0.1 Humanitarian response and prevention has been segmented from overall development cooperation by the international community.2 The future development agenda should recognise challenges of a humanitarian nature. Improper humanitarian risk management continues to contribute to lost developmental gains.3
0.2 The impact of disasters will become more frequent and intense in decades ahead, and current levels of global capacity cannot match this increased level of need. A number of universal trends, such as demographic change, climate change, urbanisation and economic turbulence will add to the humanitarian caseload and the complexity involved. The existing system is biased towards large scale infrequent events, even though suffering in smaller, frequent crises is enormous.
0.3 The humanitarian system is constantly evolving, but crisis-affected people and local actors still have little influence over the decisions that are made. Civil society’s role in humanitarian response, preparedness and prevention is not maximised; NGOs & CBOs implement the majority of humanitarian work on the ground, but have little influence over how, when and where this funding is spent as well as whom is best placed to respond.
0.4 The NGO “business model” has eroded NGO proactive capacity, because in most cases NGOs leverage privately raised resources into larger scale government donor contracts. This has a strong effect on the humanitarian system, as timely humanitarian action is vital for effective and cost-efficient results. The problems can be summarised as follows:
(1)The direct funding for humanitarian action, preparedness and prevention by NGOs is insufficient, especially funding made available to local and national civil society actors.
(2)Humanitarian funding is not timely due to indirect flows via multilateral administered pooled funds and front-loaded controls; it takes weeks (or months) before international, national and local NGOs have access to response funding.
(3)The funding that eventually reaches civil society partners is unaffordable and unsustainable due to the unrealistic provision for cost recovery rate (overheads) offered on grants by donors such as DFID.
0.5 These issues require leadership from the UN, other multilaterals as well as bilateral donors such as DFID. The CBHA has developed an initiative to address this business model challenge, namely the Start Fund, which aims to contribute to a more proactive, sustainable, and locally-led model for the contiguum4 of humanitarian action.
