Global Humanitarian Assistance: Update February 2010

GHA have released an update on their GHA report. The series aims to

present simple and objective statistical information on humanitarian financing for people involved in humanitarian aid policy, programming and performance. The goal is a shared evidence base that people can use in their planning and policy work to ensure better outcomes for the women, men and children whose lives are affected by humanitarian crises.

ICG: Why the media prefer natural disasters

The British Red Cross supports its partners within the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement to respond to humanitarian emergencies around the world. These range from giving money, people and materials to respond to natural disasters, to supporting large scale humanitarian operations in conflict zones. Since 2006 the British Red Cross has had a dedicated team working to support the Movement in assisting people suffering from the effects of armed conflict. As an impartial and neutral organisation, the Red Cross seeks to help those who are in crisis, whoever and wherever they are.

Unfortunately, public appeals launched by British Red Cross for emergencies in conflict zones routinely raise far less funds than those appeals which are launched for natural "quick-onset" disasters. A recent example of this is the ongoing crisis in northern Pakistan, where it has been estimated that the millions who had to flee their homes due to fighting in 2008/09 has been the largest displacement of people since Partition. The needs were huge and British Red Cross launched an emergency appeal in 2009 to raise funds for the displaced. This appeal raised only £60,000 and, despite the efforts of our communications team, very little of our material regarding the humanitarian crisis was picked up by the news agencies.

In the following article, Andrew Stroehlein, Communications Director for the International Crisis Group examines why the media chooses to focus more on victims of natural disasters rather than on those caught up in armed conflict.

"If only Sri Lanka last year could have got a tenth of the media attention Haiti's now getting", lamented my friend who was working in Colombo at the time, "the public pressure might have saved so many lives." While no one would ever argue with the amount of press Haiti is deservedly receiving right now, it's easy to see his point. The international media respond very differently to the victims of natural disasters and the victims of wars.

Last year's brutal end to the long-running conflict in Sri Lanka produced tens of thousands of innocent dead and injured in its final few months, as government forces shelled areas with trapped civilians, and Tamil Tiger rebels prevented them from fleeing. Hundreds of thousands of survivors were then put into appalling government-run internment camps, from which they were not allowed to leave. This all garnered significant media attention at the very end of the fighting, but it never at any point had anything near the scale of media interest Haiti's earthquake is getting today.

Read more on Alertnet.

FIC + HFP Humanitarian Horizons: tackling future challenges

The Feinstein International Center (FIC) of Tufts University and the Humanitarian Futures Programme (HFP) of King's College London initiated a joint project called Humanitarian Horizons. This project, launched in October 2008, focuses both on HFP's analyses of changing dimensions of future crisis drivers and on making more practical the exploratory futures research of FIC's Ambiguity and Change project. So far four papers by leading experts have been released, which will be incorporated into a "Practitioners' Guide to the Future", to be published in December 2009.

The Humanitarian Horizons project is a futures capacity-building initiative intended to assist the humanitarian sector to prepare for the complexities of the future by enabling organizations to enhance their anticipatory and adaptive capacities. The first step in this process is the exploration of four futures-related drivers widely expected to have an impact on humanitarian crises and responses to them. These four drivers are:

• climate change;
• globalization;
• major demographic shifts;
• drivers internal to the humanitarian community, e.g. technological advances, the "shrinking" of humanitarian space, new actors, changing financing structures and the like.

GHA Report 2009: money - what do we do with it?

The new Global Humanitarian Assistance Report is out. It provides an overview of how much is spent on humanitarian assistance, where it goes and how this meets/does not meet the needs of the beneficiaries.

The four main chapters focus on

• official (DAC) humanitarian assistance
• humanitarian assistance from non-DAC donors
• humanitarian assistance through NGOs
• financial mechanisms

Financing decisions affect behaviour and humanitarian architecture. They help determine the power of different groups and they influence policy priorities and capacity development. The financial choices made within and between humanitarian crises will often have consequences that are felt well beyond the scope of the original time-bound intervention. In short, humanitarian assistance is not just about the scale of contributions.

