The annual Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) report comprehensively assesses international financing at work in humanitarian situations since 2000.
The GHA tries to answer some of the basic questions about the way that the world finances response to crisis and vulnerability. How much is spent on humanitarian assistance? Where does it go? What is it spent on? Who spends it? Our aim is to provide clear, objective evidence on resources, easily accessible on paper and online, so that decisions and policy can be better informed. We believe that better information means better aid.
For a number of years now, we have highlighted the data on resources for people who live on the edge of crisis, in chronic poverty and where violent conflict is common and states are fragile. as the Gha report 2012 points out, building the resilience of vulnerable populations is an essential part of achieving the millennium development Goals (mdGs) and is not well served by responses that create a false partition between chronic poverty and vulnerability to crisis.
since the G20 in korea in 2010, building resilience has become an increasingly visible policy concern. the Gha report 2012 includes new data that is of particular relevance to this area. Cash-based programming, for instance, enables people to make their own choices about priorities and whether they invest for the short or longer term. between 2008 and 2011 humanitarian spending on cash and voucher-based programming ranged between us$45 million and us$188 million. spending on disaster prevention and preparedness and risk reduction, essential for building resilience to crises large and small, remains very low at just 4% of humanitarian aid and less than 1% of development assistance.
the level of unmet humanitarian need in 2011 was the worst for a decade: over a third of the
needs identified in the un consolidated appeals have remained unfunded – leaving a shortfall of us$3.4 billion. the impact of this is exacerbated by the increasing concentration of humanitarian aid on a smaller number of mega-crises. historically the top three recipients have absorbed around 30% of total humanitarian aid. in 2010 that jumped to nearly half (49%) and other countries in crisis collectively saw a reduction in their share of total funding.
