By coordinating the response to funding humanitarian emergencies and post-conflict activities, the humanitarian community aims to greatly increase the effectiveness of action taken to address the needs of crisis-affected communities. Pooled funding mechanisms provide donors and humanitarian actors with the tools to for doing this. Their goal is to increase the flexibility and speed of funding to recipients whilst reducing the costs of humanitarian financing. Pooled funding mechanisms also play a key role in providing small and new donors ways of channelling funding in support of responses to humanitarian crises.
Pooled funds are not only used in emergency situations. Increasingly, funds are being established alongside humanitarian pooled funds to provide money for reconstruction and development following a conflict or natural disaster. The emergence of these funds could help to narrow the transitional gap between humanitarian situations and long term development in many affected countries.
We collect and analyse data on the income and expenditure of various pooled financing mechanisms both at a global and country level in order to provide a detailed picture of humanitarian financing. We do this by:
- analysing donor contributions to the various humanitarian and reconstruction pooled funds
- highlighting NGO access to pooled funds to assist others in lobbying for increased involvement
- assessing the advantages and disadvantages of using pooled funds alongside an assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of bilateral funding
- looking at disaster risk reduction, peacebuilding and recovery pooled funds as well as those with a purely humanitarian mandate
- paying close attention to the humanitarian reform process and monitoring the progress made in the areas of coordination, leadership, accountability and financing.
We look at the volumes and trends in donor contributions to these pooled funds – as well as how pooled funding is spent – and are exploring ways of assessing the funds’ impact.
![Figure 9: The United Kingdom’s total use of the multilateral system for humanitarian purposes, 2008 [Source: Development Initiatives based on (i) Creditor Reporting System (CRS) and (ii) OECD DAC aggregate tables]](http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/core-oda-dfid-2008ix-144x83.png "core-oda-dfid-2008ix")
