Photo courtesy of Flickr.com/DVIDSHUB

The pressure on the humanitarian system appears to be growing. Aid from governments reached US$12.4 billion in 2010, the highest figure on record. At the same time UN appeals in 2010 reached their highest ever figure of US$11.2 billion, double what it was in 2006, and for the first time in five years the level of needs met fell significantly[1]. This is occurring alongside continued high prices for basic commodities that on the one hand creates more need and on the other reduces the amount of aid that each humanitarian dollar can buy. There is also considerable pressure on donors to be spending less or justifying each dollar spent, prioritising value for money and pushing for more and more impact with the same expenditure. Whilst it would be overly dramatic to say the humanitarian system is near breaking point, it cannot be denied that it is under substantial strain.

It is not surprising to see preparedness on almost everyone’s agenda in the humanitarian community. A sharper focus on preparedness is seen by many stakeholders as potentially transformative. It could not only connect humanitarian and development actors better and help focus national priorities, but also help reduce those growing costs of humanitarian interventions.

A study recently completed by Development Initiatives for the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) on behalf of the Inter-Agency Steering Committee (IASC) has highlighted both the current inadequate investment in preparedness as well as the many issues needed to be overcome before improvements can be both sustained and sustainable.

Funding to prevention and preparedness code, 2004-2009 (US$m constant 2009 prices). Source: OECD DAC data

Key issues to address are the inadequacy of existing financing mechanisms, lack of prioritisation or analysis of all risks, inability to learn lessons from one context to another and institutional structure issues with both global and country-level leadership.

“Not all the [preparedness] solutions are within our [humanitarians] hands but perhaps we are best placed to ensure overall aid is targeted correctly, because we are otherwise left with the failure of not doing so.”  Government donor representative

Above all donor structures that separate out humanitarian and development aid into two somewhat artificial camps, continue to inform a situation where preparedness is only considered short-term and the responsibility of which is place with ‘humanitarians’ who have neither the policies nor funding to make adequate improvements.

You can see the full report here or contact the authors below.

gha@devinit.org

This can be seen in the aid profiles of many countries but in Afghanistan and Iraq in particular. This is unsurprising given that both countries were invaded by the US and allies as a direct result of those events in New York in September 2001. Back in 2000 both of these countries were very low priority for official development assistance (ODA)[1]. Iraq was ranked as 83^rd in volume, receiving US$163.8 million and Afghanistan was ranked 73^rd, receiving US$220 million and most of that money for both countries was humanitarian (86% for Iraq and 75% for Afghanistan). These amounts still guaranteed a top ten ranking in terms of volume of humanitarian assistance, however, with Afghanistan placed 5^th and Iraq 9^th.

Table 1: Top ten humanitarian recipient countries, 2000 and 2009; (Source: Development Initiatives based on OECD DAC.)

An examination of these top ten recipients a decade apart reveals much. Firstly it highlights how countries in the top ten have changed. In 2000 the last major war in ex-Yugoslavia (the conflict over Kosovo) made Serbia a major recipient of humanitarian aid, more than double the next highest. Other conflicts leading to significant humanitarian need were Mozambique, Angola and Timor Leste. None of these countries are in the top ten in 2009. Indeed the 2009 ranking is dominated by countries that are arguably very much connected to the Global War on Terror. This includes aid not only Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Afghanistan’s fragile neighbour Pakistan, Somalia and its neighbours Kenya and Ethiopia, Osama’s old country of residence Sudan and also OPT/Palestine, often a focus of tension between Muslim countries and its neighbours. Secondly volumes of humanitarian assistance have increased significantly. Only the top placed country in 2000 (Serbia) would make it into the top ten in 2009. Volumes of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan and Iraq in 2000 would have placed only down at the bottom of the top 20 in 2009. Taken as a whole the top ten recipients of humanitarian assistance in 2009 received nearly three times the amount of those ten years earlier.

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During the decade humanitarian assistance to both countries follow a reasonably similar trend. There is an initial jump in aid in the year of invasion and the one after, followed by dropping amounts over several years and then an increase again. The increase is particularly evident in Afghanistan in 2008 and 2009 where a UN appeal helped push up funding to close to US$800 and US$600 million respectively.

