About GHA

Clarity Counts

Humanitarian response is complex and varied and not without its confusion. It involves a plethora of actors, international and national, large and small, organisations with complex global mandates and organisations that serve a community or a neighbourhood. There are actions undertaken by militaries and governments and those by families and individuals. There is preparedness for events, immediate response to them, the provision of basic needs and the first elements of recovery. There is also a continual blurring of lines between humanitarian aid, investments in disaster preparedness, recovery programming, and long-term development spending.

This myriad of interconnections is essentially what we attempt to track: the response to need, the provision of finance, the actors involved, the funding mechanisms used, and the countries and projects prioritised. A single dollar can actually be spent more than once with every choice made regarding the progress of that dollar through to a final recipient empowers one actor over another, and affects what is finally delivered and to whom.

Why do we do it?

We do this because no one else does! Humanitarian crises are messy and complicated – and so is the reporting. This messiness makes even the most basic of questions – like ‘how much humanitarian assistance is there’ – difficult to answer:

• everyone has a different definition as to what ‘humanitarian aid’ means
• there are thousands of people involved in humanitarian response – everyone accounts for their expenditure in different ways, some people don’t account for it at all and others’ efforts simply aren’t included
• there is no single, comprehensive source of information and data

How do we do it?

The Global Humanitarian Assistance team comprises researchers, analysts and policy advisors with practical field experience and backgrounds in development financing and reporting. Our work is organised in workstream areas: Global Trends; Governments; Delivery; Financing Mechanisms; Domestic Response; Conflict and the Military; and Scale of Needs.

What’s our agenda?

We provide a ‘no spin’ service to anybody involved in humanitarian programming and performance, not just people working in governments, in the United Nations and NGOs, but also journalists and researchers, and individuals of all kinds, whether those paying taxes that pay for much humanitarian assistance or those living in countries receiving aid.

Our programme receives funding from the governments of Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom and is led by Development Initiatives – an independent organisation that runs not for profit programmes such as this one, as well as aidinfo, and also runs a consultancy business.

Development Initiatives is a group of people committed to eliminating poverty. We’re a small but growing independent company, based in Somerset, UK that has high aspirations (poverty elimination) and extensive outreach around the world (mainly policymakers within governments and NGOs).