Humanitarian aid analysis Part 2 – Where does the money go?
admin July 19th, 2010
Total humanitarian aid worldwide 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 region, in 2008, it went largely to Africa (52% – $5.9 billion) and Asia (42% – $4.8 billion). And six of the top ten recipient countries in 2008 were African – Sudan (first place), Ethiopia (fourth), Somalia (fifth), DRC (sixth), Zimbabwe (ninth) and Kenya (tenth). Even tenth placed Kenya received $304 million. Sudan got $1.4 billion.
Apart from the countries to which the humanitarian aid goes, there’s what it is spent on. Food comes in top, with a spend in 2009 of $4.5 billion. That’s more than four times the size of the next identifiable category, which is health (just under $1 billion). Coordination accounts for $750 million – and when you hear the stories of ongoing chaos on the ground in Haiti, for example, you have to wonder what would happen if this $750 million was not spent on coordination. Or if it could be spent better or not at all.
Shelter and non-food items (the core of Advance Aid’s efforts in this area) account for $500 million; water and sanitation $450 million; then at just under $400 million are agriculture and protection of human rights; mine action comes in at $200 million with education ($180 million) bringing up the rear together with economic recovery and infrastructure.
Finally there’s the question of whether all disasters are equal. “What we do know,” the report says, “is that there are serious inequalities in our spending across different crises, inequalities that cannot be simply explained by the tools at our disposal”.
The authors have picked out a number of humanitarian crises to compare. The Haiti earthquake earlier this year, leads the field by a long way with a spending per person of $993. On its own, quite reasonable you might think.
But why are we spending nearly fourteen times as much per person on the earthquake victims as we were prepared to do on the cyclone victims in the very same country in 2008 – $72 per person for Haiti cyclone victims, $993 per person for Haiti earthquake victims? And again, why are we spending $206 per person in the complex emergency in the Sudan versus $58 per person in a similar emergency in the DRC?
The questions this raises include:
• Is it all down to publicity, with the Haiti earthquake and the ongoing Darfur/South Sudan/Sudan crisis garnering many more headlines than other emergencies?
• Are we spending too much per head in Haiti and not enough in the DRC? Is the Haiti sum actually what is needed and the others are grievously under-funded? Or is there a golden sum somewhere in the middle that should be a target?
These are clearly complex questions and the complex nature of responses and the funding of those responses – through international governments, national governments, the military, NGOs, the Red Cross – makes coordination a $750 million disaster area all of its own.
But having access to figures at least gives the international community something to get its teeth into and some consistent data on which to base discussion and argument.
Copies of the 156 page report can be downloaded here.
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