Providing assistance in accordance with assessed humanitarian need is a core humanitarian principle but there exists no comprehensive measure of humanitarian needs that allows objective comparison of scale and severity.
The absence of a satisfactory measure of humanitarian need or people affected by crises globally has serious consequences for the type and amount of humanitarian assistance people ultimately receive. It holds back progress on global provision of adequate financing to meet humanitarian need.
We routinely monitor global aggregations of humanitarian need and apply them to retrospective analysis of humanitarian funding to examine what these measures can and cannot tell us about whether donors fund according to needs.
In 2010, we conducted two studies that looked at how evidence on the scale and severity of humanitarian needs is generated in very different humanitarian crises and how and to what extent this evidence is used by government donors in their decision making processes. Our case studies on funding according to need in Southern Sudan and in response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti can be found in reports section of the website.
