A thematic evaluation of multi-year humanitarian funding

Humanitarian aid is largely concentrated in crises that are protracted or recurrent. In 2016, 60% of global humanitarian financing went to just 10 countries. Almost three-quarters of this aid went to long-term recipients (where a crisis has lasted eight years or more) and 86% went to crises that had endured over three years (Development Initiatives, 2018).1 In many of these countries, such as the four studied for this evaluation, crises have endured for decades but humanitarian aid has remained annualised and short term. Despite multiple commitments, development assistance has not filled this gap, remaining largely absent from the most intractable and difficult crises.

DFID introduced multi-year humanitarian funding (MYHF) in 2014 in acknowledgement of these facts.

This report summarises the learning from the thematic evaluation and employs an integrated analysis of separate country and themed studies to identify which factors shaped people’s resilience and how far humanitarian aid was addressing those factors with MYHF.