The stark contrast with funding to the 2010 Pakistan floods appeal continues.

Just seven government donors have so far reported funding contributions to the OCHA Financial Tracking service, and almost a third of the funds received so far within the appeal have been provided via the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund.

Afghanistan has been a major humanitarian aid recipient for the last decade, but its relationship with humanitarian aid has been complex, controversial and often unpredictable.

Humanitarian aid to Afghanistan increased dramatically in the year following the US-led invasion before falling sharply again the next year. Development aid continued to grow steadily throughout the decade, while humanitarian aid remained at relatively low levels until a major escalation in humanitarian needs in 2008 put humanitarian needs in Afghanistan back on the international agenda.

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Afghanistan has participated very sporadically in the UN Consolidated Appeals process. Afghanistan has only participated in the UN consolidated appeal process (CAP) just three times between 2000 and 2010 and only began to prepare a humanitarian work-plan from 2009, with the establishment of a UN OCHA office in Kabul.

There have however been five ‘non-CAP appeals’ in this period. Non-CAP appeals are by definition lower priority and typically receive a poorer donor response. The use of non-CAP appeals is illustrative of the low priority given to humanitarian needs in the post invasion period when many of the major donors prioritised state-building and stabilisation agendas.

The donor financing response to these various UN funding appeals has been extremely variable.

While the analysis and articulation of the scale and severity of humanitarian needs and humanitarian financing in Afghanistan has improved latterly with reinforced humanitarian leadership in Kabul, this latest statement of increased financing requirements happens at a time of unpredictability in donor financing responses. We commented elsewhere on the disappointing donor response to the UN CAP appeal up to the mid-year point, and noted recently the very disappointing response to the Pakistan flash appeal to date. In this climate of uncertainty, it is apposite that the revised Afghanistan appeal calls for an increased emphasis in responses on ‘more sustainable, longer term, disaster risk reduction interventions, by government and development partners over the next years.’

We will monitor donor responses to the Afghanistan appeal through this blog. You can access the data referred to in this blog here and we plan to update our report on resource flows to Afghanistan early next year.

The GHA programme will be monitoring how aid donors and those who collect data on aid to South Sudan, plan to fill in historic gaps in the data and how they will gather make data available going forward. In a revised edition of our factsheet on aid to Sudan, now in the reports section on the website, we have attempted to gather what data there is on aid to South Sudan. In the next few weeks we will be researching and writing about how donors and aid data aggregators plan to deal with the new administrative opportunities and challenges of providing and tracking aid to the UN’s 193rd member state.

The situation in Yemen is complex due to a multiplicity of issues such as internal protracted conflict, al-Qaeda activity, risks of vulnerabilities to natural disasters, water shortages and refugee displacement. Yemen ranks low on the Human Development Index, 133 out of 169 countries, due to low adult literacy and high under five mortality rates. The number of refugees residing in the country has risen from 53,453 in 1995 to 170,854 in 2009 (UNHCR) and the number of internally displaced people stands at 342,000 (UNOCHA, 2010).  In recent weeks, in response to regional political movements across North Africa, there have been pro democracy demonstrations in Yemen in which thousands of protesters have called for an end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 32 year rule.

However historically, even with its fragile humanitarian situation, Yemen has not been a major recipient of aid. In our latest factsheet we analyse in more detail aid contributions to Yemen. The excel sheet containing the data can be accessed here.

South Sudan is expected to become an independent state on 9^th July 2011 but plenty of work remains to be done before then.

Outstanding political negotiations include agreeing boundaries and determining the status of Abyei. The job of untangling the economic and administrative affairs of North and South Sudan is also no small matter. Primarily, they must agree management and division of oil revenues, which provide the vast majority of revenues for each state, as well as agreeing how to manage their liabilities, that is the large external debt Sudan has accrued (debts of US$35 billion and loan arrears of US$30 billion).

Aid is one further piece in the puzzle of resource flows to be reviewed, but one which is particularly important to millions of Sudanese citizens in both the North and South, for whom aid plays a key role in meeting their basic needs.

In our latest factsheet we examine Sudan’s history as an aid recipient from 1995-2009.

