06/13/2005

Contacts:  Keegan Kautzky and Joel Charny
ri@refugeesinternational.org or 202.828.0110

International donor response to the annual UN Consolidated Humanitarian Appeals, which constitute the UN system’s request for the minimum requirements for humanitarian assistance in crisis-plagued countries, remains inadequate. The annual shortfalls, coupled with a decline in food aid, delays in funding, disregard for protracted emergencies, and the exclusion of NGO programming, severely undermine the humanitarian community’s ability to provide protection and assistance. With the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan launching an ambitious UN reform agenda, described in his call to action, “In Larger Freedom,” donor governments and UN humanitarian agencies have an opportunity to re-think how emergency humanitarian response should be structured and funded.

Chronic Aid Shortfall

The persistent failure of donor governments to provide adequate funding for relief efforts is the most critical flaw in the humanitarian aid process today. The UN Consolidated Appeal (CAP) is a collaborative assessment of the minimal financial commitment necessary to provide essential emergency assistance in humanitarian crises. Yet, in the last five years, the CAP has been under-funded at 59%, 56%, 67%, 76% and 64%, respectively. With more than one-third of all assistance programming effectively unfunded from year to year, tens of millions of men, women and children around the world needlessly suffer – unvaccinated, malnourished and without protection.

In the case of Ethiopia, for example, the direct impact of under-funding has been a severe increase in vulnerability. Delayed implementation of the Productive Safety Nets program, intended to address the chronic food insecurity for five million people, has resulted in increased malnutrition rates, the adoption of desperate coping strategies, and reported stress migrations in search of assistance. According to the Humanitarian Coordinator in Ethiopia, “The poor funding of the appeal, combined with poor management of assistance early in the year, has put millions at risk.”

Decline in Food Aid

The recurring shortfall in financial assistance, however, is not the only thing hindering response to these crises. With reports of imminent pipeline breaks throughout Africa, shortfalls in humanitarian commitments now threaten even the most basic component of the safety net – emergency food aid. In the last five years, global food aid shipments have dropped by nearly 50% despite an 8% increase in the number of chronically hungry people in the world.  In 2004 alone, global food aid dropped to 7.5 million tons, nearly 30% lower than total shipments the year before.

Critically dependent on the time-sensitive provision of funding and food supplies, the UN World Food Program has cut emergency food rations and reduced the number of beneficiaries to receive assistance as aid commitments are insufficient to cover rising operational expenses. Of the 2.2 million malnourished men, women and children WFP targeted for food relief in Eritrea, only 1.2 million are currently receiving food aid and they are receiving a meager 60% of the standard ration. As a result, no progress has been made in reducing the country’s high levels of malnutrition, poor health indicators remain unchanged, and children and families continue to needlessly suffer from abject hunger. WFP is also concerned about its ability to meet its obligations for food assistance to more than two million refugees, primarily in Africa, and is anticipating the need to cut rations below minimum levels if urgent contributions are not received.

Funding Delays

Beyond chronic shortfalls in humanitarian assistance, the delay of promised donor funding jeopardizes the progress of emergency relief and stabilization efforts. Relief efforts must be easily mobilized and flexible in order to be effective, yet donor governments often lack the flexibility to respond to emerging crises and funding may be unavailable until late in the annual cycle due to legislative delays and the general inefficiency of national bureaucracies. In Somalia in recent years, for example, nearly 50% of all funds received for emergency assistance arrived in the last quarter of the year. Beyond delaying the achievement of targeted goals, this delay in the disbursement of funds directly limits the scope and efficacy of relief efforts, delays program execution, and restricts the responsiveness of UN and humanitarian agencies.

Vaccination campaigns and preventive health programs are particularly vulnerable to delays in funding as the transmission of infectious disease requires an immediate and thorough response to be effective. When a strain of the virus responsible for paralyzing 132 children in Sudan spread rapidly throughout Western Tigray, Ethiopia in February 2004, a region previously considered polio-free, an accelerated vaccination campaign was initiated to control the outbreak. Nearly 3.6 million children were successfully inoculated before a $4.9 million funding shortfall halted vaccination efforts, leaving 14.7 million children unvaccinated and vulnerable. Today, the emergency response remains under-funded by $2.3 million. The persistent delay of humanitarian funding by donor governments is an unnecessary obstacle to relief, and ultimately compromises the opportunity to move beyond emergency relief to long-term development.

