OCHA intends for the new report to establish a common baseline of humanitarian data that can be built on in future years, allowing for comparisons to be made across time. The data will help support humanitarian policy decisions and provide country-level context, thereby supporting operational decision-making.

Information presented in the report covers three main areas:

• Humanitarian needs in 2011
• Humanitarian response in 2011
• Humanitarian trends

OCHA intends to provide as comprehensive a picture as possible of global humanitarian needs and response, and to highlight major indicative trends in the nature of these crises. The report also covers the drivers and actors that participate in crisis prevention, response and recovery.

This report and others – including a UN OCHA report on Humanitarianism in the Network Age to which GHA also contributed – are available here.

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Key points include:

• Pledges have yet to translate into cash contributions, with the RRP just 10% funded and the SHARP 11% funded (at 6 February 2013)
• Donors within the region look set to become among the leading donors to the crisis response.

This gha-2013-briefing-funding-to-the-Syria-crisis-II collates and summarises the latest available information on financial investments in humanitarian assistance via international actors and will be updated periodically to monitor the financing response to the crisis.

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The 2013 CAP includes a major advance in the quest for more predictable financing for chronic crises in the Somalia consolidated appeal, which presents a three-year planning horizon. This important test-case represents an historic opportunity for both donors and implementing organisations to demonstrate their commitment and ability to build resilience within a more enabling funding environment.

How the international donor community responds to the funding requirements articulated in the 2013 CAP overall remains to be seen of course. If the donor response to the 2012 CAP is any indication, 2013 could be another tough year for humanitarian implementing agencies.

This briefing places the financing requirements and assessment of humanitarian needs in the 2013 appeal in context with other historic UN CAP appeals. You can download the briefing paper here: gha-CAP-2013-briefing

The post GHA Briefing: UN Consolidated Appeal Process 2013 appeared first on Global Humanitarian Assistance.

Follow the Money: How Has Aid Measured Up in 2012? (Humanitarian Assistance Webcast 13) from HPCR on Vimeo.

The presentations provided a useful summary of the main findings of the GHA Report 2012, descriptions of existing pooled funding mechanisms, a background to the consolidated appeals process (CAP) and insight into some of the current aid practices of non-DAC donors (donors outside of the Development Assistance Committee, also known as non-traditional donors) – United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Brazil and China. These were put into the context of a wider discussion around the current and potential impact of non-DAC donor countries on the current humanitarian system.

Some of the key themes that emerged from the discussion are outlined below.

The emergence of non-DAC donors

With DAC donors’ budgets increasingly tightened, there is a hope/expectation that non-DAC donors might fill any potential funding void (this hope is not founded on solid evidence of possibility).

The emergence of new actors has created some uncertainty; they may pose a fundamental challenge to the way in which the humanitarian system is run, which may conflict with current principles. In the past these donors have not given to traditional humanitarian actors such as UN agencies and NGOs or been strongly involved in existing forms of coordination.

At first glance the financial contribution of non-DAC donors looks small in comparison to overall figures from DAC donors. However when you look at funding to individual crises non-DAC donors’ contributions are often significant. For example, in response to crisis in Somalia last year both Saudi Arabia and Turkey were amongst the six largest donors. Saudi Arabia also gave the single largest contribution to the Haiti emergency response fund (ERF) in 2010 (US$50 million). One should bear in mind that current estimates of non-DAC donors’ financial contributions are likely to be inaccurate due to a lack of quality data.

Non-DAC donors’ use of pooled funding mechanisms

Pooled funds can be attractive for non-traditional donors as they reduce administrative costs by enabling donors to give in one lump sum rather than managing several grants. They can also reduce the burden of accountability and oversight for donors who might not have any country presence in the emergency area. Non-traditional donors are engaging with pooled funding mechanisms. In 2010 31 non-DAC governments chose to channel their humanitarian aid through ERFs, a considerable increase on previous years. In 2010 the top two donors to ERFs were not members of the DAC; Saudi Arabia contributed US$50 million and India US$20 million to the funds respectively. This meant that non-DAC governments were responsible for almost 60% of funding to ERFs that year (see GHA’s ERF profile). However, non-traditional donors continue to face challenges in accessing pooled funds.  Engagement is needed with non-DAC donors around how they can benefit from using pooled funding mechanisms.