The most dramatic impact Afghanistan and Iraq have had on aid flows over the decade can be seen in total ODA rather than the humanitarian subset.

Table 2: Largest recipients of ODA, 2000 and 2009; (source: OECD DAC)

As mentioned, back in 2000 neither country was in the top ten of ODA, both registering less than US$250 million. By the end of the decade Afghanistan had accounted for US$28.8 billion of aid and Iraq US$33.6 billion, more than 9.3% of the total aid allocated by country over the entire decade. The two peak years for both countries were 2005 for Iraq (US$8.9 billion) and 2009  Afghanistan (US$6.2 billion)  – both are the two highest figures for any recipient country in a single year.

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Figure 3: ODA to Afghanistan and Iraq 2000-2009, (Source: OECD DAC)

The aid trends are considerably different over the decade. ODA to Afghanistan has risen slowly but steadily from invasion-year amounts of US$0.2 billion to the huge US$6.2 billion in 2009 community. Iraq’s trend on the other hand has been very different, with a huge rise over three years from almost nothing during the oil-for-food period to more than US$8.9 billion in 2005, the year in which the Iraqi insurgency was at its peak. Volumes of aid have then fallen just as dramatically though the US$2.8 billion in 2009 means that Iraq is still ranked 6^th for total ODA.

The presence of oil, or in the case of Afghanistan the absence of it, surely has a part to play in the trend over the decade. Iraq’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2009 was US$65.2 billion, largely driven by oil income, and was more than 23 times the volume of ODA received. Afghanistan’s GDP was in comparison only US$12.5 billion, only just twice as much as the ODA it received in the same year. Both countries have very similar population levels, with Afghanistan just under 30 million people in 2009 and Iraq just more than 31 million. The GDP disparity is therefore particular evident when analysed per person; in Iraq it was US$219 in 2009 whilst in Afghanistan it was US$40.

Clearly Iraq has considerably more money available for long-term reconstruction. Aid to Afghanistan appears likely to stay at these remarkably high levels whilst with the international community having realised that turning the country into a stable state is going to need continual and substantial support for a number of years. Some of the major donors have suggested even more funds to the country in the future.

Ten years from now Iraq will likely slip down the rankings of volume of ODA. Afghanistan will remain at the top, joined in the very least by Libya.

[1] The data in this article is taken from the OECD DAC and in particular ‘all donors reporting to the DAC’.

After decades of colonial rule followed by decades of marginalisation that culminated in a devastating 20 year war, South Sudan has become the 193^rd member of the United Nations.

The challenges for this country are immense. Despite six years having passed since the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement with the Northern dominated government in 2005, South Sudan suffers from multiple humanitarian crises, compounded by the continuing lack of basic infrastructure. There are diseases of all kinds, conflicts between tribes and flash floods. Refugees return to areas that in some cases have almost no basic services. Development aid, despite the promises of the MDTF, has failed to deliver.

These challenges are further complicated by strained relations with the Northern government, over the contested areas along the border and the continual conflict in Darfur, oil rights and still existing militias.

Now these issues are solely the responsibility of this new nation.

In the next days we will publish a report on the transition in aid the government will face, as a Khartoum focused donor and implementing structure connects to the South. In the meantime you can find the detailed aid profile we put together earlier on Sudan. http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance.org/aid-to-sudan-1995-2009-new-gha-factsheet-2737.html

This interest, this stake, is particularly important in today’s humanitarian context. Needs are seemingly growing year on year and show no signs of slowing down. The finances available to manage those needs, whether in the vaults of donor governments or in the pockets of ordinary people, are increasingly under threat. Value for money, accountability, and transparency have become the key words in humanitarian discourse.

So now, perhaps more than ever, it is important to have an accurate picture of who spends what money, in which countries, through which agencies and by what priorities.  Now we need to know which countries are particularly generous and which are not. Now we need to know where we spend millions, indeed billions, of humanitarian dollars, each year, without change. Now we need to understand even more than before the complex and inter-connected world of humanitarian financing.

Today the Global Humanitarian Assistance team release the first twenty profiles of major humanitarian donors and recipient countries, the first batch of a series of country-by-country perspectives on humanitarian funding. We believe the profiles provide both the expert and the interested with the most detailed comparable humanitarian data and information available, in a design that invites investigation.

