then you had fly-in short-term. You had four surgeons would show up from Tennessee, having been sponsored by a church, with nothing. And then they asked to go and support a hospital and maybe the hospital lets them. And they start, because they're not familiar with the kinds of injuries that people sustain during an earthquake, crush injuries, for example. They started amputating people's limbs when they could have been saved with a more sophisticated experienced approach from a medical

perspective. And that's just one small, small example. So you had all these organizations, small, inexperienced, maybe created in the moment that just sort of clogged the system and actually wade it down. They would have access as outsiders,

as internationals to these organization coordination meetings that the UN would run called the clusters and promised to do things that they weren't equipped to do. And it was just messy. So from my perspective,

as a journalist, you know, that mindset, the sort of wiring of my brain, I was angry about this. I just thought, these people should not be considered credible. The ones who are really doing the work, especially the local organizations, the local hospitals,

they're the ones that really can do the job and make the most of whatever financial resources are sent their way. Because the impulse is, well, everybody can help. We can do something, let's get there on the ground. The more hands that are there, the better. But your suggestion is that those hands actually need to know what they can and can't do. Yeah, it's the old adage, good intentions are not enough.

You spent a lot of time. You mentioned in Sudan. Yeah. What is it like for you to see what's going on there now? I mean, history repeating itself and worse. 12 million people displaced. I also spend time in Chad where 1.5 million, or certainly 1.2, although it's probably undercounted, have fled over to Chad where the refugee camps are full of people. Women, children, like most refugee camps, where they're not given enough support.

They're not allowed to work. Anyway, there's nowhere to work around there. There's hardly any water. The whole future, their outlook on the future, is bleak because they were so persecuted for their ethnic identity as non-Arab. Most of them in that camp were Masalit

that I spoke to. And other ethnic groups like the Fuhr and the Zagawa, the rapid support forces, which is one of the two main belligerents that has now taken control over most of Darfur now, was targeting people as the Janjuweed did back in the early 2000s

because of the color of their skin and their ethnic background and it's genocidal acts for sure ethnic cleansing trying to push people out and very successful when I look at it now and you're asking how I feel about it.

It's like anywhere that I've been before and I read the news. It touches me more because I can visualize it. I remember the people I have the notebooks filled with interviews with people, and it's much harder to follow it, knowing also that the world doesn't really seem to care. So that's the question. How have we, as a world, allowed this to happen?

The indifference has been shocking from the outset. And when I was there at the, you know, just last year and talking to people since the beginning of all the clashes that began, And people said it's because nobody cares because we're black. That's what people there told you. Yeah. They said it's because we're poor and we're black. And it's not an oil-rich country.

It is mineral-rich, and that's why you have all the foreign investments, so to speak, in the belligerent parties, in the main actors in all of this. But it is tragic that people have fled now, and they will not have an opportunity to make a life back home because it's going to be a partitioned country probably with horrific people in charge of the area where they had their homes, their villages, their lands where they graze their animals.

There's just no going back to that. So those refugee camps will become home for those people? Yeah. Prolonged chronic crisis, as you see in many refugee situations. And then we object to them trying to make their way to a safe place to rejoin relatives who could help. them in countries in Europe or North America. There's so much scorn around people just trying to flee to survive.

And that has become a theme, I think, running through all of my years in this, is, you know, give people a chance to survive, treat them with dignity. What do you make of that? I mean, there's just announcements in the last day about what's happening in the UK, for example, and a much tougher, if I can put it that way, refugee policy, they're talking about how those who are coming to seek asylum, if they have valuables, they could be used to help pay for the processing of the refugee process. They could be sent somewhere else immediately.

What do you make of that? There's a sense from some people that, again, we are pulling the drawbridge up. Yeah, it's popular. And you look what's happening in the United States. The main category now of refugees that the Trump administration considers valid are Afrikaners from South Africa.

And all others are not to be taken as serious applicants. It's a xenophobic. It's taken root. It's popular, gets votes. It's, to me, a crying shame from a standpoint of just looking at people's humanity and how we really are all in this together. And if you don't make legal passageways for people to reach safety or at least make it possible to live where they did end up across a border to safety, if you don't provide them with the means to get a job or start a business or support themselves and maybe be able to participate in their new home, they will seek other ways to survive. And we can't blame them for that. I've covered a lot of K-pop stories in my time as a Korean journalist, but this one is different. All I need is one person to believe in me. All I need is one person to think I have something.

