Cover note to the Second Year evaluation of the Flagship Initiative (April 2025)

Response to, and recommendations based upon, the second annual external learning report and two years of supporting the Flagship Initiative countries by the OCHA Headquarters Flagship Initiative Support Team

THE HUMANITARIAN SYSTEM WE HAVE

1. There are longstanding frustrations with an ever more costly, heavy and bureaucratic system that works for, but not with, affected people. i We need to move from delivering our own mandates to delivering outcomes people want, ones that save lives and make them better. We need to move from supplying goods to getting people back on their feet. We need to work with development agencies as part of a wider aid system. And we need to make response more sustainable by handing ownership, capacity and agency to local communities.ii
2. Humanitarian aid saves lives and alleviates suffering, but we often end up providing costly emergency assistance for years on end. In 2024, 91 per cent of funds requested for humanitarian response were in protracted crises (defined as a response lasting five years or longer), compared to 29 per cent in 2014.iii We inefficiently and expensively supply short term goods in chronic situations. “People do not want to be aid reliant,”iv but "fewer than half of [aid recipients] globally think the assistance they receive enables them to live without aid in the future.”v According to GA Res 46/182, OP40, “emergency assistance must be provided in ways that will be supportive of recovery and long-term development.”vi
3. The system assesses itself based on the cost of aid delivered and number of people reachedvii with limited effort to understand the impact of such aid, and whether or how it contributes to better outcomes.viii “The system is judging itself on its own terms, given that it is still not routine practice in evaluations to directly and systematically ask recipients whether the aid they received was relevant and appropriate.”ix With the lack of impact assessment comes limited accountability to communities and their priorities.
4. At a time when resources are declining, the humanitarian system remains heavy and siloed.x Our structures place humanitarians at the center and push affected communities and their priorities to the periphery. The system of clusters encourages humanitarians to deliver to their mandatesxi rather than to needs identified by affected people. The planning and funding system promotes competition between agencies, with self-preservation serving as a barrier to reforming this supply-driven model.xii
5. While humanitarian need increases, funding is not able to keep up. Funding for 2024 HRPs was only 45.5 per cent of requirements by the end of the year.xiii The recent cuts to humanitarian assistance by the US have unprecedented consequences for the humanitarian sector and the lives of affected people. Other major donors are also cutting foreign aid budgets. As an immediate measure, we are re-prioritizing the 100 million people in most urgent need of assistance (revised down from 189.5 million people targeted and 305.1 million people in need). This retrenchment comes after prioritizing tightly in 2023 and 2024 amidst declining donor contributions.xiv
6. Donors are looking for more efficiencies and impact. There is simply not enough money to work through heavy multilateral channels as international humanitarian partners are being defunded. Donors are no longer willing to fund a heavy cluster system and are calling for more efficiencies and joined up approaches.
7. We need to go back to getting “tasking” from the hardest hit by crises. Our presence is concentrated in capitals, far from the most vulnerable people. We need to move away from a process-driven to a people-driven system that is closer to communities, even in hard-to-reach areas. While there are technical challenges to moving staff to subnational level, it is often our own administrative and bureaucratic hurdles that push us away from the most vulnerable and hard to reach.
8. We need to re-evaluate where and why an international presence is needed and work more through national and local actors. Operational paragraph 39 of GA Res 46/182 explicitly states that the resident coordinator “should promote the use of all locally or regionally available relief capacities.”xv We need to move to a lighter, more agile and more contextualized model in crisis contexts that can be scaled up and down as needed.