Reuters/Guardian: Record budget shortfall for UN aid agencies

Thanks to Michael Bear for highlighting a Reuters news release and a Guardian analysis on the Humanitarian Relief blog.

Reuters reports that both the global economic downturn and the drastic increase in needs in Pakistan have contributed to a record funding gap of $4.8 billion.

Yet some 43 million people need assistance this year, up from 28 million in 2008.
While there have been no large natural disasters so far in 2009, the global downturn has amplified needs in impoverished countries, and especially in those in protracted crisis such as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.

This situation is not likely to improve, as the 2009 contributions of the major donor countries had already been set before the economic crisis had hit them.
However, the main problem is one of political will rather than lack of money. As Conor Foley in his Guardian analysis points out,

It would cost around 1% of the money thrown at western banks in the last six months to bridge the current humanitarian deficit. Yet politicians will continue to play a game of cynical brinkmanship over where the money should come from, confident that it will be the UN itself that gets blamed for the resulting deaths and human misery.

For more figures on how the economic crisis has affected other humanitarian organisations, see another blog entry by Michael Bear.

IDRL: Lessons learnt from H1N1 and humanitarian evolutions in Sri Lanka

Three noteworthy topics signalled by the Federation's International Disaster Response Law programme:

• On July 5th, experts and representatives of 43 countries concluded the “Top Level Meeting on Influenza A (H1N1): Preparing for the Future”.
• In Sri Lanka, the Times reported, the government is starting to apply the tax law (0.9 per cent) on humanitarian aid it created in 2006, affecting 89 international and local humanitarian organisations, and potentially amounting to several millions of pounds.
• Furthermore, Reuters reported that the Sri Lankan government has asked for a reduction or scaling down in humanitarian operations, now that it declared total victory over the LTTE.

Some more information on these topics can be found in the extended blog entry.

On July 5th, experts and representatives of 43 countries concluded the “Top Level Meeting on Influenza A (H1N1): Preparing for the Future”. Some of the findings of this evaluatory meeting:

since international public health emergencies are unpredictable but recurrent and can severely affect human health and economic well-being worldwide, it is essential to reinforce public health capacity in order to permit timely actions to reduce the spread of disease.

Also, the experts and representatives

urged the WHO Director General to continue applying the procedure to determine an "internationally important public health emergency" and formulate the corresponding temporary recommendations.

In Sri Lanka, the Times reported, the government is starting to apply the tax law (0.9 per cent) on humanitarian aid it created in 2006, affecting 89 international and local humanitarian organisations, and potentially amounting to several millions of pounds.

The Government says that the tax is designed to crack down on NGOs that abused Sri Lankan law and squandered their funds on their own staff after the tsunami. Aid workers, however, say the new rules do not grant tax exemption for all the work they are doing — and want to do — to help 300,000 Tamil refugees in army-run camps. Some say the tax contravenes the international disaster response guidelines drawn up by the Red Cross in 2007 with the participation of 140 countries, including Sri Lanka.

However, some of the organisations, including Oxfam and Save the Children, have managed to negotiate their due tax with the government down to 0.1 per cent.
Furthermore, Reuters reported that the Sri Lankan government has asked for a reduction or scaling down in humanitarian operations, now that it declared total victory over the LTTE.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it was shutting down some of its offices in the country following the government's directive. "The ICRC is in the process of reviewing its setup and operational priorities in Sri Lanka," said the ICRC's head of operations for South Asia, Jacques de Maio. "As a first step, it will close its offices and withdraw its expatriate staff from the Eastern Province while winding down its operations in the area," he said. "The ICRC will continue its dialogue with the Sri Lankan government on issues of humanitarian concern."

Resources on humanitarian responses to the Global Economic Crisis

A good page of links from American University on the economic crisis and its impacts on the developing world and humanitarian assistance - reports as well as links to news articles.

See the website of the Peacebuilding and Development Institute.

Tufts: The Humanitarian Costs of Climate Change

By Mackinnon Webster, Justin Ginnetti, Peter Walker, Daniel Coppard, and Randolph Kent

A new research report which examines the projected increases in humanitarian response costs resulting from climate change.