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I wasn't there myself. It was probably the hardest thing to manage, though. Two years of trying to explain why this was so awful and in an environment in North America but especially in the United States where there's so much support understandably historically for Israel but then you have this situation where Israel is conducting itself as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions as a member of the UN you know a standing member of the international community funded by the West is conducting itself in violation of all the norms of law, not protecting the

civilians, denying them access to food, cling drinking water, medicine, all the things that are necessary to survive, jeopardizing the future generations, not only killing children, but making them sick. And so their development, their schooling, everything is on pause as at risk. And so we had to speak out a lot also because Palestinian journalists, as courageous as they were, were getting killed one by one. and by the hundreds. And international journalists, including from the CBC,

were not allowed to work independently and report from there to really describe independently what was happening. And so for a humanitarian organization like us, like many others, we really felt that the onus on us was to describe what was really happening on the ground, what we were directly witnessing as an organization.

The former Secretary General of MSF has said that that work has led him to believe that MSF is biased, that it's an accomplice of Hamas, that it's not the MSF that he knows. When you hear that from somebody who led the organization saying that what you're describing leads him to believe that the organization is an accomplice of Hamas, what is your reaction? Well, it's somebody who has not been involved in the organization for many, many decades. But was for a long time. A long, long time ago. It's not been our experience. And we're,

not accomplices of Hamas. We have to work within the occupied area where the Ministry of Health is the Hamas civilian ministry of health. If that makes us accomplices, then shame on those who hold that view. It's not certainly, I don't think, an accomplice who treats any patient in front of them.

That's humanitarian. Those are the principles of impartiality, of neutrality is you treat the person, you don't ask them who they voted for. You don't ask them what a religion is. You don't treat them whether they're this racial identity or this gender or, you know, you treat whoever is there. And the relentless killings of civilians that we witnessed and that we experienced about a dozen of our own staff, the attacks on hospitals, the decimation of the health system, these are the things that we have been denouncing. When those accusations, okay, put the Hamas part of it aside, but the accusation

of bias are leveled at an organization like MSF, what does that do? Because it's not just coming from this individual. It's coming from many other people as well. What does that do in terms of your ability to do that work? We have to have contact with all parties in a conflict. So we have to have a lot of dialogue with Kogat, with the Israeli department, if you will, that manages access, that lets your trucks go through and lets your staff come and go. We also have to negotiate with Egypt. We have to negotiate internally with whoever is there holding a gun and maybe impeding things. And so it's at the beginning of all of this after October 7th and the horrors of that,

and we absolutely abhor and denounce all attacks on civilians, we offered help to Israel. But Israel has a health system that's the envy of the world. It's well equipped. It's well-staffed. They don't need our help. We go where the needs are greatest. And so in this instance, that's why we work on one side of a conflict. But it's not for, if there were needs on the other side, we would absolutely do that, as we do in Sudan,

where we make a point of working in different parts of the country, because that's where the needs are. And it doesn't matter to us who's governing or controlling or occupying or laying siege to an area. We will try to go where the needs are greatest. What does that mean for neutrality? I mean, does that word mean anything? Can an organization be neutral? should it be neutral in a highly polarized environment? It's a profound question, and we wrangle it all the time.

It's a regular debate amongst ourselves in the humanitarian community. But the point of neutrality is the outcome of the war is not for us to say in terms of who should be in charge, which groups of politicians, which political party, what should be the structure of the who should, Who should manage it? It really is saying we are here to do medicine, save lives, alleviate suffering, and we will speak out when state policies or the actions of others, armed groups, for example, harm the patients and the staff that we have on the ground. We will speak out, and we do it all the time in all kinds of places, not just Gaza.

What do you do with the things that you have seen? Where do they go? How do you process them? I get asked that all the time. And it's hard. I go for walks in the forest. I go home to Montremla. I try to manage it.

I think maturity, the years of doing it, and even as a journalist, you do have to compartmentalize to a point, right? You have to focus on the job you have to do. And it floods back and some of us manage it better than others. It's one of the reasons, though, that I'm okay with stepping aside after almost 20. years. It's been, it's been rough. And, you know, it's time for me to take a little bit of a distance

from it. Not that I will maybe stop talking about the organization as we, as if I'm still part of it. I am not. But it's so much been a part of my life, as the CBC has been a part of my life. I still think of, you know, public radio as something I embrace and defend and champion. And I probably will always do that with Doctors Without Borders as well. worry about, I mean, Elon Musk talked about putting USAID into the wood chipper over the course of a weekend. It's not a wood chipper here in this country, but there's been a huge decrease in the federal budget in terms of international aid. What, almost $2.8 billion? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you worry about that? I mean, what's the impact of that going to be? Across the board, it has already been bad. It's already been bad. Yeah, it's $2.7 billion or $2.8 billion in global assistance from Canada is not a lot in the whole scheme of things. What the U.S. did with the decimation of USAID, the main agency that was providing that funding and

