Funding the global humanitarian crisis

As the UN asks for a staggering $20bn in humanitarian funding, some of the leading donor states share their thoughts on the future of the sector:

United Kingdom (Desmond Swayne, minister of State and lead for Department for International Development) – The UK is leading the way as the third-largest donor in the world to emergency appeals. But we need other donors to step up – the UN appeal for Syria, for instance, is only 49% funded…. The international community as a whole needs to address the growing gap between humanitarian need and resources. … Unfortunately, humanitarian need is increasing, fueled in part by the consequences of conflict. The number of people affected by crises around the world has almost doubled over the past decade, and over 90% of people in extreme poverty are living in countries that are politically fragile, environmentally vulnerable or both. To meet these challenges head on, we have refocused half of DfID’s budget on supporting fragile and broken states and regions to tackle many of these issues at the source.

Norway (Børge Brende, minister for foreign affairs) – I’m very concerned about the widening gap between humanitarian need and funding. Norway is one of the world’s largest humanitarian donors, per capita. We increased the humanitarian budget this year and will further increase the budget substantially for next year to respond to the increasing needs. A major part of this funding goes through UN appeals. … However, we cannot depend on a continuous increase in funds. We need to develop better ways to use our set of resources more effectively. We must also be able to think long-term in humanitarian efforts, and focus on resilience to shocks in development assistance. Prevention of conflict and crisis through mediation, human rights, democracy and good governance is essential and also more cost-effective than emergency assistance.

United States (Spokesperson for USAid, the US government’s development agency) – The US is the world’s single largest humanitarian donor. In the fiscal year 2015, the US Agency for International Develepment (USAID) and the Department of State provided more than $6bn in life-saving humanitarian assistance. … Given the rising needs in long-term protracted humanitarian emergencies such as Syria and South Sudan, new humanitarian emergencies in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, and the anticipated preparation for and response to El Nino-related disasters, the United States expects its humanitarian resources to be stretched in the coming year.

Sweden (Isabella Lövin, minister for international development cooperation) – We are the fifth biggest bilateral donor in the world and we expect to give at least as much as we gave last year, and probably more. Our concern is that so many other countries don’t live up to the aim of giving 0.7% of GPI to development aid. Also, it’s not just about how much you give, it’s about how much you give that’s un-earmarked. Sweden is a big donor of un-earmarked funding, and that means that it’s much more easily available for humanitarian organizations like the UNHCR, and can be used immediately to respond to a crisis. That makes it much more valuable funding, and we’d like to see other countries giving more that’s un-earmarked.

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Unparalleled challenges require new and innovative solutions. Next year, the UN will be holding its first-ever World Humanitarian Summit. The hope is that this will serve as a forum for change, where countries can come together with solutions to improve the humanitarian system to meet the challenges of today and the future.

[The Guardian]

British aid to India ends this month

After decades of giving millions of pounds to India for various projects, Britain’s traditional aid program to India will end this month and move to a new relationship that focuses on pro-poor private sector projects and technical assistance.

Ending aid to India in 2015 was announced by the secretary for International Development in November 2012 amidst growing demands that an economically-challenged Britain should stop giving aid to a country that had its own space and nuclear programs.

Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) has stopped approving new financial grant aid to India. All new programs will be either technical assistance or private sector initiatives financed using returnable capital; and working together on global development issues.

After 2015, DFID said its technical assistance and returnable capital program will focus on three thematic areas: urbanization, economic development and empowering women and girls, which reflect the Government of India’s priorities.

Britain spends 0.7% of its gross national income on international aid.

[Hindustan Times]

Less than 2% of all humanitarian funds go directly to NGOs

The humanitarian sector took a hard look at itself in Geneva last week, and the picture was not quite the heroic, saintly image it would prefer to see. Less than 2% of all humanitarian funding goes directly to local NGOs, despite them taking the lion’s share of the risk and often being better placed to deliver, according to aid insiders.

Stephen O’Brien, the head of United Nations humanitarian affairs, told a conference in Switzerland that aid delivered by local agencies was often faster, cheaper and more “culturally appropriate”. O’Brien said, “In Syria, the Arab Red Crescent risked their lives every day to help. In west Africa during the Ebola outbreak, community leaders succeeded where international actors had failed.”

But despite years of discussion about the issue, almost all aid funding continues to flow to the large international agencies; a situation that is increasingly embarrassing for the sector.

One campaigner from the global south said: “Please don’t keep telling us that we need to build capacity; it’s insulting and patronizing. It’s an old-fashioned, colonial viewpoint. These organizations are run by people with two PhDs, they are not stupid. Just assume that the capacity is there and fund us properly.”

Sean Lowrie, of the Start Network, which brings together international and national NGOs for humanitarian response, said the current model was not working. “We’re still working in an old-fashioned, centralized, top-down system, which believes in the fallacy of control. We’re stuck and we’re not talking about the real issue, which are incentives, behavior and governance. What we need is a whole new eco-system of smart humanitarianism, which responds to what is needed, which is flexible and diversified, and which is financed in new, smart ways.”

