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An article by Cyprien Fabre.

The VEDI dam in Armenia was built in partnership with the Agence Française de Développement and with the support of the European Commission. It will irrigate 3 000 hectares of farmland in the Ararat plain. Photo AFD.

2023 is already a long way off, everything is moving so fast. Humanitarian actors live in an eternal present. It’s cold right now in Armenia or Ukraine, it’s scary tonight in Sudan too, and thirst won’t wait until tomorrow in Mayotte or elsewhere. Humanitarians don’t drive looking backwards, but the OECD does.

All the humanitarian responses around the world involve thousands of individual projects that need to be aggregated to get an idea of the overall amounts, to measure and compare. Once a contract has been signed, the amounts disbursed are recorded by each of the geographical or thematic offices, then put together by a ministry – Bercy for France – and sent to the OECD, which checks line by line that the projects correspond to the definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA), of which humanitarian assistance is an important part.

In mid-January this year, the OECD published the official Official Development Assistance figures for 2023. In 2023, this ODA amounted to USD 223.3 billion, continuing an upward trend that began in 2007. This increase can be explained in part by the 5.9% rise in humanitarian funding.

The largest donors

For ODA in general, and for humanitarian assistance in particular, the concentration remains as high as ever. Firstly, the United States (USD 64.7 billion in ODA, including USD 14.5 billion in humanitarian assistance). Humanitarian funding increased in volume and as a percentage of ODA under the first Trump administration, and it is difficult to predict what will happen from now on even in the short term. Much further behind is Germany (USD 37.9 billion in ODA, including USD 2.4 billion in humanitarian assistance), followed by the European institutions (USD 26.9 billion in ODA, including USD 3 billion in humanitarian assistance). In sixth place, after Japan and the United Kingdom, France was one of the ‘big donors’ in 2023 (USD 15 billion in ODA, but only USD 410 million in humanitarian assistance). A drop in one of the largest contributors has the potential to destabilise the entire humanitarian funding system, as this drop could not be compensated for by the sum of the medium-sized or smaller contributors, if only they were able and willing to do so. The budget announcements for 2024 and 2025, already discussed in previous editions of Humanitarian Challenges, show that this is where we are. The members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC), which brings together the main contributors to ODA, still provide by far the largest share of the effort. Non-DAC donors, i.e. those who are not part of what are sometimes called “traditional donors”, are major contributors to humanitarian solidarity, but the systems in place do not allow for much predictability. In 2023, humanitarian funding from non-DAC donors will be driven by Turkey, which will remain above the USD 5 billion mark for the seventh consecutive year, followed by the United Arab Emirates, which will increase from USD 278 million in 2022 to USD 1 billion in 2023.

French ODA

French ODA is following the same overall trends as the other DAC countries. However, in addition to the overall drop in ODA in 2023, France is characterised by significantly lower humanitarian funding. The recent increase in humanitarian funding is an interesting development, but does not really change the “humanitarian effort”, as humanitarian funding will rise from 2% to 4% of French bilateral ODA between 2022 and 2023, still far behind the DAC average of around 15%. The two graphs below show the nature of France’s ODA and that of DAC countries. (The graphs are interactive here: FR Final 2023 statistics | Flourish)

Source : OECD, FR Final 2023 statistics | Flourish

Where does this aid go? In 2023, Ukraine was for the second consecutive year the largest recipient of ODA and other concessional financing, with USD 38.9 billion, an increase of 28.5% compared to 2022. Ukraine received almost five times more aid from DAC members than the second largest recipient, India. This also applies to humanitarian funding, which, taking all donors together, has increased by 23% in 2023, reaching USD 3.5 billion, the leading global recipient.

