Outcome report - Progress Acceleration Workshop: Enhanced Quality Funding through Reduced Earmarking, Multi-Year Planning and Funding

Published Date

Building on the recommendations made at the Grand Bargain Annual Meeting in June 2019, the co-conveners of the Enhanced Quality Funding workstream, Canada, UNICEF, Sweden, ICRC, Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and UN OCHA, organised a one-day workshop in Geneva to agree on practical strategies and solutions in order to accelerate progress against the Grand Bargain multi-year and flexible funding commitments. On 19 September 2019, more than 50 attendees (58) participated in a full day of discussions that included presentations on two studies commissioned by the Co-conveners to frame discussions.

Over the course of this workshop, workshop attendees participated in breakout discussions on the following topics:

  • Donor representatives discussed the hard constraints, barriers, and opportunities for further progress to increasing multi-year funding and progressively reducing earmarking.
  • Separate breakout groups consisting of UN agencies, field representatives, NGOs, ICRC, and IFRC discussed the barriers for first-level recipients to passing on or cascading quality funding to implementing partners.
  • Three mixed breakout groups discussed:
    Definitional issues in reporting multi-year and flexible funding;
    o The current status and workstream opportunities to advance multi-year planning; and
    Opportunities to increase quality funding outside of the steps envisaged in the commitments.

Highlights of the breakout sessions and proposals for solutions and opportunities were discussed in plenary. The workshop report summarizes key themes, proposals, as well as outstanding gaps and challenges emerging from these discussions. The workstream co-conveners also provided additional commentary and a refinement of the proposed next steps.

Please find below:

  • Outcome report for the Progress Acceleration Workshop: Enhanced Quality Funding through Reduced Earmarking, Multi-Year Planning and Funding;
  • A background paper commissioned by NRC synthesising the latest available evidence on progress against the multi-year and unearmarked funding Grand Bargain commitments as well as on the impact of enhanced quality funding and multi-year planning in order to identify challenges, issues and opportunities;
  • Presentation from DI on the preliminary results of their global study on multi-year funding
  • Key messages on quality funding from IASC Results Groups 4 and 5