Updates from IRC - studies on humanitarian financing and forced displacement

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) recently produced four reports on major trends in countries in crisis, forced displacement and humanitarian financing:

1. The IRC Watchlist 2022 reveals that at the global level there are record numbers of people in need of humanitarian assistance. Record levels of people forced to flee their homes and record numbers of aid workers experiencing major attacks. The Watchlist argues the scale and nature of humanitarian distress around the world constitutes a “System Failure”. With 80 million people forced to flee their homes. 41 million people are on the brink of famine. 274 million people need humanitarian assistance, the 20 countries on Watchlist 2022 provide a unique lens for understanding what is going wrong and what is needed to fix it. The report includes key recommendations to address the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises, such as in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, and Yemen.
    
2. The joint report by IRC, the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) and the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), The Global Compact on Refugees Three Years On: Navigating barriers and maximising incentives in support of refugees and host countries, produced to inform the High-Level Officials Meeting of the Global Refugee Forum in December 2021. You can also read the accompanying Executive Summary and press release. Their top recommendations include urgently prioritising more equitable and predictable responsibility-sharing towards refugees before the next Global Refugee Forum in 2023; raising donor resettlement targets globally to address massive protection needs and help reverse the downward trend of the last few years; and providing increased and predictable funding to be contributed to refugee responses. Three years on, the paper provides strong insights into the implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees.
    
3. A new briefing by IRC and the Georgetown University’s Institute for Women, Peace and Security (GIWPS) The Women Peace and Security Index: A new lens on forced displacement. The briefing applies the GIWPS’ Women Peace and Security (WPS) Index which ranks countries on women’s inclusion, justice, and security to measure the situation of forcibly displaced women in five African countries – Ethiopia, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan. It shows that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, displaced women generally faced much higher risks than host community women of violence at home. They were consistently less likely to be financially included and often experienced less freedom of movement. Households headed by displaced women were also more likely to be poor than those headed by displaced men.
    
4. A new policy report, Why Not Local? Gender-based violence, women’s rights organisations, and the missed opportunity of COVID-19. This report deepens findings that the IRC has been building from previous years, including from Where is the Money? (2019) and What Happened? (2020), which measured funding to gender-based violence (GBV) interventions and did a stock-take of women’s increased risk of GBV during COVID-19, respectively. This year, IRC drew on the perspectives of frontline responders—including IRC staff, IRC partners, and key UN personnel in Cameroon, South Sudan, and Yemen. The three key findings from this report are that COVID-19 continues to negatively impact women’s protection and empowerment; women’s rights organisations are unsung heroes in humanitarian response; and GBV interventions remain severely underfunded.