The annual Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) report comprehensively assesses international financing at work in humanitarian situations since 2000.
The GHA Report 2000 presents the latest data on financial flows to humanitarian crises. But the key messages in the report are not only about money. Financing decisions affect behaviour and humanitarian architecture. They help determine the power of different groups, they influence policy priorities and capacity development.
On any day during the last decade, humanitarian organisations were trying to get emergency relief to people in up to 50 places around the globe. More than four million people have been killed in violent conflict since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Thirty countries have been affected by complex humanitarian crises. Natural disasters have caused the deaths of over 150,000 people each year. At any point in the 1990s, more than a hundred million people were living lives blighted by conflict and natural disaster. An average of 35 million people were displaced from their homes. Overwhelmingly, those affected by disaster live in developing countries. Many spend each day of their lives struggling with poverty and insecurity.
Overall the 1990s witnessed a major jump in spending on Humanitarian Assistance. Having virtually doubled from 1990 to reach US$4.6 billion in 1991, spending rose to a peak of US$5.7 billion in 1994, reaching 10 percent of ODA for the ¢rst and only time. After declining for the following 3 years, in 1998 Humanitarian Assistance increased to US$4.5 billion, close to the average for the previous seven years. As a share of GNP, Humanitarian Assistance has dropped from 0.03 percent to 0.02 percent over the decade - twenty cents out of every thousand dollars. In 1998, one fifth of total Humanitarian Assistance was spent on supporting refugees and asylum seekers in donor countries. In 1997, OECD countries hosted 400,000 asylum seekers and used US$647 million worth of ODA to subsidise the costs; Low Income Countries received almost ten times the number of refugees and only US$341.3 million was forthcoming to help support them.
The sources of Humanitarian Assistance remained heavily concentrated. About a third of Humanitarian Assistance has come from one donor (US). The top ¢ve donors contributed two thirds of the total. The share of total ODA to Humanitarian Assistance varied between donors from less than 1 percent to more than 25 percent.