support, has killed people. It is not a savings of money for a government. It has real costs on the ground. A lot of that assistance for Canada was in global health. So you will have with the decision of Canada and the U.S. and the U.K. and many governments across Europe that are the classic big donor governments, you will have more outbreaks. You will have more outbreaks. You will have more malnutrition, you will have less of a response to the things that are hidden. A big natural disaster probably will be responded to the way people around the world always like to donate to what they see in the news in the urgent moment. But those hidden unreported, underreported, things like Sudan, where the needs are tremendous

and we'd like to see more work on the ground to save lives, it will continue to create horrible hardship for people. What aren't we talking about then? Oh, Democratic Republic of Congo is another big one. Where you have in the east, in particular, places like North Kivu, you have 100 militias fighting with a military that has no credibility among the local population there and just displacement, displacement, rape, rape, I mean, it's just awful. I think also of Haiti all the time, particularly because it's so close to Canada and so many

Canadians have strong attachments and relatives in Haiti or they're from there, it's a place where the last time I went there, I came back and uncharacteristically, I really felt it. I got depressed. And that, you know, is a sign that, okay, it's time to start moving on. Like, this is not good because normally I could come back, switch, and I'm in the different mode. And it's not that I forget about it, but it doesn't get under my skin. in the same way. But Haiti, I've had such a long history. I covered the elections there in 1990 as a freelance reporter. So I've seen the various setbacks and little bits of progress and then another big setback. But what's happening now with the gang control, with police who are out of

control, with people who are besieged essentially, who are going hungry and going without help and who cannot get out, cannot even go to the hospital because there's a gang control line and they're perceived as being for one side or the other just because they happen to live in an area that's under that type of oversight, so to speak. Haiti is another place that I really think Canada, Canadians need to pay a lot of attention. I don't know what we can do. Again, that's the neutrality. I don't know what the solution is.

I don't know who we should back. If you're looking at the perspective of the Canadian government, it all seems pretty awful with bad choices, but it's a place that needs help. Just let me ask you a couple of quick things before I let you go. One is in the goodbye letter that you wrote to the organization, you referred to crisis fatigue. Yeah. One of the reasons why people don't pay attention to some of the things that we aren't talking about is because they're tired. Yeah.

And they just turn it off. I cannot hear any more about this. Click and they don't give money, but they also just don't pay attention. What do we do about that? I'm not sure, Matt. I have relatives like that who know what I do. They love me and they support me, but they say, I can't. I can't pay attention to what you do, Averill. It's too depressing. I'm not sure what the solution is.

I guess fundamentally for me, the hope that I feel is knowing that there are always people on the ground. Usually it's the neighbors and the relatives and the local community organizations, religious institutions, all the things that can come around a community and then add into it international aid workers that they are on the ground. willing to help. And we, from our distance, in the safety of Canada or the U.S., can, the least we can do is support them to be there for their people. That to me is an act of, that's where you can make the link. So even if you don't have to follow the day-to-day of what's happening in Sudan or in Ukraine or all the other places that we follow in the news, but then get that fatigue. I think that is that is the least we can do from my perspective. And we should feel good about that. We should feel, you know, they appreciate it so much. Wow. People around the world

do know what's happening here. Or at least they are supporting what we're trying to do with this community kitchen or this little clinic or or this shelter. That really is, is important for them not to be forgotten. How has the work that you have done changed how you see the world? I mean, there's a lot of, There's a lot of bad. Yeah. But there's a lot of really good, too. Yeah. And it's hard to see the good sometimes for all of the awful.

How has it changed how you see the world? Well, I have one colleague told me after many, many years, he had to leave the organization because he had become a full-on misanthrope. He just thought humans were horrible and he wanted to focus on trees and animals. Do you believe that? The world is horrible. It's always been horrible. But there's so much goodness in the world. I mean, that is what you have to focus on.

You have to really, and look at the communities in Canada and how people volunteer. I mean, to me, volunteering is a big part of my life, even at a local level. I can have these jobs or when I was at the CBC or MSF, Doctors Without Borders. I'm always volunteering still in my neighborhood, in my community. And that is what gives me just so much nourishment is when we really look at each other. We're helping, we're lifting the boxes, we're cooking the food or whatever it is. you will find so much goodness in the world if you look for it. And it's not, it's, I would be in denial to say that I haven't reached horrible conclusions about what motivates a lot of really awful behavior in the world.

I know a lot of the layers of how deep it goes and how much people pay their coyotes or their smugglers to get them across a border and then how they're treated as migrant workers. and I do know too much at this point, and I have to find a way to process all of that. But in the meantime, I try to focus on the good. That's a good lesson. We'll look forward to whatever you do next. In the meantime, it's good to see you. Thank you very much.

Great to see you too, Matt. Thanks. Ravel Benoit is the former CEO of Doctors Without Borders USA. She just stepped down after 20 years with MSF. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.