Some of the data used in the report is publicly available, but much of it is not.  Accessing data for this report has been challenging and some of the figures included in the report are therefore partial and heavily qualified. If it is difficult enough for researchers to get hold of the full range of information about international resource flows to Afghanistan, tax payers in donor governments and perhaps most importantly, Afghan citizens and the GIRoA also face major challenges.

Encouragingly, in our conversations with the GIRoA, they were keen to point out that donor reporting and transparency have improved significantly throughout 2010. This follows a concerted campaign by the Ministry of Finance to advocate that donors at least report to the government what they are spending, to facilitate planning and rational allocation of funds, even if donors choose not to channel those funds through the government directly.

By far the most opaque area remains the aid-like resource flows that are not eligible as Official Development Assistance (ODA) under the OECD DAC criteria (more detail on this can be found in the report)– in this case mostly resources for building the security sector. We believe that aid ought to be understood in its full context, of which non-ODA resource flows are an important element. We estimate in the report that while aid has totalled US$26.7 billion between 2002 and 2009, non-ODA aid flows are at least US$16.1 billion, based on partial figures from a limited number of donor governments.

We hope that the report provides a broad contextual picture of resource flows, which also includes aid, private and domestic resource flows, and looks at the substantial costs of international military involvement which, for 2009, is estimated to be at least ten times greater than the aid investment.

How much aid is spent in conflict-affected states?

Definition of conflict-affected: based on Uppsala conflict data programme’s reporting of conflict incidence plus presence of a UN mandated multilateral peacekeeping force (i.e. the number of countries receiving the aid in the graph above varies each year). 33 recipients of aid were defined as conflict-affected in 2009.

How much humanitarian aid is spent in conflict-affected states?

How much humanitarian aid is spent in fragile states (2009)?

43 of the 145 countries receiving humanitarian aid in 2009 were classified as fragile.

Each top 10 recipient of humanitarian aid in 2009, was classified as ‘fragile’.

Definition of fragile state: characterised by widespread extreme poverty, most off-track in relation to MDGs and commonly caught in or emerging from violence and conflict. Our list here is based on definitions and lists compiled by World Bank (Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) 2008), Brookings Institution (Index of State Weakness in the Developing World 2009) and Carleton University (Country Indicators for Foreign Policy (CFIP) index 2008).

What was aid spent on in 2009?

By ‘aid’ we mean official development assistance (ODA) expenditure as reported to the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC)

‘Other’ ODA =US$55.4 billion and here includes: transport and storage; communications; business, banking and financial services; forestry, fishing and industry; core support to NGOs; refugees in donor countries; etc.

Health includes population and reproductive health. If you take this out, Health expenditure = US$8.2bn

The humanitarian aid figure quoted here is the gross disbursement as reported to the CRS.

Governance and security accounted for 12.5% of aid expenditure in 2009

Governance and security = US$16.6bn, includes: conflict, peace and security (US$3.6 billion) and government and civil society (US$13 billion)

‘Other’ ODA =US$55.4 billion

Health includes population and reproductive health (half the overall US$16bn).

Top 10 recipients of governance, security and humanitarian aid in 2009

Governance and security includes: conflict prevention and government and civil society.

All these statements can be made!:

When debt relief is excluded, seven of the top 10 recipients of total ODA are also top 10 recipients of ODA for government and civil society and conflict resolution combined: Afghanistan; Palestine/OPT; Tanzania; Pakistan; Iraq; Sudan; and DRC.

Six top 10 recipients of humanitarian ODA are also top 10 recipients of ODA for government and civil society and conflict resolution combined:  Sudan; Palestine/OPT; Afghanistan; Pakistan; DRC; and Iraq.

Seven of the top 10 recipients of ODA for government and civil society and conflict resolution combined are also top 10 recipients of total ODA excluding debt relief: Afghanistan; Iraq; Palestine/OPT; Sudan; Pakistan; DRC; and Tanzania.

Six of the top 10 recipients of ODA for government and civil society and conflict resolution combined are also top 10 recipients of humanitarian ODA: Afghanistan; Iraq; Palestine/OPT; Sudan; Pakistan; and DRC.

