This report explores how new ways of interacting are bringing people in need closer to people who can help. Its conclusions suggest a fundamental shift in power from capitals and headquarters to the people aid agencies aim to assist. This calls for more diverse and bottom-up forms of decision-making — something that most governments and humanitarian organisations were not designed to do. The report focuses on organizations that are embracing these changes and reorienting their approaches around the essential objective of helping people to help themselves.
The report lays out a series of objectives, proposes criteria by which to measure progress, and suggests a number of steps, broken down by sector, to achieve them. These include enshrining the necessity for two-way communications into common funding pools. Effective information sharing with affected communities needs to become a fundamental criterion for selecting and funding projects. The report includes World Humanitarian Data and Trends 2012.
To take advantage of the opportunities available, humanitarian organisations need to adapt to:
- Work with new data sources. With sophisticated analysis layered over big open data, and techniques such as crowdsourcing and crowdseeding, they could access more accurate, relevant, timely and reliable information. To do so, they must embrace these sources and lose the fear of being overwhelmed. They must understand how to incorporate these sources into decisions and invest in building analytic capacity across the humanitarian network.
- Work with new partners and new techniques, based on open two-way communications between traditional humanitarians and a wider array of actors.
- The idea of information as a basic need in humanitarian response. The evidence in this report suggests that in the network age, access to accurate, consistent information by a wide range of response actors provides the foundation for life-saving interventions and for helping people recover from a crisis.
Achieving these goals is less a technical challenge than a matter of political will. The main objectives identified are to:
- Recognize information as a basic need in humanitarian response
- Ensure information relevant to humanitarian action is shared freely
- Build capacity within aid organizations and Governments to understand and use new information sources
- Develop guidelines to ensure information is used in an ethical and secure manner.
World Humanitarian Data and Trends 2012
The report includes global and country-level data and analysis relevant to humanitarian assistance. This is intended to establish a common baseline of humanitarian data that can be built on in future years and allow for comparisons across time. The information covers: 1) humanitarian needs in 2011; 2) humanitarian response in 2011; 3) humanitarian trends.
In each of the last three years (2010-2012), international humanitarian organizations have targeted over 100 million people for humanitarian assistance, most in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. But there may be many more whose needs are neither counted nor addressed.
Humanitarian response is the sum of actions by communities, civil society, the private sector and governments. Sometimes, it also involves international humanitarian aid and actors. It can include material assistance, as well as efforts to protect people’s welfare and rights and to promote crisis prevention and recovery. Findings on humanitarian response include the following:
- The contributions of different actors to humanitarian response are difficult to quantify. International humanitarian aid, which includes financial contributions from governments and private donors, is much more likely to be consistently reported than assistance from national and local sources. International humanitarian aid was US$17.1 billion in 2011.
- Two thirds of humanitarian aid provided by official and private international donors in 2011 went to 10 countries. However, communities and local and national governments in the affected country are often the main providers of humanitarian assistance.
- Humanitarian response is often measured financially, rather than in terms of outputs delivered. The outcomes for affected people are not measured consistently and the longer term impact of assistance is understood even less. This is partly due to the difficulty of issues of causality and attribution and the short duration of relief operations.
Trends include the following:
- Disasters: The number of reported disasters has increased significantly in recent years. The increasing exposure of people and property to natural hazards is playing a major role. The vast majority of people affected by disasters live in Asia.
- Conflict: Incidences of conflict are roughly equally divided between those involving at least one government, those between non-state armed groups, and those involving the use of force against civilians by a government or armed group.
- Drivers of vulnerability: High and volatile food and energy prices exacerbate the food and nutrition insecurity of poor households and increase the cost of providing humanitarian assistance. While the proportion of the population that is undernourished is falling globally, the actual number of undernourished people in sub-Saharan Africa is increasing. Climate change and population growth will result in increased pressure on water resources in some regions. Poverty will be increasingly concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and fragile states in the future. Population growth and other demographic changes, including rapid urbanisation, will continue to put pressure on resources for humanitarian assistance and will require changes to the way it is provided.
- Funding: Funding requirements for humanitarian assistance in inter-agency appeals have increased significantly over the past decade. Funding contributions to appeals have also increased, but they typically still receive only around two thirds of the funding requested.
- Prevention: Spending on disaster preparedness and risk reduction remains a very small proportion of humanitarian aid and development assistance.