The research uses a number of different models to project the likely increases in humanitarian spending as a result of climate change, twenty years into the future. It uses trends projecting from past spending data to assess the likely increase in spending resulting from climate change.

The findings indicate that climate change will have a significant impact on humanitarian costs and the increase could range from a 32% increase, taking into account only changes in frequency of disasters, to upwards of a 1600% increase when other criteria, such as intensity, are also taken into account. The report also highlights the tremendous limitations in the present global databases on humanitarian spending and the difficulties in using these to project future trends.

View or download the report at the Tufts website.

ODI Blog: Realising Urban Potential: Are donors keeping pace with rapid urbanisation?

Urbanisation is characterised by the massive expansion of informal settlements and strains on existing urban work, land, services and infrastructure. For example, the number of people living in slums has doubled in India in the past 20 years and is now greater than the entire population of Britain. Are donor strategies, policies and programmes keeping up with the pace of change occurring in the least developed countries?

From a quick review of ten major international donors we saw little or no evidence that urban insecurities are moving up the aid agenda. What we tend to find is that development itself retains a very rural focus, with the urban focus limited to a series of statements about the challenges of infrastructure, environment and sustainability, and urban governance.

Read more on the ODI blog.

IRIN: Juggling emergency aid and long-term development

As the global recession bites, analysts are asking if emergencies such as natural disasters will continue to receive funding (on 19 November, a record appeal for US$7 billion was launched for crises) while development aid, which could save many more lives long-term, such as agricultural investment in Africa, is left to languish.

Read more on the IRIN website.

John Holmes: New “business model” for humanitarian aid

IRIN: You are on the WEF Council on Humanitarian Assistance. What specific ideas have you brought to the council in terms of climate change and food insecurity?

JH: What we were discussing was the need to do two things which aren’t exactly new ideas but we were trying to formulate them in a reasonably coherent way. One is to spend a lot more time and effort on what you might call the upstream side - the prevention, the disaster risk reduction, the preparedness side so that there is more effort and more resources and more thought going into that, rather than concentrating too much on the response side after the event - which is necessary because you need to help people when they’re in their moment of need but it is not a very good investment because you can’t solve any problems that way. And the second related thought is to try to empower national governments, local communities, maybe regional organisations - to make them have more capacity, be more empowered, so that the international community doesn’t need to intervene so much and can reserve itself for cases of really major need. So those two things go together if we can get that combination right. It is what we try to describe as a new business model for humanitarian assistance. These thoughts have been had before but we are trying to encapsulate them in a new way.

IRIN: But what has hindered this development? Kofi Annan when he was UN secretary-general talked about the need for humanitarians to move from a culture of response to a culture of prevention. This has not happened yet.

JH: I think it is something to do with human nature. In our personal lives we know that prevention is better than cure, prevention health is better than response afterwards, but we don’t actually behave in ways which correspond to that. I think similarly governments and international institutions know in theory that it’s much better to invest more and do more on the prevention side but they don’t actually do it. You have to convince finance ministers, you have to convince presidents and prime ministers that they need to invest in something the results of which will only be seen in 10 or 15 years when they may no longer be in power. That is quite a tricky thing to do. So you’ve got to have your arguments marshalled. You have got to be able to prove to them - as we hope to be able to do in the new study which is under way - that this is actually a really good investment because there are going to be more and more disasters from climate change and hence the importance of the disaster risk reduction agenda because of the link to climate change.

Read more on the IRIN website.

OCHA: Central Emergency Response Fund Two Year Evaluation

In its resolution 60/124 of December 2005, the General Assembly of the United Nations transformed the Central Emergency Revolving Fund, created in 1991, into the Central Emergency Response Fund, two-thirds of which would be for rapid response and one-third for underfunded emergencies.

A report on its operation after two years is now available for download from the OCHA website.

IRIN: Charity coffers face credit crunch

With the US going through the most significant financial restructuring since the great depression, international aid agencies and NGOs have reason to be wary, observers said.

