Humanitarian aid analysis Part 1 – How much is given, and by whom?
admin July 19th, 2010
Total humanitarian aid worldwide fell by 11% to $15.1 billion in 2009 according to a new analysis of the available data by Global Humanitarian Assistance, a monitoring service provided by Development Initiatives. The 2008 total was $16.9 billion, a record high. But 2009’s total was the second highest on record.
Humanitarian aid from donors reporting to the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) has grown massively through the 2000s, from $5.5 billion in 2000 to an estimated $13.3 billion in 2009 – a growth of 142% across the decade.
The DAC represents the OECD countries and speaks for well over 90% of all humanitarian aid. But overall 112 countries gave humanitarian aid in 2009 – many of them being recipients as well as donors.
In 2008, around 52% of humanitarian assistance went to Africa ($5.9 billion) and 42% to Asia ($4.8 billion).
The amount spent on humanitarian assistance varies year-by-year, driven by major crises like the Indian Ocean Tsunami, the Kashmir earthquake and the Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. But, as the report points out, “An increase in one year resulting from a major crisis may be followed by a decline, but, humanitarian assistance rarely falls back to its previous level”.
Humanitarian aid comes from a wide range of sources – governments, private donors (individuals and corporates), the UN, NGOs, local communities, the military, the Red Cross/Red Crescent. Within these groupings there are also cross-funding streams, which may mean that dollars get counted more than once. Pulling these figures together is clearly a highly complex task. The GHA itself says:
“Humanitarian response is complex and varied and not without its confusion. It involves a plethora of actors, international and national, large and small, organisations with complex global mandates and organisations that serve a community or a neighbourhood. There are actions undertaken by militaries and governments and those by families and individuals. There is preparedness for events, immediate response to them, the provision of basic needs and the first elements of recovery. There is also a continual blurring of lines between humanitarian aid, investments in disaster preparedness, recovery programming, and long-term development spending.
This myriad of interconnections is essentially what we attempt to track: the response to need, the provision of finance, the actors involved, the funding mechanisms used, and the countries and projects prioritised. A single dollar can actually be spent more than once with every choice made regarding the progress of that dollar through to a final recipient empowers one actor over another, and affects what is finally delivered and to whom. ”
Which explains why these figures are hard to find and, once found, are pretty hard to interpret.
Part 2 of this analysis will look at what the money goes on, and whether all disasters are equal.
Copies of the 156 page report can be downloaded here.
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[...] was $15.1 billion in 2009 according to a new report by Global Humanitarian Assistance. In Part 1 we looked at how much was given. In this part we are going to look at where the money goes. By [...]