OCHA Pooled Funds Complementarity: Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) and Country-Based Pooled Funds (CBPFs)

The Country-Based Pooled Funds (CBPFs) and the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) are some of the most effective ways to ensure that life-saving assistance reaches people caught up in crises. When CBPF and CERF resources are provided to the same contexts, the Humanitarian Coordinators (HCs) at the country level ensure that the resources are used in a complementary and coherent manner as part of an ‘integrated’ approach that engages the comparative advantages of each funding mechanism, thereby maximizing their joint impact. In 2021, the combined allocations by CERF and CBPF were $1.5 billion, with $1.01 billion allocated by CBPFs and $548 million by CERF across 40 countries.

While each context is unique, one or several of the following principles often underpin joint CBPF-CERF allocation strategies:

• Temporal sequencing: CBPF and CERF allocations can support different phases of an emergency response — allowing for continuity in the scaling up of humanitarian services.

• Complementary Fund recipients: CBPF and CERF allocations can fund different recipient organizations in a way that best addresses the overall humanitarian situation, with CBPFs providing most of their funding to a wide network of front-line national and international NGO partners, and CERF focusing on fewer, large- scale grants for direct operational requirements of UN agencies.

• Complementary sectoral focus: Informed by each Fund’s comparative advantage, CBPF and CERF allocations can address needs in different sectors to achieve the desired programmatic coverage.

• Complementary geographical targeting: CBPF and CERF allocations can target different geographical locations to achieve the desired spatial coverage to meet the needs of the most severely affected communities

• Common promotion of global priorities and cross-cutting issues: CBPF and CERF allocations can be used together to reinforce consideration of, and attention to, key themes, cross-cutting issues and good practices recognized by the wider humanitarian community as important to the quality of aid.

The Country-Based Pooled Funds (CBPFs) and the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) are some of the most effective ways to ensure that life-saving assistance reaches people caught up in crises. When CBPF and CERF resources are provided to the same contexts, the Humanitarian Coordinators (HCs) at the country level ensure that the resources are used in a complementary and coherent manner as part of an ‘integrated’ approach that engages the comparative advantages of each funding mechanism, thereby maximizing their joint impact. In 2021, the combined allocations by CERF and CBPF were $1.5 billion, with $1.01 billion allocated by CBPFs and $548 million by CERF across 40 countries.

In 2021, $415 million or 75 per cent of CERF funding went to 15 countries with CBPFs. Examples of complementary use of CERF and CBPF funding are presented on the following pages.