The humanitarian reform agenda aims to improve the quality of humanitarian response for people affected by crises. This includes:

•  trying to increase the size of overall resources
•  getting better value from each humanitarian dollar
•  providing flexible and timely funding
•  paying attention to the accounting, management and administrative lines that are traditionally drawn between development and relief in official humanitarian assistance expenditure.

Many of the people facing humanitarian crises are often also trapped in chronic poverty. For these people in particular, coping with emergencies requires effective short-term response to meet immediate needs, coupled with measures to address the factors that precipitate crisis.

All DAC donors have contributed to the CERF in at least one of the two years it has been operating but its funding is heavily concentrated on the same few large donors – UK, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, Canada, Ireland and Spain.

But the increasing number of contributing countries may reflect both confidence in the mechanism and also suggests that the CERF is providing a way of supporting urgent and neglected crises for donors who would find it challenging to do this bilaterally. This has a double benefit of increasing funding to these crises while enabling a more coordinated response.

See funding mechanisms >

Back to top

The cluster approach was introduced in 2005 in order to improve predictability, response capacity, coordination and accountability by strengthening partnerships in key sectors of humanitarian response and formalising the lead role of particular agencies/organisations in each of these sectors.

In November 2007, the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), which had been responsible for initiating the cluster approach, published the results of an evaluation to examine whether the approach had led to any measurable improvements.

Based on field research in the four roll-out countries (Chad, DRC, Somalia and Uganda) plus desk research on the fast onset emergencies, the report pointed to several improvements as well as recommending a few next steps as the cluster roll-out continues.

See: www.humanitarianreform.org >

Back to top

An independent evaluation carried out on the two CHF pilots in DRC and Sudan in September 2007 concluded that the funds had had a positive impact.

See: funding mechanisms >

The full evaluation report is available at: www.reliefweb.int >

Back to top

In 2004, the DAC agreed to take an active role in promoting the GHD initiative and to include broader coverage of humanitarian assistance in its peer reviews of donor performance on development cooperation.

The GHD assessment framework was applied to five DAC peer reviews in 2005, leading to the publication of a synthesis report in February 2006.

10 DAC peer reviews were carried out in 2006 and 2007. The next synthesis report of the humanitarian component of these is being drafted and will be published prior to the next GHD meeting in July 2008.

See: www.oecd.org/dac/peerreviews >

Back to top

The Global Humanitarian Forum was launched by Kofi Annan, Former UN Secretary-General, in October 2007.

Based in Geneva, its mission is to foster dialogue and broker partnerships to strengthen the international community’s ability to address humanitarian challenges.

The Forum will organise a series of workshops and events, including an ‘Annual High Level’ meeting. The first of these is planned for June 2008 and will focus on the humanitarian impact of climate change on the poorest and most vulnerable people.

See: www.ghaf-geneva.org >

Back to top