Improving the financial data available in humanitarian crises is essential to increase operational effectiveness. Better reporting would improve transparency in terms of:

• the totality of funding, including resources beyond humanitarian assistance
• traceability beyond the first-level recipient to see the transaction chain from donor to crisis-affected person and the time it takes for the money to work its way through the system
• timeliness to allow real-time data on available resources in fast-moving humanitarian settings.^[i]

Commitments to use and improve existing systems and tools for publishing data on development and humanitarian financing, such as the International Aid Transparency Initiative ( IATI ), would bring immediate results. Improvements to the IATI standard currently in progress mean that by the end of 2015 it will be fully compatible and interoperable with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs ( OCHA )’s Financial Tracking Service ( FTS ) and other aid coordination platforms.

This revolutionary step-change in the availability of information during an emergency depends on one key commitment: the preparedness of donors and other agencies to publish and refresh their data on humanitarian activities in a regular and timely fashion, particularly in sudden onset and rapidly escalating emergencies, when daily updating is critical to allow a real-time picture of the changing funding situation.[ii]

The WHS should seek a clear commitment from all stakeholders to agree to this by the end of 2016 and to put in place a roadmap for implementation. Beyond that, all stakeholders can commit to a more accountable response to the needs of crisis-affected people by supporting national data systems and new technology and innovations in the availability and use of data.

For more information see our briefing paper The World Humanitarian Summit: Making financing work for crisis-affected people

[i] GHA Report 2015, chapter 9.

[ii] Upfront investments in linking reporting systems, such as automation via IATI , would reduce the reporting burden in the heat of a crisis.

The  Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) programme together with Future Humanitarian Financing (FHF) organised a side event at ECOSOC HAS on 18 June, ‘Interactive Dialogue on Humanitarian Financing’, which proceeded and fed into the official ECOSOC HAS High Level Panel on ‘Addressing capacity and resource challenges through humanitarian financing’, chaired by Stephen O’Brien, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator. A cross-section of actors participated in the event – including donors, government representatives, representatives from multilateral agencies, non-governmental organisations and the private sector.

Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Kyung-wha Kang opened the event, highlighting the growing gap between humanitarian requirements and available resources and the need to address this through not only strengthened sufficiency of funding but also more effective use of funds. She highlighted the need to find new solutions to old problems by scaling up multi-year planning and increased coordination with development actors; diversifying the funding base to include the private sector and Islamic financing; and the promotion of risk financing and investments in emergency preparedness to meet peak demands.

In response to presentations from Sophia Swithern on up-to-date trends in humanitarian financing – drawing upon the recently launched 2015 GHA report – and from Lydia Poole on findings from FHF’s recent report ‘Looking Beyond the Crisis’, panellists discussed the way forward for future humanitarian financing.

Discussions between panellists focussed on issues relating to the financing of local and national responses, the need to develop a shared responsibility between development and wider actors financing responses in crisis-affected countries to address the underlying causes of vulnerability, the need to move towards more anticipatory ways of working, and reducing inefficiencies present within the current system.

The event was chaired by Anke Reiffenstuel, Deputy Head Task Force Humanitarian Aid, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Germany, and panellists included:

Robert Piper, UN Regional Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territories (oPt)

“Demand is outstripping supply; we mustn’t focus exclusively on raising more money, but reduce the demand in first place”

Claus Sorenson, Director General, European Commission’s Department for Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO)

“A key issue in the humanitarian system is an attitude problem; humanitarians must get out of their holes, stop hiding behind their principles and engage more with political communities to address fundamental underlying issues”

Thomas Gass, Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Coordination and Inter-Agency Affairs in UN DESA

“The humanitarian community needs to own the post-2015 agenda and develop a shared responsibility with the development community for addressing vulnerability and people’s long-term needs’

Fatou Diagne Zaouini, Risk Management Advisor, Africa Risk Capacity

“For every dollar insured by government for risk financing, the international humanitarian community should commit to matching this”.

The panel event was then followed by discussions amongst the side-event attendees who worked in groups to develop recommendations on the future of humanitarian financing under five key themes that were central to discussions on the panel and to those taking place as part of the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) and the UN High Level Panel on Humanitarian Financing. The group themes included ‘nationalising and localising the humanitarian response’, ‘the development and humanitarian nexus’, ‘embracing diversity to ensure sufficient funding’, ‘moving towards proactive ways of working to better meet peak demands’ and ‘upgrading the humanitarian architecture to address inefficiencies and strengthen needs-based funding’.

The recommendations that resulted from the group work were presented by Anke Reiffenstuel, Deputy Head Task Force Humanitarian Aid, Ministry of Foreign Affairs Germany, to the official ECOSOC HAS High Level Panel on ‘Addressing capacity and resource challenges through humanitarian financing’ in order to inform discussions and feed into the conclusions from the panel.