Non-DAC donors and the UN consolidated appeals process (CAP)

The CAP provides a useful process for planning, budgeting, raising funds, and monitoring collective action in a major crisis. The number of countries coordinating and presenting projects within the CAP has increased. Non-traditional donors are engaging more with the multilateral system, but they also have their own partners and priorities and the system needs to attune itself to that. The CAP needs to consider that humanitarian action and funding is no longer the exclusive domain of a few major western donors; they must adapt to these new actors.

Increasing need to understand non-DACs’ policy and practice

There is a hope that new actors will not only contribute financially but also bring with them new approaches that might have positive effects. Geographically and culturally they may be better placed to respond and may communicate more effectively with affected communities. They may also have less baggage attached to their response (i.e. no colonial past) and possibly be more risk averse. Again this is based on limited knowledge, evidence and engagement. There is an ever-increasing need to understand how these new ‘non-traditional’ donors operate if they are to  play an increasingly prominent role in shaping the future of the humanitarian system.

For further in-depth analysis of non-DAC donor development and humanitarian financing read GHA’s report “Non-DAC donors and humanitarian aid – shifting structures, changing trends”.

To find out more about ATHA and up-and-coming webcasts see the schedule on their website here.

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Our GHA Report 2012 published earlier this year revealed that the top three recipient countries of international humanitarian aid over the period 2001-2010 were respectively Sudan (US$9.7 billion), Palestine/OPT (US$6.5 billion), and Afghanistan (US$5.6 billion); and that the top three government donors in the same period were the United States (US$34.1 billion), EU institutions (US$14.6 billion) and the United Kingdom (US$8.5 billion). The GHA country profiles drill down into the humanitarian picture for each of these individual countries, presenting firstly the headline facts and figures before showing where each country sits in relation to others, which donors and recipients are involved, and which channels of delivery and financing mechanisms are employed. The profiles then look beyond the humanitarian sphere to other types of aid, as well as providing data on investments in risk reduction (see also our recent report on aid to disaster risk reduction).

In a world where donors are under great pressure to demonstrate value for money, and where multiple players have a stake in the effective implementation of humanitarian assistance, it is vital that we have a clear and comprehensive view of who spends what and where, through which channels and according to what priorities. We hope our new and updated country profiles, which contain downloadable data, fulfil that role for you.

We’d love to receive your feedback; we will be creating new profiles in 2013 so if there are additional countries that you would like to see profiled, please let us know.

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Yet this represented just 5% of the total humanitarian funding from international governments and private donors in 2011. There may yet be scope therefore for increasing the volumes of funds channelled via these mechanisms and space for innovations on the pooled fund model.

To date, pooled humanitarian funds have been a UN-led initiative, but a new pooled humanitarian fund was created in 2010 by the Consortium of British Humanitarian Agencies (CBHA), a group of UK-based NGOs, which they are now looking to take to scale. In this article, we examine the particular features of the CBHA ERF and consider whether its global ambitions complement and enhance the existing humanitarian funding architecture.

Do we really need another pooled humanitarian fund?

Pooled humanitarian funds are generally thought to be a good thing on balance, channeling increasing volumes of humanitarian funds from a growing range of donors to both well known and some under-funded crises. In some cases pooled humanitarian funds have improved the timeliness of funding and they encourage humanitarian organisations to participate in inter-agency coordination forums.

For donors, pooled funds also have the very attractive quality of reducing transaction costs, transferring responsibility for fiduciary control and the identification of needs and suitable funding partners to the UN agencies managing the funds and the agencies or coordination bodies overseeing their allocation processes. This is particularly appealing at a time when many government donors are facing staff cuts and it also makes it easier for newer donors who have limited technical capacity and experience to assess proposals and prospective partners to participate.

But transaction costs are not necessarily reduced overall, rather in many cases they are shifted down the transaction chain. And the transaction chain itself may be lengthened and administrative costs extracted at each stage.

The CERF – the largest pooled humanitarian fund with annual funding of around US$460 million – can only pass on funds directly to UN agencies who in turn pass around a quarter of all CERF funds to NGOs to implement humanitarian programmes. While release of funds to UN agencies may be rapid, the lag-time between the award of CERF rapid-response funds and receipt of funds by NGOs receiving funds via UN agencies takes an average of up to 13 weeks.

We can’t track these multiple transactions at the moment – although the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) would enable us to – so we don’t know what proportion of the original funds donated remain or how much time is lost in these multiple tiers of transactions. This is a major limitation in our ability to assess the timeliness and efficiency of pooled humanitarian funds.

But it is clear that both money and time may be lost in a system with multiple layers of transaction and implementing NGOs – including national NGOs who often struggle to access funds via pooled channels – are often at the end of the chain, last to receive funds and with limited influence over where, how and to whom funds are allocated.

