Future Humanitarian Financing: Looking Beyond the Crisis

Future Humanitarian Financing (FHF) is an initiative to bring fresh thinking and expertise from beyond the humanitarian sector to address the growing problem of how we meet the financial costs of responding to humanitarian crises. The daunting scale of the humanitarian funding gap and the seemingly intractable nature of the many well documented humanitarian financing challenges provided the backdrop for a series of Future Humanitarian Financing (FHF) dialogues held in 2014. Those who took part in these cross-sectorevents, however, repeatedly stressed as grounds for optimism factors such as economic growth, increasing global connectedness, new technologies, innovation in financing and business practices and emerging global norms around the need to manage risk and build resilience.

The 'Looking Beyond the Crisis' report represents an effort by members of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Humanitarian Financing Task Team to draw on this spirit of optimism and opportunity to stimulate renewed energy and commitment to resolve longstanding humanitarian financing challenges and to identify new approaches and models of engagement to address the needs of humanitarian crises yet to come. It argues that a fundamental shift in the humanitarian business model is overdue – from a culture and set of practices that tend towards insularity, reactiveness and competition towards an enterprise rooted in anticipation, transparency, research and experimentation, and strategic collaboration. Humanitarian actors need to focus not only on meeting humanitarian needs today but also need to work towards a future in which, wherever possible, international humanitarian response is unnecessary or exceptional, and the majority of needs are met by local actors. Clearly this cannot be achieved with the resources, tools and influence currently at their disposal; it requires long-term vision and strategic alliances with a broad range of actors who can deliver transformative changes to vulnerability and the management of risk. Therefore, in addition to a programme of internal reforms, the report calls for a radical global agenda needed to meet the humanitarian financing challenges of the future, engaging and enabling a far wider system of actors in meeting the costs of managing risk and of responding to post-crisis needs, as a shared responsibility and a public good.

Transformational changes in the humanitarian business model envisaged during the FHF dialogue process include:

• Re-balancing the division of labour to free up limited principled humanitarian financing and response capacity and to collectively share in the burden of meeting an increasing humanitarian caseload;
• Prioritising nationally-led response by investing in building sustainable domestic capacity to respond and removing barriers to access to flexible humanitarian funding for local and national actors;
• Embracing diversity, reconfiguring the existing humanitarian system to reflect the full diversity of financing and responding actors;
• As well as upgrades to the humanitarian system that move towards an enterprise rooted in anticipation, transparency, research, experimentation and strategic collaboration.