Reporting humanitarian aid expenditure
Of the main players in humanitarian aid, only one group is obliged to report its humanitarian expenditure to strict criteria and along comparable lines each year – that’s the European Commission and 23 government donors that comprise the OECD DAC. They report their official development assistance (ODA), which includes humanitarian aid, to the Development Co-operation Directorate (DCD) each year. DAC data allows us to say how much humanitarian aid DAC donors are giving, where they are spending it, who they spend it through, and how it relates to their other ODA.
Reporting to the other main source of information on humanitarian aid, UN OCHA’s FTS, is voluntary. FTS receives data from donor governments and recipient agencies, and also gathers information on specific pledges carried in the media or donor web sites, or quoted in pledging conferences. There is considerable cross-checking and data reconciliation involved, but the reporting criteria are not the same as for the OECD DAC, where expenditure has to be allocated to strict humanitarian aid type codes. Government donors might voluntarily report information to the FTS in addition to their ‘official’ reporting to the DAC – but the figures cited might not match because the definitions include different things and the totality might not be captured by the FTS.
While providing coverage of contributions to a great many implementing organisations (716 in the case of UN OCHA FTS alone in 2009) and countries (183 in the case of the DAC and 129 in the case of UN OCHA FTS in 2009), not all government contributions are captured, and not all contributions from private sources are captured. To illustrate the point further, the number of non-DAC donor governments reporting aid to the FTS can vary from year to year (52 in 2000, 100 in 2005, 127 in 2010, for example) – this can considerably skew any analysis. Some humanitarian aid contributions are undercounted, some are totally uncounted, and supplementary information has to be gathered from elsewhere.
However a number of non-DAC donors have historically made their aid visible and have been reporting voluntarily to a number of databases for a number of decades. For example, ‘Arab countries’ (a term coined by the DAC which previously included Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait but now excludes the UAE, which reports separately) have been reporting part of its aid to the OECD DAC since the 1970s. In 2010, after the establishment of the Office for the Coordination of Foreign Aid (OCFA), the UAE reported whole of government aid data to the OECD DAC for the first time. In addition to this, it is the first non-DAC donor to report disaggregated aid information to the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS).
Individuals and private donors (such as the corporate sector, for example), contribute to humanitarian crises in the form of taxes (spent by governments and reported through DAC and/or FTS) and sometimes also directly to NGOs, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement or a UN agency. While contributions in this latter category are likely to be captured by individual organisations and published in audited accounts, there is certainly no single source of information on how much these private contributions amount to.
Direct cash transfers to friends, families and communities affected by humanitarian crises might be captured in the form of remittance data, compiled by World Bank. However, remittances are private flows and not subject to international reporting, so this information is not necessarily comprehensive, or specific to humanitarian situations.