The extent to which pooled humanitarian funds are a good thing currently depends to a certain extent then on who you are but also on where you are.

The CERF, reliant on channelling funds through UN agencies, can only direct funds to places where UN agencies have a footprint. Country-level pooled humanitarian funds are established in a limited number of usually protracted crises, where the UN has an established coordination presence. That potentially leaves a large number of crisis situations, where the UN does not have a substantial footprint and capacity to monitor and articulate needs, unlikely to benefit from pooled humanitarian funding. With an increasing number of small-scale emergencies associated with climate change and many ‘forgotten’ or ‘neglected’ sub-national crises, smaller crises may experience growing inequality in funding and response to needs.

In reality, when NGOs need to start-up somewhere new or scale-up fast, they can’t wait for the donor and pooled funding leviathan to crank into gear, so they do so with their own private resources. But many international NGOs have limited private resources and they may have many competing claims on these funds. Moreover, it may be extremely difficult for national NGOs to call on reserves to respond to crises.

So if a new mechanism could take the best of humanitarian pooled funds, and improve on some of the limitations, to make funds for NGOs more accessible (including national NGOs) and to channel funds to less high profile crises, then perhaps we do need one.

What is the CBHA ERF?

The CBHA was established in 2010 by 15 UK-based NGOs to strengthen the coordination and capacity of the humanitarian NGO sector. As part of this initiative a £4 million fund was established for member agencies to draw on during an emergency. The ERF provided immediate seed money for agencies to begin relief efforts before other funding became available. Programmes funded by the ERF must begin delivering aid within seven days of the start of a response and complete within 30 days.

Funding in this pilot phase of the fund was awarded based on proposal submissions which are evaluated through peer review by representatives of all the member agencies.

Since March 2010 the ERF has allocated £4 million to 12 humanitarian emergencies and the ERF peer review mechanism was used to disburse an additional £21 million in the context of the Pakistan 2010 floods.

What are the comparative advantages of the CBHA ERF?

The CBHA, while small in scale to date, has received some pretty convincing endorsements. The UK Department for International Development’s 2011 Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR) for example, acknowledged the role of the ERF in improving the rapid response in certain disasters as a model for providing ‘greater equity in allocations, and coherence’. And two independent reviews of the ERF clearly indicate some important comparative advantages relating to timeliness, cost-effectiveness and funding in accordance with needs, particularly in less high profile crises.

Based on an independent review of the ERF after its first year of operation:

-          the ERF appears to have successfully driven up humanitarian funding to crises which did not have Consolidated Appeal Process (CAP) flash appeals and therefore where the UN system and bilateral donors were not focussing much attention (Bangladesh, Myanmar, and South Kordofan)

-          the ERF provided additional resources to NGOs in contexts where the UK, at least, was otherwise only channelling its humanitarian funds through UN agencies or the CERF

-          the ERF had markedly quicker disbursement and start-up times compared to other humanitarian funding modalities

-          on average, ERF-funded projects were approved and became operational two to three times quicker than other NGO projects as a whole

-          and in avoiding multiple layers of transaction costs, ERF funds are more cost effective in that a greater proportion of donor funds remains to deliver goods and services to crisis-affected populations.

While the amounts of funding awarded are relatively small and the implementation period short, recipient agencies report that ERF funds enable them to scale-up and to leverage more funding from other sources – including in the Horn of Africa in 2011. According to an independent review conducted by DARA, “The CBHA response to the crisis in Somalia long before it became a major news story reflects one of the key advantages of such a peer-managed fund – the ability to respond to humanitarian needs even when they are not on the news”.

In addition, and perhaps most importantly, 52% of all grants awarded via the CBHA were channelled on to local partner organisations. While many donors may recognise the critical importance of supporting domestic response capacity, they usually struggle to do this in practice. The CBHA offers an alternative channel for donors to domestic actors to international financing and to build domestic response capacity.

What are the challenges to going global?

In a relatively short space of time and with a relatively small amount of funding the ERF has demonstrated impact, cost effectiveness and major comparative advantages in responding to needs fast. The CBHA have ambitions to take the ERF to scale to build something like a global CERF for NGOs. If successful, this could provide an effective complement to the existing suite of pooled humanitarian funds. But with many government donors trimming their aid budgets, they may face some formidable challenges in accessing funds, while the demand for response, particularly in relation to climate-related disasters, continues to grow.