Other countries receive substantial humanitarian assistance. Ethiopia (USD 1.6 billion, +6%), Gaza (USD 1.7 billion, +122%), Somalia (USD 1.2 billion, +51%), DRC (USD 1.2 billion, +108%), Sudan (USD 865 million, +19%)

Other countries receive more modest amounts of humanitarian aid, with significant variations in response to the year’s events. Armenia received USD 5 million in 2022, but USD 35 million in 2023. Chad received USD 379 million in assistance, up 119% with the additional arrival of Sudanese refugees.

Don’t forget that 2023 was also marked by several natural disasters in already fragile contexts such as Libya, Syria and Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, Malawi and Tanzania, as well as Morocco and Turkey. In all these contexts, including those that generally receive little aid, humanitarian funding has been substantial.

The central Sahel has remained at similar levels of humanitarian funding, showing that the various coups d’état, while they have had a clear impact on bilateral development cooperation, have had less of an effect on the response to humanitarian needs.

With a 32% fall, Afghanistan remains at USD 1.4 billion, a level of humanitarian assistance that is still well above the 2020 level (USD 562 million). In Yemen, aid has fallen by 16% but remains high (USD 1.4 billion). Few other crisis contexts have seen a significant drop in humanitarian funding. Countries that used to receive little humanitarian aid have received less, with a notable downward trend in Iraq since 2016, and other countries with more established development trajectories (Sierra Leone, Liberia).

Who delivers this humanitarian aid? Financial structures are well established, built by and for actors who have developed mechanisms that enable them to mobilise funds quickly. In 2023, multilateral agencies mobilised half of all humanitarian funds, although the trend is downwards. These same agencies mobilised 60% of humanitarian funds in 2020. The proportion of humanitarian funding mobilised by NGOs remains more or less stable at 28% in 2023.

Since 2021, there has been a noticeable shift towards increasingly significant contributions to resilience projects marked as humanitarian, for example by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) in Afghanistan or Ukraine, on issues of forced displacement or food security. These channels, marked ‘other’ in the graph above, will reach 15% in 2023, compared with just 3% in 2020.

At a time when the classification of projects is not always clearly humanitarian in the “Dunantian” sense of the term, when the long-term and the short-term are intertwined, new players are appearing on the humanitarian finance scene. This trend is set to continue, taking into account the expected decline in traditional ODA and even the conceptual changes underway regarding the very nature of cooperation between countries. It’s best to be prepared.

Cyprien Fabre is head of the “crises and fragility” unit at the OECD. After several years of humanitarian missions with Solidarités, he joined ECHO, the European Commission’s humanitarian department, in 2003, and held several positions in crisis contexts. He joined the OECD in 2016 to analyze the engagement of DAC members in fragile or crisis countries. He has also written a series of “policy into action” and “Lives in crises” guides to help translate donors’ political and financial commitments into effective programming in crises. He is a graduate of Aix-Marseille Law School.

I invite you to read these interviews and articles published in the edition :

Mayotte after the Cylone Chido © SOLIDARITÉS INTERNATIONAL/Michael Bunel

Dear reader, dear friends of Défis Humanitaires,

Please accept my warmest wishes for you, your families and your projects for a wonderful year 2025, for which I propose10 good humanitarian resolutions linked to current and future crises.

At the start of this year, let’s think about Mayotte, Gaza, Ukraine and Sudan, Haiti, Syria and the DRC, the Sahel countries and Burkina Faso, all crises for which 305 million men, women, children and families need humanitarian aid and solidarity right now.

Here is a draft roadmap for 2025 that you can modify, add to and debate.

1. That humanitarian aid be more committed, competent, effective, empathetic, participatory and mobilising with and for the victims of crises. Humanitarians should think further ahead, both to optimise their mission and to broaden their audience and support. Let’s set an example.

2. Humanitarian organisations must work together to ensure that all the financial resources needed to meet the urgent needs of populations in danger are made available each year. Far from resigning ourselves to the situation, let’s argue and influence to reverse the downward trend in humanitarian budgets. Let’s shake things up and convince others to reverse this deadly trend.

