This publication outlines the 12 most important humanitarian lessons from the DAC peer reviews. It profiles examples of good donor behaviour highlighted in the peer reviews, and outlines ongoing challenges. The lessons are grouped into four categories: the strategic framework; delivering effective funding; an organisation fit for purpose; and learning and accountability.
The strategic framework
- Lesson 1: Provide clear strategic vision – A cross-government policy and/or strategy for humanitarian assistance is a critical first step towards ensuring consistent responses that respect the Principles and Good Practice of Humanitarian Donorship and highlight important areas such as gender equality.
- Lesson 2: Promote recovery and resilience – Donors need to ensure that humanitarian programming does not undermine future development work, and verify that development programming is building on humanitarian knowledge and results. Ideally, donors should also use their humanitarian funding to support spontaneous, community-led recovery initiatives and focus on strengthening the resilience of vulnerable communities.
- Lesson 3: Reduce disaster risks – This means anticipating disasters, reducing risk exposure, strengthening the resilience of vulnerable communities, using risk transfer mechanisms where appropriate, and strengthening national and international response capacity and leadership.
- Lesson 4: Prioritise participation – Promoting participation will help ensure that real humanitarian needs are met: delivering the right response to the right people at the right time.
Delivering effective funding
- Lesson 5: Match your vision with your money – Providing an appropriate level of predictable and flexible humanitarian funding
- Lesson 6: Decide how to decide – Decide where to fund based on an objective determination of the severity of each crisis, and/ or on where the donor can clearly add value. Decide what to fund by addressing the highest risk to life and livelihoods first. Decide whom to fund based on the capacity to deliver results. Joint needs assessments support more objective and rigorous decision-making.
- Lesson 7: Build strong partnerships – Streamline procedures, align funding streams and reduce the administration burden on partners, especially NGO partners. Recognise the benefits of multi-annual funding partnerships.
- Lesson 8: Develop rapid response mechanisms – Support a stronger rapid response by connecting with the responses of local communities, families, local government, civil society and the local private sector and of diaspora in donor countries.
Organisation fit for a purpose
- Lesson 9: Co-ordinate across government – All humanitarian aid management models need an effective cross-government co-ordination system. This will involve: a mechanism to ensure coherence between humanitarian and related policy areas, a transparent division of labour between the humanitarian instruments, a clear lead agency, and the participation in co-ordination structures of national response actors.
- Lesson 10: Work to clarify the role of the military – Implementing coherent and meaningful partnerships between civilian and military actors, guided by humanitarian principles, best practices and value for money, continues to pose a significant challenge for most donors.
- Lesson 11: Invest in your staff – Low staffing levels and high staff turnover create risks for institutional memory, restrict the donor’s capacity to engage at a global level, and limit the scope for staff to add value beyond a basic grant administration role.
Learning and accountability
- Lesson 12: Demonstrate value for money and promote learning – Donors could make better use of existing monitoring initiatives, such as ALNAP (the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance in Humanitarian Action), and of resource-effective joint evaluations and field visits.