How can we demand better value for money for humanitarian aid without being clear of the full picture?

See the profiles here at: http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance.org/country-profiles

Does the UN appeals process – which despite some major caveats, remains perhaps our best measure of humanitarian needs – highlight whether or not we have made any progress in reducing humanitarian need?

British Red Cross

The combined humanitarian appeal for 2011 has just been released: US$7.4 billion for some of the most complex countries around the world.  It is also for the most intractable crises too; of the 11 country appeals of 2010 all but one reappears this year. Uganda drops out and is replaced by Niger, the latter’s needs large enough to warrant being separated out from the combined appeal for West African countries.  So there is not too much sign of progress in terms of total volume requested nor the countries for which money is being requested: US$7.4 billion requested for 2011 follows US$7.1 billion in 2010 which follows US$7 billion in 2009, US$22 billion largely in the same complex emergencies year on year.

And it is these emergencies, Sudan, DRC, Somalia etc, that account for the bulk of all spend on humanitarian assistance. Despite the media coverage, generated by large disasters such as the Haiti earthquake and Pakistan flooding, conflict still takes up more than its fair share of humanitarian assistance. Seven out of every ten US dollars spent on assistance is spent on conflict affected countries, almost each and every year. And it is these same countries we see, unsurprisingly, each and every year in the humanitarian appeals.

This certainly does not look like progress. Perhaps the humanitarian appeals actually reflect a lack of progress and what we are actually doing year on year is keeping people alive and delivering basic services. Each year we add to the vast number of people being kept alive and who receive basic services through humanitarian money. If so the questions come thick and fast, two above all, is humanitarian aid the best tool to make itself redundant? And secondly, not unconnected, what is the role of development in aid in reducing the risk, the vulnerability that appears to be increasing, if we read the CAP right, year on year?

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In the range of articles the Global Humanitarian Assistance team have written on this year’s humanitarian appeal we examine the scope and scale of this record appeal, question the dollar value put on an individual’s needs, look at the relationship between commodity prices and disaster risk reduction and humanitarian aid and finally look briefly at a single country, Somalia, and see what impact this year’s CAP may have on funding for national actors.

Firstly not all actors are included in the data reported. There are far too many gaps, and significant ones.
Some governments, especially those outside of what is classed as the humanitarian system, do not report to the main databases we have at our disposal; if they do report it is often haphazard and not comparable with other data. The national governments response to humanitarian crises is incredibly difficult to track; these countries are one step removed from donors, and their contributions, whether financial or through their role in logistics and coordination, are rarely fully understood, and hardly ever counted.
The contributions from individuals are also missing. Firstly the private voluntary contributions made by individuals around the world are often not reported properly by the implementing agencies that receive their funds, especially, once again, for those countries outside of the humanitarian system as we know it. But beyond that the work done by communities, families and individuals remains uncounted and unaccounted for.
In fact in a rather perverse irony of humanitarian (and development) aid the closer you get to the beneficiaries the less you know about the value of the money given.
The data reported itself meanwhile is not as useful as we need it to be. The two main databases we have, the DAC CRS and the OCHA FTS have issues. The DAC is much more rigorous as it demands all countries to use it the same way, the same codes and to report all aid funding. It is also far too late in reporting, includes the funding from only the 22 members of the DAC and the codes it uses for humanitarian are nothing like that used within the humanitarian system. The FTS meanwhile, though a part of the system and set up to monitor appeals, cluster funding etc is flawed because it is a voluntary system; it relies on individual donors and organisations to report, and that reporting when it is made is far too variable and open to question.
Finally, the missing link perhaps, is impact. Even given these caveats I would like to say we understand reasonably well what is happening in terms of inputs. But of the exact group of beneficiaries for these inputs. And the outputs that money produced? And beyond that to outcomes? That is something much, much harder to gauge. And yet of course this is the thing that surely is most important. How is it possible that we still don’t have an easy way to measure what happens to US$100 million of humanitarian aid to a country, of what impact it has on the population’s life and welfare?
In essence in my role as programme leader for GHA I am, together with the programme colleagues and our various partners, to work through these issues, to fill in the blanks, interpret the variables, discounting those we judge are wrongly reported, mix and match sources of data as best we can, investigate those areas of humanitarian financing that others do not. We try our best.
For humanitarian aid then what do we need? Simply, a systematic, easy-to-use and real-time detailed data set that goes down to the level of what is done exactly where with whom. If we had all the data in forms that we could compare and contrast we could tell a much clearer picture of humanitarian aid, and, we think, enable those in positions of policy and implementation to make much better decisions, and for those paying the aid bills or receiving the assistance, to better hold the system and its actors to account.
There would be still the need for the GHA programme, and other people and organisations who want to examine humanitarian financing to do exactly that. We would just wouldn’t be spending all our time trying to work out whether or not we had good enough data and from then what it was trying to tell us.
Until then we’ll continue the work.

