The big picture of trends in protection funding is mixed. On the plus side, the total amount of funding to protection has remained fairly steady, despite a decline in overall humanitarian funding since 2010. However, when we examine the extent to which protection is funded in appeals, it is always funded to a lesser extent than the sectors perceived to be more life-saving (food, shelter, WASH, health), and characterised more by volatility than by an overall trend line.
This lack of predictability means that we do not know if the recovery of protection funding relative to other clusters observed in 2012 is going to continue in 2013 and beyond. Our research suggests that this volatility in protection funding is not the result of conscious thematic preferences by donors – it is more likely to be the unintended consequence of the different “weight” of protection in the shifting landscape of emergencies, and of the range of ways in which the term “protection” is used in varied contexts.
Considerable emphasis was placed on understanding what drives donor funding choices. Notwithstanding the wide variety of donor approaches and the differences in scale, we felt that we could derive five general conclusions regarding donors that have in turn shaped the general direction of this study.
- The first is that donors (like other protection actors) have varied interpretations of what protection is – to a large extent because it lacks a simple conceptual framework with a universal terminology: it is hard to explain to the public and to decision-makers.
- The second is that donors for the most part do not make the major protection allocation decisions. Instead, most donors tend to allocate resources to priority countries and trusted partners ideally with as little earmarking as possible, and implicitly place the onus upon their trusted partners (either through their own allocation of un-earmarked funding, or through the composition of partner proposals) to determine what share of their funding goes to protection.
- Thirdly: many donors are concerned about the quality of protection programming and the narrow range of capable partners in this sometimes sensitive field of humanitarian work. At the same time, donor administrative constraints lead them in most cases to prefer fewer, larger projects.
- Fourth: most donors would like to see better outcome-level reporting of protection results.
- And finally: some donors are placing increased emphasis on protection mainstreaming, as an important complement to protection-specific programming.
It seems that there are two general funding strategies that can be deployed by the protection community at this juncture: (a) increase the supply by advocating for more (especially more multi-year) funding to be allocated to protection, and (b) increase the demand by improving the standing of protection within the overall humanitarian response and the quality of protection work. The two are closely related, and we are convinced that advocacy to increase the quantity of protection funding will fall short of expectations unless it is accompanied by clear commitment and action to improve the quality of protection work.
In the short term, it is protection actors (more than donors) who can increase the focus on protection:
- In terms of advocacy: beyond the prevailing practice of advocacy for particular issues, vulnerable groups or countries, there is definitely room to advocate more within protection organisations for a greater share of un-earmarked or privately-raised funding to be allocated to protection, and for greater protection content in multi-sector or integrated programmes pitched to donors. This is the most likely avenue for increased protection funding in the short term.
- On the demand side: work that is already on-going through IASC and the GPC to place protection strategically at the centre of the humanitarian response should continue, so that protection becomes a unifying narrative that ties together the purpose of humanitarian intervention (the goal), the way the response is organised (the approach), the orientation of its component sectors (mainstreaming and integration goals), and the specific activities of protection actors. A simpler, clearer conceptual framework for protection – with an agreed universal lexicon – would make this task much easier. In addition, efforts could be made to better plan, manage and report on protection results. And finally, there remains a need to strengthen the capacity of INGOs and particularly NNGOs to design and implement quality protection projects, especially given the technical difficulty and heightened levels of risk associated with protection work. Taken together, a bundle of such actions to increase the centrality and the quality of protection work will lay the foundation for increased funding.
In the medium term, some donors might increase their funding for protection, on the basis of results. As this foundation becomes better established, some donors could be expected to increase their contributions to protection. When donors have a clearer understanding of how protection fits into the bigger picture, and especially when they see better proposals from quality organisations achieving demonstrated outcome-level results, then demand will connect with supply, and both increased and more predictable funding specifically for the protection component of appeals can be expected.
In the long term, it is possible to access a greater share of development funding: Finally, in the long run there are good prospects for protection actors to access development funding sources for some aspects of protection, although to do so will require some culture change within the humanitarian community, and in particular some institutional and policy changes on the part of donor agencies. An increased focus on long-term development problems such as state policies that encourage social exclusion, weak legal systems and poor state security services will help shift protection work upstream — addressing some of the causes of harmful behaviour.