The recommendations emerging from the five groups are outlined below.

Group A: Nationalising and Localising Humanitarian Response:

1. A change in the national humanitarian architecture is needed to ensure local and national actors’ strategic involvement in context-appropriate coordination mechanisms. This needs to be accompanied by placing a far greater proportion of international humanitarian assistance directly at a national level.
2. Clarify the role of international organisations to identify and understand where and how they add value, and where their role could be fulfilled by national actors.

Group B: The Development and Humanitarian Nexus:

1. Donors and wider actors should organise funding investments to create incentives for humanitarian, development, climate change and other concerned actors to work in complementarity to address longer term needs of vulnerable and crisis-affected populations. This in practise means shifting from assessments to joint analysis, from planning to programming, and from funding to financing.
2. Clarify the remit of humanitarian actors, recognising that they must work better with national governments and development actors where appropriate. At the same time, development actors must prioritise risk management, preparedness and resilience in order to ‘leave no one behind’.

Group C: Embracing diversity to ensure sufficient humanitarian funding:

1. To better engage emerging donors, we need to build trust and engage in mutually beneficially dialogue.
2. To increase the diversity in the funding base of humanitarian action we must illustrate transparency, improved efficiency and performance.

Group D: Moving towards proactive ways of working to better meet peak demands:

1. Build national, sub-national and regional mechanisms and capacities for countries to manage their own crisis risks and financial preparedness before establishing a new global contingency fund as a default for managing risk.
2. To develop ways of working that better meet peak demand we need to not only invest in institutions that better manage risk but also invest in behavioural change within the sector towards more anticipatory ways of working.

Group E: Upgrading the Humanitarian Architecture to address inefficiencies and strengthen needs-based funding

1. Recognising that the current system perpetuates competition over resources, we need to strengthen understanding of donor preferences and behaviour, as well incentives for coordinated decision-making between donors. Underpinning this, the development of a shared understanding of global needs is vital to prioritising funding to particular crises.
2. Move towards results-based funding through multi-year funding and collaboration with development The measurement of outcomes should be undertaken on the basis of beneficiary feedback in addition to donor perspectives.

The global summit, declaration and Communiqué all led to agreements to strengthen funding to respond to sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV). The global summit recommended: “Donors need to make longer-term funding commitments (beyond one year) in order to build necessary systems and long-term engagement with communities; funds should be made accessible for local level organisations and leveraged from other areas.” [i]

Funding pledges totalling over $US41 million were made publically by donors as a result of the Communiqué  and over US$15 million as an outcome of the global summit.

Have these global agreements increased funding for action on SGBV?

Funding to address SGBV remains low though has increased between 2012 and 2014

Figure 1: Total humanitarian funding for action on SGBV, 2011–2014

Source: Development Initiatives based on UN OCHA FTS data

Note: Funding analysis captures SGBV-related projects reported to UN OCHA ’s FTS . As there is currently no identifier or marker specifically for SGBV in the FTS , a keyword search was undertaken on project titles and descriptions. Thus, the analysis may not capture all SGBV-related funding, particularly where activities are mainstreamed across all other programmes, and/or where funding falls outside of humanitarian spending (ie what is reported to the FTS ).

Figure 1 shows that humanitarian assistance for action on SGBV doubled from US$50 million in 2012 to US$107 million in 2014. The increase in funding during this period mirrors the growth of political attention to, and policy commitments related to, SGBV from 2013, culminating in the global summit in 2014.

Funding to SGBV increased from US$93 million in 2013 to US$107 million in 2014, illustrating an increase of US$14 million during the year from the signing of the Communiqué in 2013. This is less than a third of the total pledged by donors following the Communiqué (over US$41 million).

Despite the rise in funding to address SGBV overall, it continues to be low, and only constituted 0.6% of total humanitarian assistance reported to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affair ( OCHA )’s Financial Tracking Service ( FTS ) in 2013, decreasing slightly to 0.5% in 2014.

Levels of funding to address SGBV may, however, be higher than these reported figures. This may be because SGBV activities that are mainstreamed within other programmes are not captured in this analysis. This analysis has largely only captured projects that include an explicit reference to SGBV (or related terms) in the project description as it is not possible to capture mainstreamed spending on SGBV using current reporting mechanisms. Also, additional SGBV activities may be funded through non-humanitarian activities (i.e. development or stabilisation activities) that are not captured in the FTS and are beyond the focus of this analysis.