In reality, despite the potential of pooled humanitarian funds to broaden donor participation and a record 161 official and private donors contributing to pooled funds in 2010, just ten government donors (UK, Netherlands, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Canada, Ireland, Denmark, Germany and Australia) provided 90% of the total funding to all the ERFs, CHFs and the CERF from their inception in 2006 up to 2011, with the UK alone providing 29%. There are already many competing claims on these donors’ resources.

In targeting private donors, the ERF may come up against competition with the fundraising strategies of their member agencies and they may face some difficulties in achieving consensus among members on ethical and reputation considerations around accepting funds from corporate donors. Building relationships with non-traditional government donors requires time and resources.

The ERF’s peer review model, which currently functions transparently and efficiently, may need to develop new governance models for global scale operations, where informal networks, personal relationships and experience will not be adequate to evaluate partners and their proposals, and they will need to move away from their UK brand in order to appeal to a wider constituency of donors and implementing agencies.

Based on the impressive early successes of the ERF however, there is every reason to believe that the CBHA has the creative vision and drive to meet these challenges. What remains to be seen is whether donors will rise to their challenge to provide more timely, needs-driven and cost effective humanitarian funding.

You can read more about pooled humanitarian funding in GHA Report 2012, and our special reports on  CHFs and ERFs and you can access our unique dataset on financing flows through the UN OCHA managed CERF, CHFs and ERFs here.

The post The CBHA Early Response Fund (ERF) appeared first on Global Humanitarian Assistance.

The first panel of the Congress was lead by GHA’s Lydia Poole who presented on the global trends of private funding to the humanitarian sector. The panel was chaired by Kathrin Schick, the Director of VOICE, and the other panellists were Jean Saslawsky, the Secretary General of the International Network of Médecins du Monde, and Marion Lieser, the General Director of Oxfam Germany. The session had been moved into the auditorium as so many people had expressed an interest and the room was almost full, further proof that money is power!

Interest in private and other non-official sources of humanitarian funding run high in a world where demand for humanitarian response shows no signs of slowing yet the pot of official funding from traditional donors is likely to fail to meet this growing demand: with an economic slow-down in many OECD countries, ODA has probably peaked, and fell by 3% in real terms in 2011.

Private funding meanwhile may offer some hope for growth in humanitarian financing. Private funding grew rapidly, by 70% in 2010 in response to the major crises in Haiti and Pakistan, and remained surprisingly buoyant in 2011, above 2009 levels in 2011. And moreover, private funding also has some uniquely attractive attributes vis-a-vis official funding.

Jean Saslawsky of MDM received one of the biggest laughs of the conference with his brilliant comparison of trying to tessellate emergency funding for a crisis response like a game of tetris. In these circumstances, private funding can be essential to fill the gaps.

Lydia also noted that if we want to think more creatively to try and harness the potential, increase flows of private financing for humanitarian purposes, we need to look a little wider.

Poles of economic growth are shifting and the public of many emerging and even developing economies are also motivated to give. In response to the Horn of Africa crisis in 2011 for example, private individuals in Turkey donated US$60 million through the Turkish Red Crescent society and the Kenyan Red Cross Society, the Kenya Media Owners Association, telecoms company Safaricom and the Kenya Commercial bank, raised 678 million Kenyan shillings ($8m) through the Kenyans for Kenya (K4K) initiative to support humanitarian relief operations.

Remittances are also a growing and relatively stable private capital flow, which can pass directly into the hands and bank accounts of vulnerable and crisis-affected people. Recorded remittance flows to fragile states have grown rapidly, by 272% in the ten years between 2002 and 2011. An estimated US$1 billion in remittances flows to Somalia each year.

This opens up a whole range of new considerations in terms of government policy, private sector regulation, investments in technology. You can find Lydia’s presentation here.

Perhaps the largest ethical area of concern around private humanitarian financing is the lack of transparency as to how and where the money is spent as compared with official sources of funding. The potential for power afforded by independence and a lack of accountability requirements associated with private funding to corrupt are explored in this blog from MSF conference panellist Jeroen Jansen.

Many questions from the audience focused on accountability and transparency including the difficulties of real time reporting of financial transactions during an emergency and several raised concerns about the additional burden of reporting asking ‘where will this transparency thing end?’ and ‘why cant we just be trusted?’. Lydia explained that in fact reporting to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) should in fact reduce the burden of reporting in the long-run and cautioned that NGOs might as well get used to the demand for greater transparency as it is part of a world-wide cultural shift. Humanitarian organisations need to adapt and respond to this if they want to maintain their reputation for impartiality, fairness and neutrality and if we want to make real progress in accountability and efficiency in our collective response.