Afghanistan received over US$1.3 billion in government/civil society aid in 2009 …

… and was the largest recipient of aid expenditure on conflict prevention …

… and six of the top 10 governance and security recipients were also top humanitarian priorities

Six top 10 recipients of humanitarian ODA are also top 10 recipients of ODA for government and civil society and conflict resolution combined:  Sudan; Palestine/OPT; Afghanistan; Pakistan; DRC; and Iraq.

Aid expenditure on governance and security is growing

‘Other’ ODA =US$55.4 billion

Health includes population and reproductive health. If you take this out, Health expenditure = US$8.2bn

The humanitarian aid figure quoted here is the gross disbursement as reported to the CRS.

What does ‘government and civil society’ aid include?

What does aid spent on ‘conflict, peace and security’ include?

But official development assistance (ODA) is only part of the picture

Between 2002 and 2010, the United States has appropriated US$52 billion in ‘Reconstruction assistance’ for Afghanistan – not all of this counts as official development assistance (ODA). US$19 billion has gone through state and USAID, of which some goes to security activities that are non-ODA eligible.

US$33 billion has been spent through the US Department of Defense (DoD), of which US$28 billion on training for Afghan security forces and counter-narcotics operations.

[Note:

ODA cannot be used to fund military equipment, services or debt relief. It cannot

fund security expenditure related to paramilitary functions or anti terrorism. It

cannot fund mine clearance if the objective is not developmental.

If the military are used to deliver humanitarian aid, limited additional costs can

be counted as ODA. To be additional, costs must be incurred over and above the

costs of keeping personnel on base in the donor country and take account of any

compensation received from the UN for the use of military services.

Within UN approved peace operations some activities in the post confl ict

phase can count as ODA. These include human rights, election monitoring,

rehabilitation of demobilised soldiers, advice on economic stabilisation,

demobilisation of soldiers and weapons disposal. Within these activities funding

must not go to the armed forces or for military capacity building. It has to be used

to increase democratic control or for civil society engagement.]

What is global expenditure on UN department of peacekeeping missions?

Source: GHA Report 2010, Development Initiatives, based on SIPRI Multilateral Peace Operations database

The gap between the first and second leading recipients of aid significantly widened with Ethiopia receiving US$1.5 billion less than Afghanistan in 2008 and US$2.2 billion less in 2009.

The donor responsible for the largest share of this increase in aid to Afghanistan (63%) was the United States, which gave US$836 million more in 2009 than in 2008. Other donors also significantly increased their aid to Afghanistan in 2009. A further 10% of the 2009 increase came from an US$139 million increase in aid from the World Bank and 5% of the increase from the Asian Development Fund (US$62 million more than in 2008), 4% from Germany (US$52 million), and 4% from the United Kingdom (US$49 million).

Humanitarian aid rose sharply in 2008 to a historic peak of US$870 million when food shortages and increased insecurity contributed to a significant elevation in humanitarian needs.  Despite the US$1.3 billion increase in total aid to Afghanistan however, growth in humanitarian aid has not been sustained and aid fell by US$278 million to just US$592.5 million in 2009.

The total aid to Afghanistan reported to the OECD DAC from all donors since 2001 now amounts to US$29 billion. This official aid however represents only part of the total international resource flows to Afghanistan. In a forthcoming GHA report, to be published in early 2011, the GHA programme examines in detail resource flows into Afghanistan since 2001.

The levels of violence are staggering and are certainly comparable with major inter-state conflicts. An estimated 28,000 people (Mexican security and drug cartel personnel plus unfortunate civilians) have lost their lives since the beginning of the Mexican government’s offensive. By contrast during the same period, from the beginning of 2007 to end June 2010, 20,000 fewer international forces and civilians lost their lives in the war in Afghanistan (civilian casualty figures at 7,324 as reported by UNAMA Human Rights; military casualties at 1,510 as reported by icasualty.org; casualty figures for anti-government forces in Afghanistan are not available to complete this comparison).

Whilst the Mexican government remains on a war footing against the threats to the state from within, at the same time they have mooted the controversial question of how to deal with the transnational threats that span the wide-ranging drug supply chain. Would a change in the law, bringing the drug trade out into the light and regulating it as well as changing how we manage the demand for drugs, be more effective in dealing with this wider threat than a ‘war’?