ReliefWeb

Executive summary

This report presents a system-level mapping and analysis of the performance of international humanitarian assistance. The pilot report on the State of the Humanitarian System (SOHS) was published in 2010 and focused on the years 2007 and 2008. This report includes descriptive statistics from the following two years, 2009 and 2010, and reviews performance assessments from 2009 to the end of 2011, comparing findings from the two periods.

The ‘international humanitarian system’ is defined here as the network of national and international provider agencies, donors and host-government authorities that are functionally connected to each other in the humanitarian endeavour and that share common overarching goals, norms and principles. The system also includes actors that do not have humanitarian assistance as their central mission but play important humanitarian roles, such as military and private-sector entities.

This report covers recent developments with those actors as well, and for the first time includes the perceptions and perspectives of some humanitarian aid recipients, through fieldbased surveys in four countries.

It reviews the considerable amount of work undertaken by the humanitarian system since the pilot, against a backdrop of heightened stress caused by rising fuel and food prices, the growing challenges of urbanisation and climate change and a charged geopolitical environment. Although the massive impact of the disasters in Haiti, Pakistan and Somalia over this period may stand out in the headlines, the humanitarian system also engaged on an enormous scale across a range of chronic conflict-related contexts such as Afghanistan, Sudan and South Sudan and DRC. Other crises, such as the conflict in Cote d’Ivoire, received much less attention and only a fraction of the resources.

You can also watch the 90 second animated video to find out more about the report's key findings.