Furthermore, just under half of SGBV funding (49%) identified in this analysis was not coded using the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) gender marker in 2014 (but captured through Global Humanitarian Assistance coding). Poor reporting on gender using the IASC gender marker is a challenge across humanitarian funding more broadly. In 2014, less than a third (62%) of all humanitarian funding reported to UN OCHA ’s FTS was not coded using the gender marker. As a result, it is difficult to track the delivery of policy commitments on gender and SGBV.

South Sudan was the largest recipient of SGBV-related funding in 2014

Figure 2: Top ten recipients of SGBV funding, 2013–2014

Source: Development Initiatives based on UN OCHA FTS

Based on the available data, South Sudan was the largest recipient of humanitarian assistance for SGBV-related projects, receiving US$21.2 million in 2014, almost three times as much as the next largest recipient Iraq (US$7.2 million). It overtook funding received by the largest recipients in 2013, Syria and Somalia (US$19.1 million and US$12.6 million respectively). Yemen received US$6.7 million and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), often the focus of global SGBV attention, US$5.4 million (an increase of 22% from 2013).

The way forward

To ensure the momentum built from last year’s Call to Action and Global Summit is not lost, it is critical that donors meet the funding pledges made and continue to channel funding towards the goal of addressing SGBV against women, girls, boys and men in emergencies. This would also align with the proposed post-2015 sustainable development goals’ stand-alone goal on gender equality.

Better reporting is also needed so the levels of funding can be properly understood and tracked. Two improvements would facilitate this:

• Better reporting using the IASC marker. As noted in our briefing note on ‘Funding gender in emergencies’, a mandatory commitment from all donors to use this marker when reporting on humanitarian spending to the UNOCHA’s  FTS – for UN appeals and more widely – would help to better track overall funding for gender equality and so help to identify SGBV funding within this.
• Adopting a code for reporting on funding that is specifically targeted at addressing SGBV within the existing IASC gender marker and/or within the FTS . This would help to identify specific funding to address SBGV whether for mainstreamed or standalone projects and to track commitments against pledges.

Methodology

Funding analysis captures SGBV-related projects reported to UN OCHA ‘s FTS . As there is currently no identifier or marker specifically for SGBV on FTS , a keyword search was undertaken on project titles and descriptions.

The keyword search focused on capturing projects with a description including any of the following: SGBV, gender-based violence, GBV, basees sur le genre, violences basées sur le genre, VBG, basées sur le genre, violences sexuelles, violence sexuelle at basée sur le genre, VAWG, gender based violence, violence against women, , sexual violence, violence-affected children, adolescents and women, sustaining girls’ and boys’ rights to protection from violence, exploitation and abuse in humanitarian settings in Sudan, violence against girls.

[i] UK Government (2014) Summit Report: The Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict. 

Over the past couple of weeks since the first major earthquake struck, there has been mounting public demand, particularly in affected districts, for information on how funding – from both international and national sources – has been allocated, where it has be channelled and who has received it. See a recent blog from Open Nepal’s Pavitra Rana regarding public demand for better data on funding. The heightened level of accountability resulting from better information on funding would help to ensure that available humanitarian resources are allocated effectively, appropriately and in response to people’s needs.

Public calls for transparency of international and national funding to the crisis are particularly pertinent in the context of Nepal, given the ongoing recovery from a decade long insurgency. In this context, it is important that humanitarian aid reaches all those in need and in particular the most marginalised groups who are also likely to be most affected by the earthquake.

Meeting the demand for better data and traceability of funding to the Nepal crisis

The public desire for greater accountability through better data on funding highlights a need for improved local and international mechanisms to trace how and where funding has been allocated, from source to recipient. The current humanitarian situation in Nepal may also provide lessons for the improvement of traceability systems more generally.

Currently, mechanisms for the traceability of humanitarian assistance are lacking at both national and international levels, representing a critical gap in data on humanitarian financing. UN OCHA ’s FTS is the most comprehensive source of available data on humanitarian funding and plays a critical role in tracking international spending in response to individual crises. However, the FTS was designed to track the progress of funding to specific appeals and is not intended to enable funds to be traced through the system once committed – it shows just the first-level funding recipients rather than the full spectrum of donor to recipient. This makes it impossible to measure what has reached communities and when.

So how can this data gap be filled?