The Congress explores a wide range of emerging practical and ethical humanitarian considerations and immerses attendees in MSF’s culture of vigorous debate. It is truly invigorating stuff and comes highly recommended as an annual spiritual retreat for humanitarians, but the conference also contributes to the important work of collective thinking on how we interpret and apply core humanitarian principles to the challenges of an ever-changing world to ensure they continue to remain relevant and of practical use in identifying and targeting populations in need and negotiating humanitarian space.

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Disaster risk reduction (DRR) often in conjunction with emergency preparedness, climate change adaptation and resilience building has become an increasingly common element of donor policy particularly  following the adoption of the Hyogo Framework for Action (HFA) at the UN’s World Conference on Disaster Reduction in Kobe, Japan in January 2005. The rise in prominence of DRR in many government donors’ policy agendas comes at a time when incidences of disasters related to climate change are increasing and the impact of disasters on an increasingly populous, urban and globally interdependent world is set to become even more difficult to deal with. This comes at a time when there is a continued downward pressure on many aid budgets and the need to extract more value from every aid dollar spent.

In March 2012, the GHA programme published ‘Disaster risk reduction: Spending where it should count’, which examined the levels of donor investment in DRR in the period 2000-09. The report found that despite the rhetoric, just 1% (US$3.7 billion) of total ODA had been spent on DRR in 40 of the world’s poorest and most disaster-affected countries.

Using the latest available data, our new report continues this analysis of ODA investments in DRR in the period immediately following the adoption of the HFA, and looks in detail at the policies and investment profiles of 24 of the leading ODA donors.

Following the HFA, a number of countries have written specific policy documents focusing on DRR. Many now recognise DRR within their development and humanitarian policies, and have expressed their support at the UN International Strategy of Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) Global Platforms for Disaster Reduction in 2007, 2009 and 2011. Others have demonstrated their financial support to the two main international bodies in relation to DRR, namely the UNISDR and the World Bank’s Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR).

Our analysis of donor contributions suggests that despite positive inroads in promoting DRR on the global agenda – a gap persists between rhetoric and policy recognition on the one hand and action and investment on the other.

The report uses recommendations put forward at the 2009 Global Platform (that 10% of humanitarian funding should be allocated to DRR and development spending should constitute at least 1%) to measure donors DRR expenditure over the period 2006-10.

We found that the majority of donors continue to allocate only a small proportion of their aid budgets to DRR. Only 2 donors out of 24 have spent 10% or more of their humanitarian aid budgets on disaster prevention and preparedness and only 3 have spent more than 1% of their development expenditure.

Our analysis again highlights the complexity and difficulties in trying to quantify donor investments in DRR. The current data sources available do not supply a readily available and robust tool for analysing donor commitments. Improvements in the quality of donor reporting are essential if we are to have clarity around who does what in this space.

If you have any queries or would like to discuss the report further please do get in touch; dan.sparks@devinit.org

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World Humanitarian Day was established in memory of the 22 UN staff who were killed in the 2003 bombing of the UN headquarters in Iraq. The attack shook the humanitarian sector, and whilst humanitarian workers had been killed ‘in service’ previously, this attack signified the targeting of a central symbol of the sector: the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and his staff. As the graph below shows, the number of aid workers involved in severe security incidents has seen a sharp increase over the past decade.

Source: Development Initiatives based on Humanitarian Outcomes (2012), Aid Worker Security Database, https://aidworkersecurity.org/ (accessed 31 July 2012)

The purpose of World Humanitarian Day is threefold: it provides an opportunity to raise awareness of humanitarian aid to the general public; it is a chance to reflect and remember those who have lost their lives whilst working to help others; it recognises all those who are working in emergencies right now. The media, especially in the West, are very good at covering the terrible scenes of a natural disaster or conflict, but rarely do we see portrayals of the individuals who work tirelessly to bring relief.

It is also a good time to remind ourselves of the central principles of humanitarian action. The Red Cross and NGO Code of Conduct is most often used for this purpose. Adopted in 1994, it lists ten core commitments for upholding the core principles of humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence. At the forefront of this is the humanitarian imperative: that every citizen has the right to receive humanitarian assistance. This means that no person should be left to suffer alone and that those most in need should be assisted first.

The humanitarian imperative is difficult to act out in many circumstances due to security dangers, problems accessing those in need and the procurement of appropriate aid. Yet, we have already seen numerous examples of how the sector can adapt to new challenges and it is this resilience and determination that we should recognise when remembering aid workers on Sunday.

