In recent years, as a result of natural disasters, there have been steady increases in the need for humanitarian services worldwide, compounded by rising food prices, the global financial crisis and increasing urbanization. Political conflict has also made increasing numbers of people reliant on humanitarian assistance. The number of people reported to have been affected by natural disasters doubled to more than 300 million between 2006 and 2010.
In accordance with its mandate, contained in General Assembly resolution 46/182 and subsequent resolutions, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has succeeded in positioning itself within the international humanitarian system as the convenor and facilitator of a range of important coordination tools for international humanitarian advocacy and response, including cluster coordination, the Consolidated Appeals Process, pooled funds and response preparedness initiatives. It has overseen a sizeable increase in funding for humanitarian crises. The total number of deployments of OCHA staff and partners from the four surge mechanisms managed by the Office rose nearly tenfold between 2006 and 2011. Moreover, OCHA has been instrumental in marshalling the most recent humanitarian system reform process, known as the “transformative agenda”, within the Inter-Agency Standing Committee.
At the same time, OCHA is central to a complex and multilayered humanitarian assistance structure of stakeholders and interventions, yet it lacks real authority to coordinate. The exercise of its mandate is dependent upon the trust and goodwill of actors who hold individual mandates, have more specialized technical competency and who often are in competition for visibility and scarce funds. The United Nations system partners are also often much larger in size and have more senior people positioned in the field.
There is a need for more clarity on where the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ unique value-added and comparative advantage lies, at both the global and country levels. The Office of Internal Oversight Services makes one critical recommendation: the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs should work closely with its partners in the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, the International Strategy for Disaster Reduction and its secretariat (United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction) and the United Nations Development Programme, in particular, to further clarify and articulate the respective roles and responsibilities of the Office and its partners in the Inter-Agency Standing Committee involved in response preparedness and disaster risk reduction work.
Other recommendations are aimed at strengthening the ability of the Office to deploy and sustain appropriate leadership resources to field operations; further developing the plan for addressing the collective aspects of accountability envisaged in the transformative agenda; and improving the monitoring of the emergency response funds, common humanitarian funds and Central Emergency Response Funds, including establishing clear performance reporting, monitoring of fund usage and project effectiveness evaluation frameworks for each fund.