• The multi-stakeholder International Aid Transparency Initiative ( IATI ) is one way in which better data and information on humanitarian assistance could be made publically available. Originally designed for development aid, IATI is currently being modified to capture humanitarian assistance. A humanitarian marker added to the IATI standard will pave the way for longer term traceability of humanitarian funds at national and international levels. With greater availability, accessibility and use of information such as this, humanitarian actors could coordinate more effectively and enable accountability over the days, weeks, months and years following a disaster. However, although initial discussions around this are in place, the uptake of an IATI humanitarian marker into donor reporting systems will take time.
• Local efforts to trace money are a very important contribution to transparency. The portal developed by Young Innovations to track funding could be expanded to report on the amount of pledged funds actually committed and information crowd-sourced on how the funds have been spent. Other important local traceability efforts from those within Nepal’s growing open development community include plans to work with clusters of donors in affected districts, plans to track government disbursements through right-to-information procedures, and plans to gather citizen-generated feedback from local volunteers to ensure accountability of relief expenditure.
• The Government of Nepal is reportedly coordinating the response through the Nepal Emergency Operations Centre (NEOC). The traceability of funding through the recently established Prime Minister’s Relief Fund is going to be equally important in terms of accountability and meeting the information demands of affected communities. The government has stated that the details of receipts and expenditures of the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund will be circulated on a daily basis, and that the fund will be audited annually by the Office of the Auditor General of Nepal. While this is important, and a positive step, annual efforts to audit accounts may not be enough to ensure effective traceability of humanitarian assistance. This raises a challenge for local and international actors to collaborate in joining up reporting systems in appropriate formats to ensure all stakeholders have access to information on how much has been given, where it has gone, how it got there, what it was spent on, and how quickly it was spent.
• Given that some development funds are likely to be channelled to address the longer-term effects of the earthquake – for example through reconstruction, rehabilitation, and disaster prevention and preparedness efforts – it is critical that all development actors involved in the response (both funders and recipient organisations) report to IATI . At present, the lack of real-time reporting of these funds (e.g. through the OECD creditor reporting system) prevents useful analysis of such funding, but reporting of development assistance through the IATI standard allows some potential.

Lessons for global discussions on the need for greater transparency and data on financing in crisis-affected countries

Lessons drawn from the experience of Nepal following the earthquakes on the need for better traceability of funds are relevant to broader global policy discussions currently taking place on effective financing and reporting in crisis-affected countries. These include discussions through the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS), Financing for Development (FfD), the UN High Level Panel on humanitarian financing, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee Task Team on humanitarian financing and the Future Humanitarian Financing Initiative (FHF). It is important that in these fora, further commitments are made to improve the traceability of humanitarian and development financing.

We are all too aware of the number and scale of humanitarian crises facing our world today, not least in Syria where an estimated 220,000 people have died in the four-year conflict. It is important to remind ourselves that our collective humanity is taking on these challenges, with record levels of funding providing urgent assistance to millions of people affected by conflict, natural disasters and epidemics such as Ebola. Spiralling needs, however, mean that we have an unprecedented shortfall – last year US$7.5 billion of humanitarian funding requirements remained unmet. More than ever, we are having to seek better ways to meet the needs of those affected by humanitarian crises.

Faith plays a key role in international humanitarian response . Between 11% and 16% of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) listed in the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs ( OCHA )’s Financial Tracking Service ( FTS ) as humanitarian funding recipients in 2013 are explicitly guided by faith-based principles. Seven of the 22 NGOs represented on the board of the Core Humanitarian Standard have an explicit faith-based ethos, as do five of the 13 NGOs that constitute the UK Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC).

Islamic financing in particular is a surprisingly underexplored territory. Surprising because previous estimates suggest that anywhere between US$200 billion and US$1 trillion is spent in the form of Islamic charitable giving (Zakat) across the Muslim world each year. The Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) programme’s new report An Act of Faith – Humanitarian financing and Zakat published today reinforces these figures and goes further by looking at Zakat in depth, specifically in relation to humanitarian assistance.

Read the report in full – An Act of Faith: Humanitarian Financing and Zakat

The case for investing in DRR

Last week in the build up to Sendai, the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) launched the 2015 Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR 2015). The GAR 2015 provides a comprehensive review of current and projected trends in global risk. The report provides compelling evidence of the need to invest in reducing risk to minimise spending on dealing with disasters. Some of the key findings include:

1.  The poorest and most vulnerable people have the highest exposure to disasters

• A new metric developed for the report calculates that 42 million life years were lost annually in internationally reported disasters between 1980 and 2012. Low and middle-income countries account for over 80% of total life years lost. These same groups of countries accounted for 88% of humanitarian assistance in 2012 and 84% between 2003 and 2012.

2. Investments in DRR make economic sense

• GAR 2015 finds that governments need to set aside US$314 billion every year to meet annual average losses from earthquakes, tsunamis, tropical cyclones and flooding alone.
• GAR 2015 forecasts that an investment of US$6 billion annually in disaster risk management would result in avoided losses of US$360 billion over the next 15 years.