Disregard for Protracted Emergencies

Sustaining donor commitment in chronically unstable countries or protracted refugee situations is difficult. Regardless of the needs of the vulnerable or displaced, it is increasingly common for intractable or deteriorating emergencies, such as those in Zimbabwe, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Northern Uganda or Liberia, to receive inadequate levels of humanitarian assistance in relation to other crises. The Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland, non-governmental organizations such as Refugees International and Doctors without Borders, and the Reuters website on relief issues, alertnet.com, have persistently tried to bring greater attention to “forgotten” crises, but with little success. Donor governments seem capable of responding in a meaningful way to no more than one or two major emergencies at a time, and the lack of a predictable discretionary funding mechanism leaves other crises seriously neglected.

Côte d’Ivoire is an example of a country where emergency response has been chronically under-funded. Requesting $39.36 million to provide emergency assistance to over 3.5 million vulnerable people, the 2005 Appeal for Cote d’Ivoire targets only the most critical needs of the war-ravaged country. Six months into the 2005 Appeal, Cote d’Ivoire has received barely 10% of requested funding as donors are wary of the country’s unstable “no war no peace” situation. In 2004, the country similarly received one of the lowest relative aid commitments, achieving only 35% of necessary funding for relief efforts. Côte d’Ivoire’s funding shortfall was second only to the appeal for Zimbabwe, which received a mere 11% of its request due to donor apprehension over continued political instability.

Exclusion of NGO Participation

While the complex needs of every humanitarian crisis necessitate a comprehensive intervention, donor governments have been known to exclude non-governmental humanitarian organizations from participation in emergency relief efforts, undermining the potential benefits of a concerted response. By uniting UN agencies, the Red Cross Movement and NGOs, the CAP is designed to foster cooperation throughout the planning, implementation, and monitoring of response efforts. Humanitarian relief is intended to be strategically coordinated in order to build upon the strengths and abilities of each relief organization’s operational capacity, targeted programming, issue expertise and specialized personnel.

In the 2004 Consolidated Appeal for Somalia, only three relief projects coordinated by NGOs received funding from donors. Of the eleven NGOs that participated in Somalia’s appeal process in 2004 and 2005, only four participated both years. The bias against non-governmental humanitarian organizations has resulted in NGO withdrawal from the collaborative appeal process. Similar withdrawals have occurred in many other countries in response to donor exclusion of NGO funding.  As a Humanitarian Affairs Officer in Chad noted, “NGOs have been questioning their usefulness…as many of their projects presented in the CAP last year did not receive any funding.” The loss of NGO participation not only increases the operational load on over-burdened UN agencies and under-staffed field teams, but diminishes the credibility, efficacy, responsiveness and quality of relief efforts.

Conclusion

The general paucity of adequate, timely and unrestricted funding forces UN institutions and non-governmental humanitarian agencies to choose which victims and assistance programming must be abandoned in order to maintain operational capacity. They must decide whether it is more important to vaccinate nine million infants from disease or to provide school-feeding programs to two million under-nourished children. Emergency relief inevitably becomes a zero-sum game wherein assistance to one group comes at the expense of others.

The UN reform process launched by the Secretary-General provides an opportunity to address these problems. One promising initiative is to establish a trust fund to provide ready unearmarked funding for response to immediate emergencies as well as chronic situations, capitalized at a level of $1 billion and replenished annually as funds are withdrawn. Since the UN lacks a unified management structure for emergency response, allocating these funds would have to involve initially a joint process, overseen by the Emergency Relief Coordinator, including the major UN humanitarian agencies with either direct participation or oversight by the representatives of major donor governments. Managing the trust fund, however, might point the way towards the need for a more ambitious reform, involving the consolidation of the UN’s humanitarian response agencies into a single entity with a unified management structure.

Twenty-six million people continue to suffer in 14 humanitarian emergencies around the world as the principles of good donorship, officially touted by donor governments, continue to remain elusive in practice. Failure to resolve these persistent flaws in donor response will come at a high cost – a cost that will be paid in needless human suffering and loss of life for years to come.

Refugees International therefore recommends that:

• The international donor community act to address persistent and damaging delays in funding by establishing a trust fund or permanent stand-by funding capacity to enable immediate response to unexpected emergencies and support for neglected protracted crises.
• Donor governments increase financial commitments to humanitarian appeals and pledge to provide a minimum of 75% of the aid requested in the annual Consolidated Appeals Process in order to guarantee the most critical emergency relief programs remain funded.
• Donors increase commitments to food aid in order to compensate for heightened operational costs and increased emergency demand.
•  Donor governments support a comprehensive, collaborative approach to humanitarian relief by funding NGO-directed aid programs alongside UN agencies and the Red Cross Movement.
• The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs initiate a public campaign to increase awareness of the broken financial promises of governments as a way of pressuring donors that delay or fail to commit funds previously pledged to humanitarian crises.