Building on the recommendations made at the Grand Bargain Annual Meeting in June 2019, the co-conveners of the Enhanced Quality Funding workstream, Canada, UNICEF, Sweden, ICRC, Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and UN OCHA, organised a one-day workshop in Geneva to agree on practical strategies and solutions in order to accelerate progress against the Grand Bargain multi-year and flexible funding commitments. On 19 September 2019, more than 50 attendees (58) participated in a full day of discussions that included presentations on two studies commissioned by the Co-conveners to frame discussions.
Over the course of this workshop, workshop attendees participated in breakout discussions on the following topics:
Donor representatives discussed the hard constraints, barriers, and opportunities for further progress to increasing multi-year funding and progressively reducing earmarking.
Separate breakout groups consisting of UN agencies, field representatives, NGOs, ICRC, and IFRC discussed the barriers for first-level recipients to passing on or cascading quality funding to implementing partners.
Three mixed breakout groups discussed: o Definitional issues in reporting multi-year and flexible funding; o The current status and workstream opportunities to advance multi-year planning; and o Opportunities to increase quality funding outside of the steps envisaged in the commitments.