The case for investment in DRR is clear. Alongside the potential savings DRR investments can realise, there are recent examples where a significant allocation of resources has directly reduced the impact of large-scale natural hazard events. In the 2014 GHA Report, we highlighted how DRR investments from the Indian government and local authorities in the Adhra Pradesh and Odisha regions greatly reduced the number of fatalities caused by Cylone Phailin in 2013, compared with a similar intensity cyclone, Cyclone Orrisa in 1999.

Are investments in DRR materialising?

While investment in DRR has been emphasised since the adoption of the HFA in 2005 and increasingly in the build up to Sendai, concrete discussions around financing have so far been limited. Governments have the primary responsibility for spending on DRR, yet there are only a few examples of countries where DRR financing has been clearly identified in national budgets (see UNISDR 2013).This is not surprising as countries with fewer national resources are disproportionately impacted by disasters. These are countries where international spending on DRR is needed and of greater significance.

Current estimates suggest while there has been a slight increase in DRR spending within international development assistance, it remains a very small proportion of total expenditure, just 0.4% of the total amount spent on international aid between 1991 and 2010 (ODI 2013): 0.7% of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD ) Development Assistance Committee ( DAC ) development assistance in 2011 (GHA 2013). In terms of dealing with disasters and humanitarian emergencies, a minimal proportion (5.4% in 2013) of international humanitarian assistance can be identified as having been spent on disaster prevention and preparedness since the HFA was launched.

It is likely that the actual figures are higher as humanitarian activities that contribute to reducing risk might be embedded in other programmes and so reported as such. It’s also widely acknowledged that the existing data on international aid are not yet adequate to enable systematic tracking of DRR investments within development assistance (including humanitarian) expenditure. Improvements in the data on DRR financing are needed to better understand where and how investments are being made. Better data will help to identify gaps in spending and the extent to which DRR is being adequately mainstreamed within all development sectors.

Figure 1: Disaster prevention and preparedness funding from OECD DAC donors, 2005-2013

Source: OECD DAC CRS – downloaded 10/03/2015

How can international DRR finances be better tracked?

In the current statistics on official development assistance ( ODA ), there are challenges in tracking investments for cross-sector policy objectives like DRR. In the OECD DAC Creditor Reporting System (CRS) ’markers’ have been introduced to track cross-sector policy objectives such as gender and climate change adaptation.

A marker for disaster risk management is under consideration by the DAC Working Party on Development Finance Statistics at the OECD , as a way of improving visibility of spending on risk management (including DRR). It is hoped that the presence of the marker will encourage the mainstreaming of disaster risk management into development planning, as it will require the review of every aid activity through a “disaster risk management lens”. This is an important and welcome step forward in DRR data and provides the tool to improve the visibility of where DRR is mainstreamed within development programmes. However, it is not the panacea for tracking DRR financing. Firstly, DAC donors are only one set of donors within the international financing picture – so the marker won’t apply to those outside this group (other bilateral donors, regional bodies and private donors), although it could perhaps be a useful model for them. Secondly, visibility of mainstreaming masks big differences in the type and extent of investment in DRR in a given programme and is a long way from being able to quantify exactly how much is being spent on DRR. There have also been issues where limited reporting has undermined the value of some existing markers, such as the gender marker (Development Initiatives, 2014 and GHA 2015).

What about DRR funding at the national level?

Identifying DRR financing in national budgets is at least as challenging. Many countries operate traditional budget systems that focus on financial compliance and are typically not geared to enhancing policy clarity or effectiveness (International handbook of public financial management, 2013). As with international expenditure, the cross-ministry/sector nature of DRR means it is often embedded in other activities and cannot be easily identified.

There have been recommendations to include DRR budget codes within national budgets (see Darwanto 2012). Such codes indicate whether a budgeted activity has a DRR purpose or focus and would be used across all ministries and agencies. Useful lessons can be drawn from other cross-sector policy objectives included in national budgets. The Nepalese government through the Ministry of Finance and National Planning Commission have introduced a climate budget code to allow for tracking of climate expenditure. The initiative has led to an allocation of 10.3% of Nepal’s 2013/2014 national budget to climate funding.

Discussions on financing in Sendai

While Sendai is first and foremost a forum for agreeing a future framework for DDR rather than mobilising funding, the importance of investments from national, international and private sector resources are likely to feature throughout. International development financing is only one of these potential resource flows for DRR and needs to be considered in the context of all resources to complement national initiatives and budgeting.

More financing is undoubtedly needed, but needs to come hand in hand with better data to understand how much is actually given, from whom, to whom and for what. Sendai offers an opportunity for commitments to this at the national and international levels – based on the understanding that better data can drive better spending decisions, and ultimately the reduction of risk for those most vulnerable to disasters.

