The State of the Humanitarian Aid System 2015

“ALNAP” launched today the 2015 “State of the Humanitarian Aid System” Report.

One of the key findings highlighted in their fancy infographics:

"44% of aid recipients surveyed were not consulted on their needs by aid agencies prior to the start of their programmes”.

In totally unrelated news, the DFID-ODI-CGD High Level Panel on Humanitarian Cash Transfers chaired by Owen Barder published it’s report a few weeks ago, arguing that much more use should be made of cash transfers, because most of the time they are more cost effective than giving out stuff.

In further totally unrelated news, DFID published two press releases today highlighting substantial non-cash aid in response to humanitarian crises in the Central African Republic and Malawi.

In Owen’s words: "the questions should always be asked: “Why not cash? And, if not now, when?”"

Chasing Misery

My friend Kelsey is creating a book of essays by women who work in humanitarian aid, and the Kickstarter campaign has just gone live. She needs to raise $11,690 to cover the costs of design, editing, formatting, printing, and building a website. She's a really good writer, as her woefully neglected blog attests, with lots of stories to tell from South Sudan, Darfur, and elsewhere, so if that's your kind of thing (which it really should be if you're reading this kind of blog), you should make a contribution to the campaign, and share the link with your networks.

Humanitarian Aid in South Sudan 2013

The UN has just published its annual mammoth humanitarian aid coordination effort for South Sudan, and it has GRAPHS. LOTS of GRAPHS.

Up to 4.5 million people are expected to need food and livelihoods support in 2013, so it's kind of a big deal.

The document pulls together needs analysis across 12 sectors ("clusters") and details costed plans for response by 114 non-governmental organizations and UN agencies, adding up to over $1.1 billion.

Finally kudos to UNDP and OCHA for signing up to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). The next job is to actually publish some data ...

Social safety net bleg

A friend writes;

Do you know any good, short reads on “social safety nets”?

The context for this is that the South Sudan oil shut-down made all the donors panic and want to divert lots of development programming back to humanitarian programming. All of the advice to the government in response has been to continue to focus on building government systems so that they are stronger and more funds can flow through them when the oil is turned back on.

I think there can and should be a stronger response on the humanitarian side as well, that is institutionalised. Every year, there are going to be parts of South Sudan that are food insecure, even if just due to bad rains or floods. So we need a sustainable system that can address these needs, and to ensure households don’t become chronically food insecure, not the current system of panicked international fund-raising and dumping tonnes of food aid on the problem every year.

So do you know a good, short briefing paper that summarises country experiences and evidence on these sorts of programmes?

I second all of that. So - any suggestions?

The State of the Humanitarian System

There is a new edition coming out in a couple of weeks, but until then, the data on coverage from the 2010 State of the Humanitarian System caught my eye.   

On average, total humanitarian contributions equalled over 85% of total stated requirements in 2007 and 2008, compared with 81% in 2006 and only 67% in 2005. However, the needs of affected populations have gone up as well, and are still not matched by resources, so the result is a nearly universal perception of insufficiency, despite quantitative evidence of progress.

So; yet again; things are getting better, but they are still really bad. Unmet humanitarian need means that people are dying for the sake of what is really pennies in the grand scheme of things (overall funding for the sector is around $7 billion, considerably less than, say, the $50 billion US residents spend on their pets each year). 

If you take the data at face value, the simple framing of the problem as a quantifiable one with some kind of definite limit, I find incredibly encouraging. Perhaps the really interesting question though is what that data really means. "Humanitarian need" is presumably some kind of function of the actual need on the ground, but processed through the humanitarian agencies on the ground who report those needs to funders. And the agencies are locked in a very long repeated strategic game with those funders - for instance agencies have incentives to overstate need in order to get more funding. But donors know this. And agencies rationally prefer funding before a disaster happens rather than after, but it is presumably harder to both fund raise and demonstrate impact when you have averted a crisis (i.e. nothing happened) than when you responded to one has started (i.e. something is clearly happening). And what on earth is the line between humanitarian need and development need?

You may have noted a couple of "presumably"s in that last paragraph. Anyone know of any studies on game theory and the political economy of humanitarian fundraising?

Did donors in Sudan try to move on from humanitarian aid too soon?

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) (Doctors Without Borders) sadly witnessed this premature assumption in 2009. The overwhelming majority of international funding was directed at development and provision of basic services in support of the state — to the detriment of emergency preparedness and of civilian populations at a time when violence was resurgent. While the international community recognises the new start for South Sudan, aid is not only about state-building — it cannot lose sight of the humanitarian reality on the ground that may
not be as rosy as the projected political future. 

So far in 2011 nearly 3,000 people have been killed due to violence in South Sudan and around 300,000 displaced, giving a hollow ring to the idea that South Sudan is now ‘post-conflict.’

Parthesarathy Rajendran, MSF’s head of mission in South Sudan