[Read full Guardian article]

Nobel winner Angus Deaton and the impact of foreign aid

Earlier this month, Princeton’s Angus Deaton was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences—an award richly deserved for Deaton’s path-breaking work on consumption, poverty, and welfare.

Much attention has also been given to Deaton’s much more controversial opinions on foreign aid, and his arguments that aid does not work, and that it can accelerate corruption and keep bad leaders in power. Of course, the evidence on aid is not definitive. Partly that is because aid for different purposes has different impacts in different country contexts. Still, a growing body of recent evidence tends to show a net positive impact of aid on development.

The United States has led the way in supporting efforts to fight HIV/AIDS, and deaths have fallen by more than one-third in just seven years. Malaria deaths have dropped in half since 2000, again in large part due to the President’s Malaria Initiative. Tuberculosis infections have fallen by 25 percent just since 2002, and the world is on the brink of eradicating polio once and for all. Donor-financed programs helped increase the number of children receiving basic vaccinations from 20 million in 1980 to 200 million today, and in reducing deaths from diarrhea from 5 million to less than 800,000 children a year. Remarkably, the rate of child death has fallen in every single country in the world since 1980—there are no exceptions. Leadership and hard work in developing countries deserve much of the credit, but these gains would not have happened without foreign assistance.

Aid has also supported progress in education, especially girls’ education. In Afghanistan, less than 1 million children attended schools in 2002, and almost all of them were boys. Girls and women were excluded. But since then, the Afghan government, USAID, and other donors have built more than 13,000 schools, recruited and trained more than 186,000 teachers, and increased net enrollment rates to 56 percent. Just one decade later in 2012, there were 8 million children in school—more than eight times more than in 2002—including 2.5 million girls.

More contentious are the debates about aid and economic growth. But even here the pendulum has swung, with more evidence that aid has a modest positive impact on growth.

[Excerpts of Brookings Opinion by Steve Radelet]

The derailing of the U.S. Agency for International Development

USAID’s capacity is on the cusp of crisis: Its staff is divided between veterans who are aging out and greenhorns, with too few in the middle. From the standpoint of national capacity, America has a development donut. And it’s a problem that so far has gone all but unnoticed by policymakers or the public.

Since 2009, USAID has witnessed about a 16 percent real drop in funding while its partner across the Potomac, the Pentagon, fought a successful campaign to limit decreases.

Over the last two decades, about one-third of USAID’s professional staff, according to the U.S Global Leadership Coalition, has gone away, leaving it more or less a contracting office for NGOs, who are fortunately doing much better aid work than before. But there’s only so much even they can do, given their likewise limited economies of scale — which is one reason a leading global power has an international development ministry to begin with.

At a briefing delivered at the National Defense University in April, USAID’s human capital and talent management staff reported that its agency has about 10,000 personnel total worldwide. Just fewer than 4,000 of these, however, are Foreign Service officers or civil servants — the professional core of the agency. The remainder consists of non-American subject matter experts making up approximately 80 percent of overseas staffing, in addition to contractors.

What really limits America’s capacity, however, to foster its long-term international standing and national security is a cavity of human capacity right in the middle of the organization. Over 50 percent of the agency’s professional workforce — its institutional memory — is now past retirement age. Over 70 percent of the remainder has less than five years of experience. That means a serious shortage of seasoned staff in a middle management mode — and a dearth of future, seasoned senior leaders.

USAID has made significant strides in effectiveness, and doing a better job of demonstrating return on investment, as its annual performance reports have shown since 2007. There are still improvements to be made, but despite those made so far, Uncle Sam’s development arm is still atrophying. Not that anyone seems to care.

[Excerpts of Foreign Policy article]

How $168 billion in development money flows around the world

You’d think that most foreign aid would be reserved for the world’s poorest countries, but that’s not actually true.

For example, according to the advocacy group ONE, the U.S. only gives one-third of its foreign aid to the least developed countries in the world.

This is the kind of information you can unearth with a new tool, called D-Portal, run by a U.K. nonprofit called Development Initiatives. The site tracks development aid flows around the world, showing which countries are donating and receiving money and how it’s being spent. It shows the U.S. gives the most aid every year ($27 billion in 2013 or about 16% of the global total), followed by Japan ($24 billion) and the European Union ($16 billion).

The site uses data from the International Aid Transparency Index and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and gives a sense of whether inbound resources are leading to positive results. It’s a useful tool: You can create country profiles showing income and spending and see how countries are performing on several development metrics (e.g. the number of residents who still live in poverty).

In a recent report, Development Initiatives said many social programs are severely under-funded in developing countries. Across all least developed countries, only 20% of costs are financed.

[Excerpts of Co.Exist article by Ben Schiller]