ReliefWeb

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The international humanitarian system is larger than ever in terms of financial and human resources. In 2014 it comprised some 4,480 operational aid organisations with combined humanitarian expenditures of over $25 billion and roughly 450,000 professional humanitarian aid workers in their ranks. And yet it is failing to meet the global demand for humanitarian assistance. The past few years – particularly 2014, with four concurrent major emergencies followed by the Ebola epidemic – laid bare the system’s limits.
The political and security impediments to providing relief to civilians trapped in war-ravaged Syria, combined with glaring capacity gaps in the Central African Republic and South Sudan, have overshadowed genuine humanitarian successes such as the response to Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda) in the Philippines.

Although it has become a cliché for reports of this kind to declare the humanitarian system ‘in crisis’ or ‘at a crossroads’, something new seems to have dawned in the collective understanding of the paucity of the enterprise. Pronouncing the system ‘broken’, as more than one prominent observer has, is not accurate. To the contrary, its financing and institutional machinery continue to improve and attract more participation and support each year. In multiple crises, humanitarians provide aid that supports survival and recovery, and in a far more coordinated fashion than was the case a decade ago. Rather, the problem is that it is at the wrong scale and lacks both the capacity and the agility to meet the multiple demands that have been placed upon it in many crises, while often being hamstrung by external political forces. As a result, too many populations in need of humanitarian assistance remain unreached or under-served. The global humanitarian system as we know it was not deliberately engineered; it evolved largely organically from disparate altruistic endeavours at the local™and international levels. We may have reached the limits of what juryrigging new mechanisms for planning and coordination onto that structure can accomplish.

About the study

The State of the Humanitarian System (SOHS) project is an independent study that compiles the latest statistics on the size and scope of the humanitarian system and assesses overall performance and progress every few years. This edition synthesises the findings of over 350 formal evaluations and other relevant documents, 340 key informant interviews and surveys of 1,271 aid practitioners (including host-government o›cials) and 1,181 aid recipients, covering the period 2012–2014. The humanitarian system’s performance is assessed within its core functions of responding to major sudden-onset emergencies and supporting populations in chronic crisis, as well as its less well defined roles of humanitarian advocacy and support for resilience. This assessment is made based on standard evaluative criteria for humanitarian action (su›ciency/coverage, relevance/ appropriateness, eªectiveness, connectedness, e›ciency and coherence).

The SOHS microsite is available here