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Seizing This Moment of Hope: Priorities for Funding

Seizing This Moment of Hope

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Humanitarian assistance depends on funding from donors, either bilaterally from individual governments or multilaterally through international institutions. For humanitarian assistance in the DRC, the main donors are the United States and the European Union. (The World Bank has a portfolio of loans to the DRC totaling more than $2 billion, but these are mostly for long-term development projects.) A great deal of money has already been donated and spent in support of peacekeeping and humanitarian relief in the DRC: MONUC costs more than $1 billion a year, the July 2006 elections cost $450 million,
and the U.S. alone gives about $100 million per year for humanitarian assistance, food aid, and preliminary community development. In a positive sign, contributions have increased in recent years; the United Kingdom, for example, is increasing its funding for DRC threefold, allocating £60 million for 2006-2008, and a law proposed in the U.S. Congress would allocate an extra $52 million for the DRC.

It is still not enough. Funding is completely inadequate for a country that has never had a government focused on improving the lives of the people, that suffers from chronic underdevelopment and neglect, that has been overrun by invading armies, rebel groups, and government forces seeking to control its vast natural resources, and that has over two million internally displaced people and refugees who need help meeting basic needs for survival. Beyond the scale of the problem, the DRC is also a very expensive place to work: IDPs huddle in isolated and remote areas, where air transport is sometimes the only option for bringing in supplies and equipment; difficult working conditions lead to high staff turnover; corruption is endemic; and humanitarian agencies are a steady source of revenue for local authorities through taxes and administrative fees.

The United Nations estimated that it would take $680 million to address humanitarian needs in the DRC in 2006, to be spent according to projects included in the Action Plan that the UN compiled and then launched in Brussels in February 2006. This was far greater than previous estimates, but still an approximation of the real need. The response so far has been pathetic: with four months left to go in 2006, only 40% of the needed funds had been either contributed or committed, or had been brought forward from previous years.

There is no similar estimate of need for funding for security and peacekeeping, but the substantial needs related to reforming the FARDC and expanding MONUC require hundreds of millions of dollars.

A complicating factor in the DRC is that humanitarian needs are expanding and changing with the improvement in peace and security. People are increasingly accessible with the deployment of MONUC and the FARDC, while joint operations between MONUC and the FARDC are also creating more forced movement. Needs continue to arise in areas of displacement while similar needs crop up in areas of return and resettlement, as people begin to go home. Humanitarian funding, often given through specialized mechanisms, is directed to humanitarian implementing agencies that are used to working with short-term budgets and implementing activities quickly in order to save lives. Long-term funding, sometimes through different mechanisms, is directed to developmental implementing agencies and the host government to manage large-scale community development projects. Given the improved security and hopes for peace following the elections in the DRC, donors want to reduce humanitarian funding in favor of long-term work.

This transition is not going smoothly, creating a gap in assistance. Humanitarian needs will continue through 2007, and humanitarian agencies with experience, trained staff, and established operations are available to meet returnee needs. However, humanitarian funding is being cut before developmental funding is available, and before development agencies are in place. The European Union seems to be having particular trouble in this regard, where funding provided through the European Community Humanitarian Office (ECHO) for health care in the DRC has been reduced before the new European Development Fund is available. In Ituri, a major implementing agency with substantial experience in the area had to stop food distributions due to a sudden cut in funding from ECHO; another in North Kivu is unable to start new water and sanitation projects because EU funding is unclear.

In the midst of this transition, and in the face of inadequate funding overall, the new Pooled Fund mechanism shows some promise for filling gaps and improving humanitarian response. The Fund was established to support priority projects in the Action Plan compiled by the UN that were not receiving funds from other sources; controlled by the UN Humanitarian Coordinator, it is also designed to strengthen such coordination in the DRC. The Fund has not attracted contributions from the U.S. or ECHO (the former being barred by law from contributing to such funds for reasons of accountability, monitoring, and evaluation), but some European donors have made it their main funding mechanism. The UK in particular has contributed generously, with half of its allocation of £30 million for the DRC in 2006-2007 going to the Fund.

To be as useful as possible, the Fund should disburse money quickly, as needs arise. The first round of grants, however, has been mired in a long and bureaucratic process. The Humanitarian Coordinator decides how much money is available from the Fund for each province; provincial coordinating bodies then choose priority projects for submission. In 2006, NGOs were forced to revise their proposals three times as management of the process shifted, ending fi nally with control by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) as the Fund administrator. Successful applicants thus become grantees of UNDP, which disburses and monitors the funds. Some successful applicants however, had not received any money after several months, and there were widespread worries that UNDP did not have the capacity to monitor the projects properly.

In addition, there is a common perception that UN agencies are benefiting from the Pooled Fund at the expense of NGOs (and UN agencies already have access to a new source of funding from the CERF, the global emergency response fund instituted in early 2006 and managed by the UN in New York). Some NGOs feel that, in fact, they will receive less money this year because traditional donors are giving to the Pooled Fund, but that money is not going to them.A few NGOs are also uncomfortable with the pressure to become grantees of the United Nations, which through MONUC is a party to the confl ict in the DRC. This overlap between military and humanitarian operations means that armed groups could see NGOs as supporting military operations against them; NGOs could then be targeted or denied access, reducing their effectiveness.

The Pooled Fund’s largest donor, however, seems committed to working with the UN to overcome these problems, and several European countries are now placing their contributions to the DRC in the Fund instead of funding UN agencies and NGOs directly.

Beyond the promise of the Pooled Fund, however, overall funding for the DRC remains insuffi cient. While the needs are clear, fundraising efforts have been weak. The 2006 Action Plan was designed as both a coordination tool as well as a funding appeal, but it failed to fulfill its potential to catalyze funding. Paradoxically, the Plan was compiled at the instigation of donors (led by the U.S. and Belgium) through the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative, but donor response to the Plan has been lackluster. Part of this, as donor representatives explained, was due to concerns that projects proposed by UN agencies cost too much due to high overhead costs, nd that there simply was not enough capacity available, neither among UN agencies nor NGOs, in the DRC to absorb and spend the requested funds effectively.

Decisions about funding humanitarian assistance in the DRC are ultimately made by democratically elected legislators in donor countries, mindful of their constituents, overall public awareness, and political agendas. Within the United States at least, Africa as a whole does not command much attention, with the possible exception of Darfur, making reaching appropriate funding levels for the DRC unlikely in the face of national priorities such as the war in Iraq and domestic security. In addition, appeals come long after funding decisions have been made. While this is to be expected for new emergencies, the needs for protracted crises like that in the DRC are more predictable. U.S. officials, for example, have alrady developed their funding proposals for humanitarian assistance to the DRC for 2008; these will be submitted formally to Congress in February 2007. In contrast, the 2007 DRC Action Plan compiled by the UN will be launched in November 2006, one month after the start of the U.S. fiscal year for which funding decisions were made months previously.

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