Good Humanitarian Donorship: Overcoming Obstacles to Improved Collective Donor Performance

Good Humanitarian Donorship (GHD) represents an important collective policy initiative by donors to improve the quality of their contributions to the humanitarian system. For GHD’s potential to be realised, its high-level commitments need to be translated into practice. However, obstacles to making GHD an operational reality persist.

• Clear indicators are needed to clarify the roles and responsibilities of donors,
increase the accountability of individual donors and make GHD more tangible
for all stakeholders.

• A collective performance framework in line with the full range of GHD
principles should be agreed between donors. Such a framework will provide
direction for systematic improvements in performance among the majority of
official humanitarian donors, and enable more valuable assessments of
progress in implementing GHD.

• Operational agencies and humanitarian policy advocates need to engage more
actively and collectively with the GHD initiative to enhance implementation by
donors, and to take full advantage of the opportunity GHD presents. Agencies
should advocate for improved donor behaviour against the broad range of GHD
principles