Rice fields under water Mehran Town, Dadu District, Oxfam International

Current funding in response to the disaster stands at just below US$2 billion.

This funding level could be deemed something of a remarkable recovery from the first few weeks of the disaster. In stark comparison to the Haiti and Tsunami disasters the response to the Pakistan flooding was initially pitiful. Ten days into the disaster the humanitarian financing was a paltry USD$200 million compared to the USD$1.6 billion received by Haiti by that time. In fact the media coverage moved quickly to replace the rather predictable focus on the chaos of coordination to this inequity of funding, an issue that surely has to have a much more prominent place in humanitarian financing. It was this attention to equity that, in a positive reverse of the much-maligned CNN affect, brought urgently needed funding to Pakistan.

Yet this seeming increasing parity is rather misleading. To date Haiti funding is more than US$3.2 billion whilst the response to the Pakistan funding has reached nearly US$1.9 billion: Pakistan has received 58% of the funding that Haiti has. However if we use those figures of affected (Haiti 3.7 million people and Pakistan 17.2 million) the inequity becomes once more pronounced. For each person affected in Pakistan US110 has been received whilst for each Haitian the figures is significantly higher, US878: the figure for Pakistan is now not 58% of Haiti but only 12.5%.



Figure 1: Humanitarian funding for major disasters, [Source: OCHA FTS]

The methodology is pretty crude but the inequities are real enough. Total funding to a country obscures continuing inequities.

Analysing the funding profile of a crisis like the Pakistan flooding remains a challenge. The tools at our disposal to analyse funding and responses to crisis remain in serious need of review. Humanitarian funding to the Tsunami, for example, did not magically spike around day 75 after the disaster. (See above graph.) Yet on that 75^th day a huge US$1.3 billion of aid was reported, such as US$394 million by the American Red Cross, US$161 million from Oxfam GB and US$145 million by Catholic Relief Services, money which appears to have been raised through private donations, i.e. individual contributions from you and me. I would be greatly surprised to find out they’d all decide to commence US$1.3 billion of activities on the same day.

Central to improvements in the way we make funding decisions surely has to be the development of streamlined and systematic real-time tracking system, even one that works to tell us at the very least, who has received what money from whom, in which country and when. And this is just step one.

Pakistan Floods 2010: The Funding Profile

Perhaps the revision of the UN humanitarian appeal may help address the current inequity of financing in comparison to other major disasters. This appeal has been revised upwards from the US$459 amount originally requested to US$1.9 billion, making it the largest appeal of the year, US$400 more than Haiti. This new appeal also includes a specific focus and request for funding for early recovery. Financing for these activities, helping communities make the transition from relief to recovery still remains low, though partly because the appeal has been revised only recently. Total funding to the UN appeal following the disaster is US$946 million.

Figure 2: Current humanitarian funding in response to the Pakistan flooding, [Source: OCHA FTS]

The largest donor to the Pakistan flooding has been the United States with more than US$600 million, not as surprising as you may think given it has been number one humanitarian funder to Pakistan in eight of the last ten years. Saudi Arabia has given more than US$242 million, more than double the third and fourth placed donors (the United Kingdom and European Commission) and in itself more than four times the entire total of Saudi humanitarian aid for all countries in 2009.  India is  the 9^th largest government donor.

Thanks to my colleague Dan for providing the data for this article.

