Notes
1 UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2018, July 2019. This figure includes people forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, and human rights violations.
2 Development Initiatives, Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2019, September 2019. Total international humanitarian funding ($28.6 billion) includes governments and EU institutions ($21.9 billion) and private funding ($6.6 billion, including individuals, trusts and foundations, companies and corporations, and national societies).
3 Christian Els, Kholoud Mansour, and Nils Carstensen, Funding to National and Local Humanitarian Actors in Syria: Between Sub-contracting and Partnerships, Local to Global Protection (L2GP), May 2016.
4 Charter for Change, Charter for Change: From Commitments to Action Progress Report 2018-2019, June 2019.
5 See, e.g., Jeremy Konyndyk, “Fit for the Future: Envisioning New Approaches to Humanitarian Response,” Center for Global Development, October 23, 2018; ICVA, “Localization Examined: An ICVA Briefing Paper,” September 2018.
6 UNHCR, “Guidance for Partnering with UNHCR,” May 2019. Providing overhead to partners has proven to be the most challenging commitment for INGO signatories to the Charter for Change; only 10 of the 28 have provided any. See Charter for Change, Charter for Change, and Groupe URD and Trócaire, More Than the Money: Localisation in Practice, July 2017. A real lack of transparency surrounds the overhead policies of
INGOs and other actors, in terms of both the overhead that they create and the overhead that they receive. See the Wolfgroup, Initial Research: Provision and Conditions of Core/Overhead/Indirect Costs for Local/National Humanitarian Actors, December 2017.
7 Tara R. Gingerich and Marc J. Cohen, Turning the Humanitarian System on Its Head: Saving Lives and Livelihoods by Strengthening Local Capacity and Shifting Leadership to Local Actors, Oxfam Research Reports, July 2015.
8 Development Initiatives, Global Humanitarian Assistance Report. The revised C4C sets a 25 percent target, by 2020.
9 Ibid., p. 48. Funds to pooled funds reached a record total of $1.3 billion in 2017, and within that, funding to the 18 CBPFs increased by 10 percent. Types of pooled funds besides CBPFs include the UN Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) and the NGO-managed START Fund. Importantly, the allocations from CBPFs to NGOs
(local/national and international) have been growing, although the annual rate of growth is slowing, down from 58 percent in 2015 and 34 percent in 2016 to just 4 percent in 2017. Within that allocation, INGOs receive the largest share by far (67 percent), local and national NGOs receive 30 percent, and southern INGOs receive 3 percent.
10 C4C, the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development, Care, Christian Aid, Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam, and NEAR Network, Highlights and Ways Forward: A Synopsis of Grand Bargain Signatories’ Achievements and Challenges Implementing Their Grand Bargain Workstream 2 Commitments on Localisation, June 2018.
11 By “responsible governments,” we mean national governments that are truly committed to saving lives and upholding rights and dignity.
12 Paul Knox Clarke, The State of the Humanitarian System 2018, ALNAP, 2018.
13 A shift toward LHL would mean that INGOs would not be launching the huge responses that they often do today, involving deploying international staff and incurring the expenses associated with such large responses. Direct funding would also mean that each intermediary would not take out overhead. Anecdotal evidence suggests that locally led humanitarian action would be less expensive, but comprehensive research on this point has not occurred.
14 At the time of its creation in 2007, COSACA was made up of Oxfam, Care, Save the Children, and Concern Worldwide, but Concern Worldwide closed its Mozambique office in 2018 and left the consortium.
15 Bündnis Entwicklung Hilft, WorldRiskReport: Analysis and Prospects 2017, 2017.
16 David Eckstein, Vera Künzel, and Laura Schäfer, Global Climate Risk Index 2018: Who Suffers Most from Extreme Weather Events? Weather-related Loss Events in 2016 and 1997 to 2016, Germanwatch, November 2017.
17 The Philippine Disaster Risk Reduction and Management law (RA10121) mandated local governments to set aside 5 percent of their estimated revenue from regular sources for local disaster councils. Of this allocation, 30 percent is automatically invested in a quick-response fund for relief and recovery programs. The remainder can be used for predisaster measures. The law also established a disaster fund at the national level to respond to urgent needs during emergency situations.
18 See Philippines Humanitarian Country Team, “Humanitarian Response and Resources Overview for Northern Philippines 2018 Typhoons,” November 2018. The cluster approach is the coordination system of the UN-led global humanitarian response model. In the approach, lead agencies organize clusters based on sectors (e.g., shelter; camp coordination; health; logistics; water, sanitation, and hygiene) and task them with coordinating the humanitarian response across the crisis-affected country.
19 Two of the partners, the People’s Disaster Risk Reduction Network and the Humanitarian Response Consortium, were also part of a three-year pilot project aimed at enabling local organizations and communities in the Philippines to handle disasters without significant help from international agencies. The project was called the Financial Enablers Project and was led by Oxfam, Tearfund, and Christian Aid.
20 Since Typhoon Haiyan, which saw a massive influx of international assistance, the Philippine government has made fewer international appeals for assistance, although bilateral requests from local governments (from region to province to barangay) and agencies are still permitted, so that the UN, INGOs, and civil-society organizations can support the needs of specific local governments and sectors. In recent responses, the national government has requested that INGOs keep a low profile and discouraged foreigners from visiting response areas.
21 Lisa Cornish, “Q&A: Degan Ali in the systematic racism impacting humanitarian response,” Devex, June 20, 2019.
22 Veronique Barbelet, “As local as possible, as international as necessary: Understanding capacity and complementarity in humanitarian action,” Overseas Development Institute (ODI) Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG), November 2018.
23 Tufts University and Oxfam have just published research that gathers local and national actor perspectives on the humanitarian system and LHL. See Sabina
Robillard, et al., Anchored in Local Reality: Case Studies on Local Humanitarian Action from Colombia, Haiti, and Iraq, Boston: Feinstein International Center at Tufts University and Oxfam, January 2020.
24 Gingerich and Cohen, “Turning the Humanitarian System.”
25 See, e.g., Namalie Jayasinghe, Momotaz Khatun, and Moses Okwii, Women Leading Locally: Exploring Women’s Leadership in Humanitarian Action in Bangladesh and South Sudan, Oxfam, forthcoming; Brittany Lambert, Francesca Rhodes, and Mayssam Zaaroura, A Feminist Approach to Localization, Oxfam Canada, 2018; Helen Lindley-Jones, Women Responders: Placing Local Action at the Centre of Humanitarian Protection Programming, Care International, 2018; Tessa Bolton with Jessica Hartog and Melissa Bungcaras, Beyond Caring: Enabling Women’s Leadership in Disaster Risk Reduction by Breaking Down the Barrier of Unpaid Care Work, ActionAid, 2017; Alison Barclay, Michelle Higelin, and Melissa Bungcaras, On the Frontline: Catalysing Women’s Leadership in Humanitarian Action, ActionAid, 2016.