UN OCHA FTS

The fts.unocha.org/">UN OCHA’s FTS is a real-time online database on humanitarian aid resources. The FTS records reported bilateral aid and in-kind aid, as well as private donations, from government donors, NGOs and the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement.

The FTS offers a series of standard tables that show humanitarian aid flows in various formats (PDF, Excel, etc), and also allows users to produce custom financial tables on demand. Users can: report contributions; check the funding status of certain projects, agencies, sectors, or overall appeals; confirm that the posted information is correct; determine which donors have funded which projects; and identify which appeals (or which projects and sectors within an appeal) have the greatest unmet needs.

Reporting to the FTS is voluntary. So although FTS will search for new funding information (e.g. on donor websites), resources permitting, coverage is not guaranteed.

fts.unocha.org/pageloader.aspx?page=showpage&PageID=62-Definitions">FTS humanitarian aid definitions

Our use of FTS data in 2011

• We use UN OCHA FTS data to report on humanitarian expenditure of governments that do not report to the OECD DAC and to analyse expenditure relating to the UN consolidatedappeals process (CAP). We have also used it in the ‘Where does it go?’ and ‘How does itget there?’ sections of the report (Chapter 1) to analyse private contributions and moneyspent through NGOs, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement or a UN agency.
• As well as being the custodian of data relating to UN CAP appeals, UN OCHA FTS receives data from donor governments and recipient agencies and also gathers information on specific pledges carried in the media or on donor websites, or quoted in pledging conferences.
• Data for 2000–2010 was downloaded on 5 April 2011 using the ‘Make Custom Table’ function. FTS online data can change on a daily basis – so we use downloaded data for our analyses in order to try and ensure consistency in our data throughout the workstreams and throughout the year.
• In 2010 127 non-DAC donors reported to the FTS. Due to Korea’s membership to the OECD DAC in January 2010 our non-DAC donor FTS data now retrospectively excludes Korea as it is included in the OECD DAC data.

Care should be taken not to assume that an agency is ‘underfunded’ inside the appeal just because the FTS data might look like it is:

• money sits in the ‘pledges’ column until it has been confirmed as received by the appealing agency, and some agencies are slower at doing this than others
• money might also sit in the ‘pledges’ column until it has been processed:
• e.g. WFP had US$6.6 million in outstanding pledges for 2010. Its appeal requirements were only 85% covered, with US$589 million requirements uncovered. This outstanding requirement might be reduced if the outstanding pledges are fulfilled and converted into contributions ‘inside the appeal’
• some US$104 million were outstanding in pledges at data download, including: US$92 million labelled as ‘UN agencies’.