Is the same to be said of humanitarian aid? Does everyone look at the other for their transparency? Or perhaps something else drives people to be less transparent about aid than they should: the imperative to save lives. Does it inhibit people’s ability to be transparent? Perhaps operational agencies are too busy saving and protecting life, in providing the basics of human dignity for distressed population to think about the transparency of what they’re doing.

If we take that to be true, what arguments can we use for humanitarian aid that is transparent from initial donation through implementing agencies to the impact in beneficiary communities?

In its simplest form the argument goes like this: humanitarian aid transparency will save lives now.

Greenland: Ethereal Iceberg, by Denni Schnapp

The reasons for aid transparency in general become even more important because of the urgency of the need. More transparency would mean a more efficient coordination of activities and the avoidance of duplication, presumably the reduction of administrative costs for all involved and thus an increase of the overall value to the beneficiary. It would increase the need for accountability for the delivery of humanitarian services and products and lead to an increased stake in this delivery by both government and communities. And finally, surely only by understanding fully what is happening on the ground in humanitarian crises can we begin to see what needs to be fixed in the system, so all the research and all the consideration about what to do, issues of humanitarian space and the role of national government, of better and faster delivery, all this actually needs aid transparency.

In fact perhaps humanitarian reform, despite the relative successes of pooled finances and the cluster coordination system and slightly less successful moves towards better humanitarian leadership, actually has the wrong focus. Isn’t it is an attempt to fix the system without understanding the full nature of what the system is doing? In the aftermath of a crisis or in a protracted complex emergency we still don’t know the basics: what is delivered.

That said then what exactly do we mean by the transparency of humanitarian aid?

For me there is one overall need with two overall goals. The need is to have real-time information on all aspects of humanitarian provision: who is spending what money through which actors in which parts of the affected country on what sectors, targeting which beneficiary groups. And this information would have to include what national governments and civil society groups, and what communities and even families are doing to respond to humanitarian need. The detail is absolutely essential. It should at the very least tell us about the outputs, and later, one hopes, the outcomes too.  If we had this information then perhaps we would reach our two goals. Firstly we would have an aid system where we know what is happening right then and there and not three or six months later with evaluations and reviews; with up to the minute aid information we should be able to know what is happening when and where and be able to make the right decisions, prioritise some sectors and areas of the country, move resources around to make better use of them, make better appeals, request specific funds from donors to meet the identified need.

Secondly by having information on exactly what is supposed to happen collected together we would for the first time enable beneficiaries, whether the government or its people, to understand exactly what they should have received, from whom and when. We would drive accountability from a complete picture of what was promised by whom, rather than this rather piecemeal system that is reliant on those implementing agencies that actually do give opportunities for communities to give feedback, views that rarely affect what is delivered anyway.

In a sense then transparency is only part of the goal. Having tons of undigested raw information is unlikely to help many people. However if that information is properly understood and correctly packaged, it can help people make right decisions and help all stakeholders hold others to account.

But this is all fine, at least to me. What next? How do we deliver this? What do we need to do and who should be in charge? Who will drive this process, will it be top down, with the system demanding a uniform reporting system in detail for all actors, or will it come from the bottom, through the increased use of technology at community level, monitoring the implementation of promised work. Both of these perhaps. And how can we build into the delivery of humanitarian aid the fact that the full and ‘digested’ transparency of that assistance is a part of the work and not an additional, somehow external element?

Sachs suggests we might have institutions such as the World Bank or Asian Development Bank holding a fund of emergency aid that could be replenished over time. Funding would come from both recipient and donor countries.

This sounds interesting. So let’s look at the statement of the problem and the proposed solution.

The issue for me is not whether or not the needs articulated by UN appeals are met or not met; it is pretty obvious that Sachs is right. Over time needs represented inside UN appeals are not met, despite there being adequate funding to do so.  In fact over the last ten years we can clearly see that government funding for humanitarian aid has always exceeded the appeal needs.

The problem is not only about spending according to the need articulated in the appeals however. Part of the problem is inside the process of how these requests for money are determined. UN appeals are not a comprehensive articulation of all the needs of that country or that crisis and neither are appeals generated for all crises around the world, for various reasons, some to do with scale, sometimes politics etc.