The likelihood that the US administration will need to divert up to US$700 billion or more to keep US banks afloat seems almost certain to diminish US enthusiasm for large-scale funding of projects abroad. At the same time, rising food and fuel prices are hitting the world’s poor hardest. The World Bank reports that in many developing countries, food prices have risen 83 percent over the past three years.

Liliana Rojas-Suarez of the Center for Global Development, wrote that the ripple effects of the slowdown were likely to be protracted and would not all show up at the same time. She warned that the crisis would cut demand for many goods and commodities that developing countries needed to export to sustain their own economies. The squeeze on international credit was also likely to make investors much more cautious about involvement in new projects.

“If a country goes into a recession, it is pretty hard for a development minister to argue that there should be an increase in foreign aid,” said Robert Glasser, secretary-general of CARE International, adding that international aid was more likely to stagnate than come to a complete halt. “Politically, it is usually much easier to stop or delay an increase in foreign aid than to stop it altogether. Usually, at a minimum, they keep the aid flow level and delay the increase.”

Read more on the IRIN website.

Global Humanitarian Assistance 2007/2008

Published in March 2008, Global Humanitarian Assistance 2007/2008 is the fifth in a series of reports produced by Development Initiatives as part of the wider Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) programme.

Chapter 1 attempts to quantify and analyse long-term trends in humanitarian assistance. How much official humanitarian assistance is there? How does it compare with aid expenditure as a whole? How generous are donors in terms of expenditure per citizen or as a share of gross national income (GNI)? What about other sources of humanitarian assistance? How does the bilateral allocation of humanitarian assistance reflect the humanitarian priorities defined in the UN consolidated appeal process (CAP)? Is it reaching everyone in need?

Chapter 2 looks at the latest developments in humanitarian assistance financing and policy. What are the implications of the 2007 introduction of new rules for reporting and analysing official humanitarian assistance and aid? Are the funding mechanisms such as common (pooled) humanitarian funds (CHF) and Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) achieving their objectives to strengthen humanitarian response? What steps are being taken to improve predictability, response capacity and coordination?

Further details and supporting data are available online at:

www.globalhumanitariandonorship.org

HPG Background Paper: Business engagement in humanitarian relief: key trends and policy implications

A slightly belated link to a paper published in June by Andrea Binder and Jan Martin Witte of the Global Public Policy Institute, funded by HPG.

For decades, companies have occupied a secondary presence in humanitarian relief, providing goods and services to dominant humanitarian actors contracting their assistance. However, recently, the business community has started to respond unconventionally to needs arising from humanitarian emergencies, offering more than just logistical support or the delivery of construction materials on a fee-basis. While most donors expend humanitarian funds only to non-profit organisations, certain key donors have started to contract commercial providers directly for planning and implementation of humanitarian projects.

These developments have given rise to much discussion within the humanitarian community regarding the role of the private sector in humanitarian relief. Critics and supporters alike argue that the two trends depicted above, if significant and persistent, have the potential to transform the humanitarian domain and will affect humanitarian principles.

Download the paper from the HPG website; full details of the GPPI project are available from the GPPI website.

Thanks to Jutta for sending this in.

Follow the Money: Tufts Review and Analysis of the State of Humanitarian Funding

A new Tufts briefing paper focusses on the financing of humanitarian action, asking:

• Is the pot of humanitarian finance able to meet present and projected global humanitarian needs?
• Do existing financing mechanisms ensure that money follows need?
• Do the present financing mechanisms promote quality aid, encouraging it to be timely, context-specific, evidence-based and rigorous in its application?
• Are the operational agencies capable of using the funding appropriately?
• More succinctly, is there enough money, is it going to the right people in the right places in the most efficient way?

The paper describes the present state of humanitarian funding—focusing on the global picture, key trends and recognized shortcomings. While it includes discussion of new financing mechanisms, such as the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) and Common Humanitarian Funds, these are not the primary focus of the paper. Combined these tools account for perhaps 10 percent of official humanitarian aid. The analysis, by contrast, is concerned with the totality of humanitarian financing, and how the many different instruments and mechanisms used to disburse these funds interact with each other.

The paper is available for download from Reliefweb (169KB pdf).