Guidance note for donors: Promoting inclusive and locally-led action through humanitarian pooled funds (November 2024)

This Guidance note is intended to inform how humanitarian donors operationalise their reform commitments to promote more inclusive and locally-led action through humanitarian pooled funds (hereafter “pooled funds”). The Guidance note can be used by donors working at headquarters, in regions and in embassies, in their engagement across all humanitarian pooled fund and trust fund mechanisms. It may also be useful to a wider set of humanitarian actors that engage with donors on these efforts.

The Guidance note seeks to reaffirm and help operationalise the Grand Bargain commitments to support local and national responders and “make greater use of pooled funding tools which increase and improve assistance delivered by local and national responders”. It also seeks to operationalise the Grand Bargain commitments on the participation revolution, the recommendations of the Grand Bargain caucuses on funding for localisation, on the role of intermediaries and on risk sharing, and the IASC Guidance note on how to promote gender responsive localisation in humanitarian action.

Pooled funds have been at the forefront of testing approaches to deliver more inclusive and locally-led action and many donors consider pooled funds an important lever to deliver on their locally-led action commitments.1 Donors play a significant role in promoting inclusive and locally-led action across pooled funds, both as funding partners and when they participate as pooled fund governance board members. In contexts where multiple pooled funds operate alongside each other, donors have a role to play to incentivise complementarity and collaboration. Donors can also support pooled funds and the wider humanitarian system to operate more effectively – for instance through transparent sharing of funding intentions, supporting due diligence passporting or through sharing learning from third-party monitoring.

Individual humanitarian pooled funds will have made varying level of progress towards inclusive and locally-led action depending on the context and on their respective objectives. There is no expectation that this Guidance note can or should lead to a “one size fits all” approach. Donors will need to work with pooled fund managers, board members and with fund partners and particularly local and national actors (LNA), to determine which areas captured in this note to prioritise for progress and how to sequence them, considering the specific context and objectives of the pooled fund.

This Guidance note first outlines nine inter-related principles to guide donors in their engagement with pooled funds as funding partners, and, as appropriate, as board members. The principles are followed by an explanatory note that provides illustrative examples of how to operationalise the principles outlined, as well as best practices. Whilst some of these best practices are focused on donors’ actions, pooled fund management teams are at the heart of most of the best practices listed – and therefore many of these are presented from the point of view of pooled funds themselves. More detailed case studies are provided in annexes on the OCHA Country-Based Pooled Funds, the United Nations Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF), the IFRC Disaster Relief Emergency Fund (DREF), the Global Resilience Fund and the Network for Empowered Aid Response (NEAR) Change Fund.

>>Click here to read the guidance note

This Guidance note was developed by the UK, Switzerland and Denmark, in collaboration with Australia, Canada, Germany, Ireland, Jersey, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden; with support and comments from the Global Resilience Fund, the International Council for Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) and the IFRC Disaster Response Emergency Fund, and with helpful inputs from the Advisory Group of the CBPF-NGO Dialogue Platform (PAG), the Aid Fund For Northern Syria, ALNAP, the Disability Reference Group, the International Disability Alliance, Resourcing Refugee Leadership Initiative (RRLI), the Livelihoods and Food Security Fund (Myanmar), the Start Network, NEAR (Network for Empowered Aid Response), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the United Nations Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund and Veronique Barbelet (independent consultant).