Global Humanitarian Assistance: Non-DAC Donors and Humanitarian Aid - Shifting Structures, Changing Trends

In the past few years the role of ‘non-DAC donors’, a group of donors that sits outside the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) member group, has gained great prominence and has generated much interest within the international development community.
These donors are often referred to as ‘new’, ‘emerging’, ‘non-traditional’, ‘non-Western’ or ‘non-DAC’, but the labels applied to them simplify a very complex and diverse group. The variety amongst the donors that make up this generic group is clear: it includes countries that have previously been recipients of aid (such as Poland) and those that still are (such as Nigeria); countries that respond to disasters domestically (such as India or Turkey); those that host a growing number of refugees (such as Syria); as well as countries that have been contributing to and supporting international development programmes and systems for a number of decades (such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE)), and some of which have been doing so for longer and with larger aid budgets than certain DAC donors. For the purpose of this report we will refer to
this government donor sub-set as ‘non-DAC’ donors, but this is by no means an ideal or an accurate title – many of these ‘donors’ do not want to be labelled as such and instead see themselves as development partners facilitating South–South cooperation.