Further recommended reading on DRR financing

GHA (2012) Disaster Risk Reduction: Spending where it should count

GHA (2012) Aid investments in DRR: rhetoric to action

ODI (2013) Financing DRR: A 20 year story of international aid

ODI (2015) Briefing: Finance for disaster risk Reduction

ODI and UNDP (2015) 10 things to know about finance for reducing disaster risk

UNISDR (2013) Exploring Existing Methodologies for Allocating and Tracking Disaster Risk Reduction in National Public Investment

Source: Development Initiatives taken from UN Office for the Coordination of Human Affair ( OCHA )’s Financial Tracking Service ( FTS ).

As illustrated, the proportion of projects that are ‘uncoded’ (i.e. not coded using the IASC gender marker) has increased significantly from 57% in 2012 to 68% in 2014. This means that less than a third of all projects reported to the FTS in 2014 were coded using a gender marker.

This increase in uncoded projects may in part account for the decline in the combined proportion of projects coded as making a ‘significant’ or ‘principal’ contribution to gender equality, which fell from 35% in 2012 to only 19% in 2014. This means that less than a fifth of all projects reported to the FTS in 2014 explicitly focussed on gender.

To address this widening gap in reporting on gender there is a need for a standardised and systematic international approach to donor reporting on gender as an outcome of the WHS consultations.

The closest we currently have to this is the IASC gender marker. There are some shortcomings with this marker as identified in a recent review – particularly regarding the need to extend the IASC gender marker from being a proposal development tool to being a programme cycle tool. However, reviewers said that it does provide a useful and standardised tool for tracking and comparing donor funding to gender in emergencies, which can be used as a starting point and improved over time.

A mandatory commitment from all donors to use this marker when reporting on humanitarian spending to the UN OCHA ’s Financial Tracking Service ( FTS ) – for UN appeals and more widely – would help to fill this gap in information.

There will of course be some technical challenges regarding the use of the marker, but these can be overcome with sufficient planning and support. As some Humanitarian Country Teams move towards activity-based (rather than project) costing in their SRPs, they will need to work with UN OCHA to understand what this means for using the gender marker and ensure that granular reporting is not lost.
To ensure consistency between donors in reporting, it is also important that internal systems used by donors to report spending on gender are compatible with standardised international reporting mechanisms on gender (i.e. the IASC gender marker), so that information contained in these internal systems can be easily transferred to international reporting systems (i.e. the FTS ).

As an example, the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection (ECHO) department’s new ‘Age-Gender Marker’ (2013) seeks to achieve this and has been designed to be largely consistent with IASC gender marker by using a similar coding system. In addition, it is applied throughout the programme cycle, which is important in terms of tracking how funding to gender is actually allocated in practice (as opposed to how it was forecasted during the design phase). As such, ECHO’s marker offers promising potential in terms of generating key lessons for other donors regarding the application of a gender marker as a programming and reporting tool, and building consistency with international reporting systems on gender.

The WHS presents a critical opportunity to make a difference in humanitarian response to the different needs of women, men, girls and boys in crises, and to strengthen accountability on this issue. This must be accompanied by a stronger commitment from donors regarding their consistent use of an international standardised reporting system on gender.

While the focus of the project is on East Africa, the survey is intended to target a broad range of both international and national humanitarian actors within and outside East Africa so we can better understand who is producing, influencing and using humanitarian evidence.  We will also be conducting focus group discussions and interviews to drill down in more detail into the barriers and enablers to the production and use of humanitarian evidence.

Please complete this short 10-minute survey and share among your networks and colleagues. For further information on this project please contact Kerry Smith: kerry.smith@devinit.org

Complete the online survey.

These profiles are for anyone involved with or interested in humanitarian assistance to access and understand the data for both government donors and countries receiving humanitarian assistance. They provide analysis on humanitarian funding data from 2003 to 2012 (including 2013 where data is available). Importantly in the context of risk, resilience and poverty, they also contextualise humanitarian assistance within wider official development assistance . As a new feature to all 69 profiles, there is a summary of key facts giving a quick overview of financing trends, donor policies and recipient vulnerability indicators.

The country profiles provide insight into the individual donor behaviour behind the overall global trend of increased humanitarian assistance (as reported in our GHA Report 2014). Kuwait’s profile in particular highlights the growth in funding from countries outside the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD ) Development Assistance Committee ( DAC ), showing an increase in its humanitarian assistance by 2,315%, from US$14 million in 2012 to US$327 million in 2013. Our new profiles for OECD DAC donors Luxembourg and Italy, however, illustrate that this was not the case for every donor; both marginally decreased their contributions by US$1 million and US$7 million, respectively. Australia reduced its humanitarian expenditure by the largest percentage of the OECD DAC donors in 2013, with a 21% decrease.