The ALNAP report acknowledges the need to improve leadership within the sector. This is reliant on organisations allocating adequate resources towards the training of their aid workers. As last year’s Inter-Agency Standing Committee ‘Real-time evaluation of the response to the Somalia crisis’ noted, “Local agencies have a number of comparative advantages over international actors. Those that lack technical and administrativecapacity need support from international sources to build that capacity. This should pay long-term dividends”.(1) The difficulty is that to do this requires donor funding and as the graph below shows, total official development assistance (ODA) from Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors dropped by 10% between 2010 and 2011.

Source: OECD DAC 

With competing priorities and pressures on many donor aid budgets these suggestions will not be easily integrated. Donors are focusing more and more on demonstrable results, which disincentivises the allocation of limited resources to capacity-building, the direct results of which are harder to demonstrate. But without adequate equipment, leadership, information and capacity, the humanitarian imperative cannot be upheld and the effectiveness and efficiency of our aid will not improve.

On Sunday, let’s remember the challenges faced by aid workers and reflect on how we can best support them.

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The good news is that the number of people affected by humanitarian crises and the number of people in need of assistance both went down in 2011. Humanitarian funding also reduced in 2011, but remained above 2009 levels, at US$17.1 billion.

But while the major proximate causes of disasters appear to have abated somewhat in 2011 (there were fewer natural disasters and the incidence of conflict has been on a downward trend for almost a decade), the major global vulnerabilities of climate change and economic volatility remained a present threat, with food and energy prices remaining high and subject to volatility into 2012. And in reality, we still know very little about the real number of people affected by crises or in need of assistance.

The international financing response to the crises considered of the highest priority for international response in the UN’s consolidated appeals process (CAP) fell 38% short of the financing requirements in 2011, despite a substantial reduction in the amount of funds requested. This is part of a longer-term downward trend, and in 2011, the unmet financing needs were at their widest for a decade.

In addition to the financing response falling further short of needs, the international response to the major crises of the last two years have also exhibited some concerning tendencies in the proportional allocation of funding in accordance with assessed needs, and in the timeliness of response.

The distribution of humanitarian funding has been relatively stable for a number of years. Sudan was the leading recipient for five consecutive years between 2005 and 2009. But all that changed in 2010 when Haiti and Pakistan received large volumes of funds which had far reaching effects on the distribution of funds among other recipients. Funding for these emergencies does not appear to have been entirely additional.

The data suggests that the major emergencies of 2010 attracted funding at the expense of smaller scale, less high profile emergencies. The top three recipients typically receive around 30% of the total funds to recipient countries but in 2010, this jumped to 49%. All other recipients saw not only their shares of the total, but the collective volumes they received also fell. Consolidated appeals, which represent the needs of chronic complex crises, saw an 11% drop in their proportion of funding requirements met in 2010, and many appeals reported having greater difficulties attracting funding in the first half of the year, which in some cases meant programming ambitions were scaled back.

In 2011 we saw another worrying example of the limits of international response in responding to meet humanitarian financing needs, when donors showed a lack of willingness to respond to an assessment of needs that focused on risk and likely outcomes rather than manifest humanitarian needs, at great human and financial cost. Clear evidence that a crisis was building in the Horn of Africa and calls for donor support were not responded to until the crisis had already escalated to huge proportions. By June 2011, only 28% of the financing requirements in the UN consolidated appeal for Somalia were met. A few weeks later, famine was declared and funding began to flow quickly to the appeal.

Not only do we need more comprehensive, comparable and timely information on humanitarian needs, we also need a shift in mindset towards incorporating risk and probability of disaster into our assessment of crises and the need for response if we are to respond effectively, proportionately and in a timely fashion to slow-building complex disasters, which look to be increasingly likely to occur in areas such as the Sahel and Horn of Africa.

The emphasis on where we place our financing investments to deal with humanitarian crises similarly requires a major rethink. Building greater resilience to crises is the most efficient and cost-effective way of preventing suffering and protecting livelihoods, yet we currently still only spend 4% of humanitarian aid on disaster prevention and preparedness and less than 1% of development aid between 2006 and 2010.

GHA Report 2012 presents transparent and reliable analysis of how the international response has measured up to the scale of global humanitarian crises, and is an essential resource for all those working to address humanitarian crisis and vulnerability.

You can view, download, or print the report and its data, or get in touch if you would like to receive a hard copy.

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