Diversity in donorship: the changing landscape of official humanitarian aid: Aid donorship in the Gulf States

Over the past decade, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of
official donor governments in financing humanitarian action. Whilst analysis, for
the most part, has been limited to significant members of the Development
Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development (OECD), over the past few decades a number of non-DAC donors
have become increasingly active in responding to a range of international
humanitarian crises.

This background paper is one of three regional studies on the role of non-DAC
donors in humanitarian action. It explores the role of the Gulf States as official aid
donors, and looks in particular at the humanitarian aid programmes of Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as three of the largest official
donors in the Gulf. The case study will inform HPG’s research project on the
growing diversity of official donors in humanitarian action.