From the recipient perspective, the country profiles provide funding background to the current high-profile UN-coordinated humanitarian appeals, including appeals for Level 3 emergencies in Syria, Central African Republic (CAR) and the Philippines in 2013. As a result of the prolonged crisis in Syria, its humanitarian assistance peaked at US$1.5 billion in 2012, making Syria the largest recipient that year. Initial estimates of Syria’s humanitarian assistance in 2013 total US$1.4 billion. At the other end of the funding spectrum, the crisis in CAR has been consistently classified as a ‘forgotten crisis’ by the European Commission’s Humanitarian Aid and Civil Protection department (ECHO) Global Vulnerability and Crisis Assessment. The CAR 2013 Appeal was the most underfunded appeal among the three Level 3 emergencies that year. Despite a significant increase (142%) in the total humanitarian assistance received by CAR (US$69 million in 2012 to US$167 million in 2013), CAR’s profile shows that only 53% of needs were met by international donors.

Prior to the Ebola virus outbreak, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia collectively received US$35 million in humanitarian assistance in 2013; the UN Response Plan is currently requesting US$1.5 billion to respond to the crisis, of which 77% had been covered by 9 January 2015. The United States is the top donor to the appeal having contributed US$230 million, followed by the UK (US$132 million) and Germany (US$129 million).

The data in our country profiles is derived from UN OCHA Financial Tracking Service ( FTS )) and OECD DAC data. Preliminary data for 2014 is not available until April 2015, which is why our profiles provide a historical picture of humanitarian funding trends. Please see our crisis briefings for funding responses to current crises.

If you have any queries about our recent updates or regarding current crises, please contact our helpdesk.

This is the largest request to date at the time of the launch date. It includes a new Strategic Response Plan (SRP) for Ukraine, which hasn’t previously appeared in the list of appeals. It also includes increased funding for four Level 3 emergencies – the UN’s highest level of emergency – in the Central African Republic (CAR), South Sudan, Syria and Iraq, totalling US$11.3 billion (69% of global requirements). The crisis in Syria alone, including the two appeals to respond to affected populations both in Syria (SHARP) and in neighbouring countries (RRP), accounts for 44% of the total amount requested globally.

Haiti and the Philippines have dropped off the list of appeals. The Haitian government is working with the UN and its partners on a transitional appeal for 2015 to 2016; and the government of the Philippines announced an end to the humanitarian phase of the response to Typhoon Haiyan in July 2014. Financial requirements for the Ebola crisis are also not included – currently US$1.5 billion for 2014 – since it is first and foremost a public health crisis, rather than a humanitarian one.

US$16.4 billion is certainly not the final figure for 2015 – far from it. The request doesn’t include requirements for Djibouti nor for nine countries in Africa’s Sahel region (Burkino Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Gambia, Mali, Mauretania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal). These appeals are scheduled to launch in February 2015, and if their requirements for 2015 are similar to this year’s then together they could amount to an additional US$2 billion. Other notable absentees from 2015’s list of SRPs are the Republic of Congo and Libya, both of which requested funding through UN-coordinated appeals in 2014. No SRP for the Republic of Congo is expected in 2015, though a new SRP for Libya is currently under consideration.

Figure 1: Launch requirements and revised requirements for UN-coordinated appeals, 2011–2015

Sources: Development Initiatives based on UN OCHA FTS data, OCHA Global Humanitarian Assistance Overviews and OCHA press statements.

Notes: Data downloaded 9 December 2014. Launch requirement figures are approximate and detail advance funding requests before the year has commenced. Increases in requirements reflect adjustments made during the year. Data drawn from OCHA overviews of global humanitarian response requirements or OCHA press statements use numbers that are rounded up or down. The overall requirement figure for 2014 has been reduced to take into account a partial overlap between SRPs.

Past experience has shown that the amount requested at the outset of the year rarely bears any resemblance to the revised financial requirements at the end of the year. The UN is aware of this and has cautioned that its 2015 figures are provisional and expected to increase as more SRPs are finalised and as events unfold across the world in the next twelve months.

As Figure 1 shows, the amount requested for 2014 at the time of the 2014 SRP launch was US$12.9 billion. By 9 December 2014 that amount had gone up to US$19.2 billion – an increase of 48%. The same was true in 2013, which saw requirements go up by 51% throughout the course of the year – from US$8.5 billion to US$12.8 billion. Even if we take a conservative approach and project a 35% increase in requirements during 2015 (the average % increase over the last four years), the revised requirements by December 2015 could be as high as US$22.1 billion. If they increase by more, 50% say, then the requirements could reach a staggering US$24.5 billion.