So I propose that we do away with appeals altogether and instead develop identical threshold indicators in every location in the world. Such thresholds and indicators have already developed in West Africa as part of the appeals process there, covering food security, nutrition, protection, water and sanitation, and health. Perhaps we could expand this to cover shelter and education and everything else we might provide as humanitarian assistance.

Once this demand-side of humanitarian assistance has been resolved we can move to the supply of money. Rather than give funds to the banks as Professor Sachs suggests, given that they are not really experts in humanitarian aid and not best placed to administer such funding, we could instead give all the money (US$11.9 billion from governments in 2009) to the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), or something similar.

This way, as soon as an indicator is breached in any part of the world for any sector funds can be dispatched immediately. Perhaps it can also be automated, removing the need for human involvement at all, except on the ground where it matters.

Would this work?

Brauman uses the numbers of the disaster to back up his argument: “1,500 deaths, 750,000 homes destroyed” and according to the UN, 20 million now affected, up from the 14 million of a week earlier. In fact this increase in numbers affected allowed the UN to add Cyclone Nargis to the list of other disasters that, combined, would not equal the affects of the flooding. This disaster is now, according to Moon, “more than the entire population hit by the Indian Ocean tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake, Cyclone Nargis and the earthquake in Haiti — combined.”

The language and what lies behind this debate is important and is not a periphery to the debate on how much money should go to Pakistan; rather it is absolutely central to this discussion and probably reveals just how weak are the tools we have to use.

Brauman’s argument is that the numbers simply don’t show this flooding to be as catastrophic as it is suggested. Yet this needs a little examination beyond the bald statement.

Deaths: Whilst any death is absolutely regrettable, 1,500 for a natural disaster is not at all astonishing, and as Brauman points out it is far less than the 73,338 reported by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) for the Kashmir earthquake of 2005. It is also much, much less than the more than 220,000 than died after both the Tsunami and Haiti earthquake. However, is that the end of the comparison? It shouldn’t be. On the one hand people who are dead do not unfortunately need any particular support beyond being buried as soon as possible to avoid the spread of disease. They don’t need water, food, shelter and healthcare; a crude comparison between disasters or an estimate of need after cannot rely solely on deaths.

Affected: This is where we find the big numbers; the 20 million affected by the Pakistan flooding is so much more than all those other disasters. ‘Affected’ is a vague word and means a lot to many people. CRED uses this term to mean “those in need of immediate assistance” which sounds more helpful than it is, for immediate assistance could mean many things. It could mean a family who have lost everything, all their crops and their home, their main income-earner, as well as their community assets; it could also mean those who have lost access to a market or perhaps those who have been evacuated just in case, soon to return to undamaged assets. It is perhaps not surprising that the UN Secretary General used the words “more than the entire population hit by…”. The word ‘hit’ replaced the previously used ‘affected’ and has just enough strength to make it count and just enough weakness to enable multiple interpretations.

Homes destroyed: Perhaps this can help more. Of course different disasters affect communities in different ways. A flood may not immediately devastate in the same way as an earthquake and it may not kill because of that. However, families may still have lost their homes, their cattle and crops, and their schools, clinics and roads, much like an earthquake. Where those families may differ is perhaps in how the earthquake, through the many deaths, may have devastated family units themselves, taking away breadwinners, carers, children and parents. So whilst the flooding may have been incredibly damaging on land and assets, its relatively slow damage has largely left families somewhat intact.

The destruction of homes tells us a minimum of how many people are displaced, probably needing so many things beyond the shelter itself, since the displacement undoubtedly would have meant the loss of all those other things indicated above. It also tells us how many homes may need to be rebuilt in the future. It’s not perfect and there are significant caveats but at least the destruction of individual housing units does give some indication of both quantity and scale of need, something that both death and affected do not.

The numbers rarely speak for themselves, however……

After Cyclone Sidr there were 539,744 houses completely destroyed and 885,280 partially damaged. No one suggested that it was the disaster of the century or anything like that. Was it because actually it was not that serious? Was it because the government did not make a formal appeal for assistance? Was it because Bangladesh is not a global priority? Was it because the secretary-general did not visit and the former head of MSF did not write?