They give food items like rice, oil, and flour. What to do with these items when we do not have kitchens?
The Humanitarian Economy
Beginning in 2015 we undertook in-depth research and analysis of funding flows through the international humanitarian system with a particular focus on how much – or how little is available for local and national humanitarian actors.
This research grew from the Grand Bargain commitments to giving 25% of humanitarian funding directly to local or national actors. Through this research we tracked progress made towards this goal and restoring power local and national responders to crisis.
Localisation in Numbers: Humanitarian funding flows and local leadership (2020)
These country briefs examine national and local participation in humanitarian coordination and leadership, along with data on funding flows.
Iraq | Jordan | Lebanon | Nigeria | occupied Palestinian Territories | South Sudan | Sudan | Syria | Somalia | Ukraine
Localisation Literature Review
Imogen Wall, with support from Kerren Hedlund
Funded by the Swiss Development Cooperation
The foundation for our investigation of localisation in the humanitarian system. This literature review explores the meaning of “localisation” and how this differs from “locally-led”. The authors highlight barriers to localisation and locally-led responses, which are well explored in the literature. They also note that there is very little literature exploring what actually works when putting local actors at the forefront of response.
Local Actor Funding Targets
An overview of global humanitarian funding flows between 2008 and 2018, focusing on how much funding went directly or indirectly to local and national responders in 2018.
Funding to Local Responders: Cash vs In-Kind
An exploration of whether in-kind assistance should be included in Grand Bargain targets for 25% direct support to local responders.
Based on data of CERF sub-grants, it is demonstrated that UN agencies’ cash-grants to local actors ranged between 4 and 22% in 2014. If in-kind transfers were to be considered “funding”, six out of the seven studied UN agencies’ transfers to local actors were above 30%, therefore individually achieving the global, aggregated funding target of the Grand Bargain already in 2014.
Can Grand Bargain signatories reach the 25% target by 2020?
This 2015 paper provided the first global estimate of how much funding Grand Bargain signatories chanelled to local and national responders in 2015.
Funding to Syrian Humanitarian Actors
While Syrian humanitarian actors were responsible for delivering 75% of the humanitarian assistance in 2014, they received only 0.3% of the direct and 9.3 % of the indirect cash funding available for the overall Syria response. Despite their crucial role, Syrian NGO’s struggled to get their most basic costs covered in the sub-contracting and partnership agreements they have with international agencies. While international actors are all committed to transparency, 30% of the known funding remains unknown in terms of which humanitarian actor actually received the funding. Private remittances and assistance from diaspora groups were found to play a crucial role in day-to-day survival but it remained impossible to estimate their exact volume.
Executive Summary
Full Report
Funding for National and Local Actors
This briefing note demonstrates inequalities in the global humanitarian funding system.
Explore how money travels from the biggest backdonors through the largest international agencies to national and local actors in the collaborative piece “The Humanitarian Economy – where is all the money going” (external link) co-published with IRIN in 2015.