Figure 2: Timeline of SRP 2014 funding requested and funds committed/contributed

Source: Development Initiatives based on UN OCHA FTS data and OCHA overview of Global Humanitarian Response 2014

Notes: Data downloaded 9 December 2014.  Funding received before or during December 2013 includes amounts that were retrospectively allocated to SRPs in 2014.

Unpredictable funding, and to some extent unpredictable needs, make it difficult to project either the funds required or the likelihood of securing those resources. However, a more detailed look at 2014 (Figure 2) can tell us something about what to expect. Very occasionally, appeals were adjusted downwards during the year. More often, however, there were significant increases as situations such as those in Iraq and South Sudan deteriorated further, forcing millions of people to flee their homes and leaving unprecedented numbers reliant on humanitarian assistance.

Funding reached record levels in 2014, with US$9.2 billion received for activities within the SRPs.  But the parallel increase in needs meant that as of 9 December, only 50% of requirements had been met. With no end in sight for many of the major crises driving this week’s UN record funding request, it looks like 2015 will continue to see a growing gap between the funding required for humanitarian response and available resources.

Note: Watch this space early next year for a more detailed analysis of the 2015 SRPs.

Latio Paul Abbas of the Society for Civic Development, one of the training participants, said:

The post A week of learning: Aid & Budget Training for civil society leaders appeared first on aidinfo.org.

• If you’d like to find out more about aidinfo’s capacity development work, please contact Victoria – victoria.room@devinit.org

• Follow aidinfo’s training work with data users,  including photos, data viz and case studies on Twitter @aidinfo

• We'll be sharing learning and outcomes of the training on the aidinfo blog in upcoming months

The post Supporting data users who can make a difference: Aid & Budgets Training in Kenya appeared first on aidinfo.org.

Press Release: Our partner programme, Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA), has today launched GHA Report 2013, the most comprehensive annual assessment of humanitarian funding.

Among the report’s key findings are:

•  Global humanitarian response fell by 8% from US$19.4bn in 2011 to US$17.9bn in 2012.
• In 2012, 76 million people were targeted by the UN as needing humanitarian assistance – compared with 93 million people in 2011.
• The proportion of total UN humanitarian appeals met in 2012 (62.7%) was the lowest for a decade. This funding gap has increased year on year since 2007.
• The US remains by far the biggest donor by volume (US$3.8bn or 0.02% of GNI), while Luxembourg and Sweden gave the most as a percentage of national income (0.16% of GNI or US$74m and 0.14% of GNI or US$784m respectively).
• Turkey was the fourth-largest donor of humanitarian assistance in 2012 (over US$1bn or 0.13% of GNI). This illustrates the rising significance of ‘emerging’ donors but also more comprehensive reporting of humanitarian assistance from a much wider range of providers.
• Pakistan, Somalia and the West Bank and Gaza Strip received the most humanitarian assistance in 2011 (the latest year for which figures exist). Pakistan received US$1.4bn, Somalia US$1.1bn, and the West Bank & Gaza Strip US$849m.
• Many of the poorest countries provide humanitarian assistance by hosting refugees – for example Pakistan hosted over 1.7m refugees in 2011, Kenya 567,000 and Chad 367,000.

The post Report on humanitarian aid highlights need for better reporting and access to information appeared first on aidinfo.org.

Reblogged from The Conversation, with permission.

The post Can the G8 Open Data Charter deliver real transparency? appeared first on aidinfo.org.

By Simon Parrish: Programme Leader, aidinfo

The post AidView.net: The aid transparency ecosystem is growing appeared first on aidinfo.org.

By Karen Rono: Analyst, Development Initiatives Africa Hub

The relevance of open data for developing countries

1. All these countries are regarded to be of low human development in terms of Human Development Indicators
2. They all have more than 60% of their population depending on agriculture for their livelihoods, this agriculture is small scale and not mechanised.
3. More than 60% of the inhabitants live in rural areas, and of the proportion that lives in urban areas, the majority live in the slum areas; and
4. All these countries have more than 25% of their population living on less than 1.25USD per day, and a large proportion living in vulnerable conditions.

Legislation for open data is necessary- but not sufficient- to create a healthy ecosystem

Open Data for Development: The Ecosystem in East Africa and Nepal

The post What Nepal’s open data movement can learn from East Africa appeared first on aidinfo.org.

The post Open Nepal project launches appeared first on aidinfo.org.

The post Open Nepal Week continues with data literacy bootcamp in Kathmandu appeared first on aidinfo.org.

The post Open Nepal Week kicks off with a focus on the media appeared first on aidinfo.org.

The post Aidinfo preparing for Open Nepal week appeared first on aidinfo.org.