Good Humanitarian Donorship

In June 2003, the Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative was launched at an international meeting in Stockholm, Sweden. The meeting involved representatives of donor governments, UN agencies, the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and other organisations involved in humanitarian action.

Government and ECHO representatives at that meeting endorsed Principles and Good Practice of Humanitarian Donorship which set out commonly agreed objectives for, and a definition of, humanitarian action, as well as a set of guiding principles and good practice examples of official donorship.

The recognition that official humanitarian assistance constitutes a distinctive subset of aid policy in donor governments is an historic shift — particularly at a time of increasing trends towards integrating security and aid policy overall. 22 donors now participate in the GHD initiative. Several donors are progressing implementation plans at the domestic level, and OECD DAC members endorsed GHD at the Ministerial level in April 2006. Two pilot studies, funded by GHD donors, were carried out in Burundi and DRC during 2004-05 to identify ways in which donors could better work together and with the wider humanitarian community. In addition, an agreement to support the monitoring of a set of indicators that measure progress against flexibility and timeliness of funding, needs based allocations, and support for coordination mechanisms, has been reached.

The UK currently chairs the initiative, and convenes ad hoc meetings of GHD donor representatives to progress implementation of pilot approaches and dialogue through multilateral fora. A web-site has been established which posts regular updates of progress, and provides a comprehensive list of resources. Click here to access it.

HPG's involvement in GHD to date

Throughout the evolution of the initiative and at its key events, HPG has played an active role in engaging with and observing the process.

Influencing GHD outcomes
The initiative itself and its main conclusions were significantly influenced by the findings of a series of HPG studies (see HPG Report 12, on the changing role of official donors in humanitarian action; and HPG Report 15, on measuring humanitarian need).

Reviewing Progress
Adele Harmer and Lin Cotterrell conducted research to inform the initial GHD stock-take meeting held in Ottawa, Canada, in October 2004. A briefing paper outlining key findings and implementation challenges can be found here.

Under commission from Canada, Adele Harmer in partnership with Abby Stoddard at the Centre on International Cooperation (CIC), reviewed available domestic donor strategies in advance of the 3rd International Meeting on Good Humanitarian Donorship, New York, July 2005. The paper is available here.

HPG's current work on GHD

While donors themselves have devised a range of indicators of progress in line with GHD, these relate almost exclusively to the financing roles of donors. GHD responsibilities, however, extend beyond financing to respect and support for international law, policy and program design to support early recovery from crisis, and support for local capacities to cope with crisis. For GHD to be successful, donors also need to work through these broader set of their responsibilities.

Moreover, operational agencies’ engagement with GHD – as policy advocates and implementing partners – is arguably critical to the success of GHD and the accountability of donors to the GHD framework.

Past HPG research has indicated that advocacy with GHD donors on the part of operational stakeholders is limited, as is consideration of good partnership between donors, and donors and agencies, to ensure good humanitarian outcomes.

Current HPG research, funded through the Integrated Program, aims to inform ongoing donor efforts to guide field based implementation of GHD, and to strengthen the engagement of operational agencies with the GHD initiative. A set of indicators of collective donor progress in line with the endorsed GHD principles, and complementary to the indicators already agreed by GHD donors, will be developed, and included in a briefing paper exploring the challenges of measuring progress in GHD. The indicators and findings will be disseminated in October 2006. A project outline is available here.


Project team

Research Fellow Sue Graves (team leader)

Research Fellow Victoria Wheeler

Research Fellow Adele Harmer