Documents of Enhanced quality funding (Increase collaborative humanitarian multi-year planning and funding and reduce the earmarking of donor contributions)
Multi-year and flexible humanitarian funding supports better outcomes and delivers efficiencies. Evidence of the benefits of multi-year flexible funding has steadily grown in recent years; numerous studies - published by think tanks, humanitarian organisations and UN Agencies, and commissioned by donors - point to effectiveness and efficiency gains in programme quality.
Prepared by the workstream 7&8 (Enhanced Quality Funding), the purpose of this Definitions Guidance Summary is to clarify the definitions of multi-year and flexible funding in order to help Grand Bargain signatories with this year’s (2019) annual self-reporting process. To highlight, this Guidance Summary is not modifying the existing definitions of multi-year (OECD definition of multi-year) or flexible funding (Annex I of The Grand Bargain: A Shared Commitment to Better Serve People In Need) adopted by the Grand Bargain.
The Grand Bargain calls for aid organisations and donors to increase multi-year humanitarian planning and funding. However, the extent to which progress is being made remains unclear. Existing data sources – including the Grand Bargain self-reporting process, the Financial Tracking Service (FTS) of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) and independent research – do not currently provide a clear picture of the quantity of multi-year funding passing through the humanitarian system.
As committed at the Grand Bargain Annual Meeting on 27 June 2019, WFP is pleased to share their management insights on quality funding. While their reflections and benchmarks are agency specific, they indicate a pathway that other agencies could consider recognising that the current impasse between donor and agency Grand Bargain Signatories needs a more nuanced understanding of the realities, barriers and opportunities to improve the funding of the humanitarian system.
The study, conceived as a multi-stakeholder contribution to the Grand Bargain workstream 7&8 (Increase collaborative humanitarian multi-year planning and funding and reduce the earmarking of donor contribution), provides significant evidence to support the claim that NGOs can do more with predictable and flexible f
Please find below the priority action plan for workstream 7 & 8 (Increase collaborative humanitarian multi-year planning and funding and reduce the earmarking of donor contributions), finalized in November 2019.
For more information, don't hesitate to reach out to the Co-convenors (Canada, Sweden, OCHA, UNICEF, ICRC, NRC).
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.
Humanitarian aid is largely concentrated in crises that are protracted or recurrent. In 2016, 60% of global humanitarian financing went to just 10 countries. Almost three-quarters of this aid went to long-term recipients (where a crisis has lasted eight years or more) and 86% went to crises that had endured over three years.