Food security in Chad © Solidarités International

3. Humanitarian aid must include in its aid grammar respect for the identity of peoples, cultures, ways of life, beliefs, languages and histories that constitute dignity, especially when everything has been lost. There is a universalism of diversity and a diversity of universalism, far from any levelling. One for all, all for one.

4. That international humanitarian aid and national and local humanitarian aid cooperate actively in a complementary way to add their respective strengths. In the face of hardship, solidarity must first and foremost be local, and the scale of needs calls for international solidarity. Their aim is to create a new humanitarian synergy. Acting together.

5. Humanitarian aid should avoid any simplistic use of the term colonialism. Colonialism generally means the long-term conquest of a territory, its wealth or even power, which is not the same as humanitarianism. On the other hand, condemning colonialism while exporting this or that ideology to other peoples in order to change fragile societies raises a serious ethical problem. Let’s practise discernment.

6. Humanitarian action must be humanitarian, far from any partisan politicisation that is contrary to the principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence that humanitarian organisations claim to uphold. The application of these principles is a major condition for access to populations at risk in the face of the obstacles posed by crises. Humanitarianism is an ethical commitment that must be practised.

7. Humanitarian aid must consider the person in need of help as a human being who is the victim of a crisis (war, disaster, epidemic) and not as a client in a market that would become commercial! Humanitarians act on principle and not out of commercial interest.

8. Humanitarian aid must not become a form of industrial ‘Taylorism’, a mechanical repetition of the same gestures, but a human, empathetic, adapted, participative and evolving response, in order to be effective and accepted and not limited to the simple control of the ‘time sheet’ devoted to the execution of tasks. The real effectiveness is the concrete positive impact on the populations affected.

9. Humanitarian aid must be reactive and effective in emergencies, and must be able to adapt its action as soon as reconstruction becomes possible and necessary, so that development can be relaunched in a peaceful situation. Humanitarians aspire to peace, but peace remains the responsibility of political and military actors, and first and foremost of the belligerents. Everyone must assume their responsibilities and strive for peace.

10. Humanitarian action should focus on major causes such as water, hunger, habitat, health, climate, biodiversity and everything related to the vital needs of populations in crisis situations in order to safeguard their existence in an emergency and in the long term. The legitimacy of the action is based on advocacy.

Installation EAH Solidarites International © Solidarités International/Vincent Tremeau

By way of conclusion.

In 2025, according to Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator with UNOCHA, there will be 305 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, with an estimated budget of 47 billion US dollars for aid in 32 countries. This project brings together more than 1,500 humanitarian partners.

But by November 2024, only 43% of the $50 billion required had been received. Not only is this penny-pinching immoral in an increasingly rich world, but the consequences are disastrous and will come back like a boomerang.

Let’s mobilise today, wherever we are, to ensure that funding finally meets the vital needs of populations adrift and abandoned for lack of essential resources. It’s our duty.

In 2025, together with you, Défis Humanitaires is committed to providing you with the best possible information, depending on our resources. You can personally take part in this humanitarian rescue operation by making a donation here (link here). Your donation is 66% tax deductible. With your donation, we will be more effective together for the humanitarian cause.

I would like to thank you personally for your generosity and wish you, despite the crises, the best possible year for you and for our relief efforts.

Alain Boinet.

Chairman.
Défis Humanitaires. (faireundon)

Thank you for your support.

Alain Boinet is President of the association Défis Humanitaires, which publishes the online magazine www.defishumanitaires.com. He is the founder of the humanitarian association Solidarités International, of which he was Managing Director for 35 years. He is also a member of the Groupe de Concertation Humanitaire at the Centre de Crise et de Soutien of the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs, and of the Board of Directors of Solidarités International, the Partenariat Français pour l’Eau (PFE), the Véolia Foundation and the Think Tank (re)sources. He continues to travel to the field (Northeast Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh and Armenia) and to speak out in the media.