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        *AID POLICY: Reaching out to "emerging
donors"<http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=94011>
*

  [image: lead photo]DAKAR, 19 October 2011 (IRIN) - Guyana, Thailand,
Botswana, South Africa, Poland and Sudan share something in common: they all
committed to the Horn of Africa drought
appeal<http://fts.unocha.org/pageloader.aspx?page=search-reporting_display&C...>.

Higher up the scale, with multi-million dollar pledges, were China (US$63
million); Saudi Arabia ($60 million); Brazil ($32 million); United Arab
Emirates ($17 million) and Qatar ($5.6 million).

Non-DAC donors - countries that are not members of the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development's Development Assistance Committee -
reported $622 million worth of humanitarian assistance in 2010 and
contributed 6 percent of total reported humanitarian aid between 2000 and
2008, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA) Financial Tracking Service <http://fts.unocha.org/>.

When it comes to all types of foreign assistance, non-DAC
donors<http://www.globalhumanitarianassistance.org/report/non-dac-donors-and...>are
collectively estimated to have given $60 billion in 2010, according to
aid watchdog Development Initiatives; and the UN estimates non-western
donors provided almost 10 percent of overall aid in 2008. South-south trade
meanwhile, accounted for more than a quarter of global trade in 2008.

*Growing influence*

Though many non-DAC donors' aid pots are still relatively small (India
reported just $36.5 million in humanitarian aid in 2010), amounts grow
annually (in 2000 it gave $200,000); their economic clout is growing (India
is tipped to be the third-largest global economy in 2020), and many are
shunning the stigma of "recipient-only-status", says Shoko Arakaki, chief of
funding coordination at OCHA.

But the power of these new donors extends beyond money. As well as being a
significant donor to Haiti in 2010, Brazil wielded influence by leading the
UN Stabilization Mission for Haiti (MINUSTAH). The government plays an
active role in global disaster preparedness, such as the International
Strategy for Disaster Reduction and Global Facility for Disaster Reduction
and Recovery (GRDRR), according to Germany-based Global Public Policy
Institute (GPPi <http://www.gppi.net/>).

The influence of these donors is likely to grow further, says Claudia Meier,
public research associate at GPPi, and could reshape coordination and
accountability bodies, such as the DAC, which have to date remained
relatively "closed". Of the emerging donors only South Korea has joined DAC.
It has also joined the Good Humanitarian Donorship
Initiative<http://www.goodhumanitariandonorship.org/gns/news-events/overview.aspx>alongside
Poland, Brazil, Estonia and Lithuania - the GHD is reaching out to
Turkey, Croatia, United Arab Emirates and Singapore to join.

Some emerging donors shun membership of these structures as they have not
been part of their establishment, said Meier, who wrote Humanitarian
Assistance: Truly Universal? <http://www.gppi.net/?id=1819>, which analyzes
entry points for collaboration with non-western humanitarian donors.

Brazil cited this as a reason for not joining the DAC. Many prefer regional
coordination bodies, says GPPi, such as the Association of Southeast Asian
nations (ASEAN), the Organisation of the Islamic Conference or the League of
Arab States, which are "taking a more active role in [humanitarian]
coordination".

As Karin Christiansen, head of Publish What You Fund (PWYF), told IRIN:
"Both the system and the donors need to change. Emerging donors might drive
this reform. Ultimately, the more people in the tent, the language will have
to change."

Other likely changes are the growing influence of consortia and pooled
funds, into which donors - both traditional and not - are putting
increasingly large amounts, says deputy funding director at Oxfam, Suzi
Faye.

Relief organizations from emerging economies are also likely to develop more
of an international humanitarian role, said Meier.  "Maybe an Indian NGO,
the Chinese Red Cross, the Red Crescents of the Gulf States [will emerge].
they are not fully there yet, but there are lots of signs of their
professionalization," she said.

*Opportunities*

Opportunities arise with donor diversification, said Kerry Smith, researcher
with aid watchdog Development Initiatives. Emerging donors often tend to be
recipients and providers of aid, and thus have a better understanding of the
needs and constraints facing developing countries in emergency response.
India has sophisticated disaster management systems after decades of
disaster response, and has helped shape those of Pakistan and Afghanistan -
two of its largest aid
recipients<http://www.gppi.net/approach/research/truly_universal/india_and_human...>
.

These donors often tend to stress a more equal, solidarity-based
relationship, rather than the traditional top-down donor-recipient dynamic,
said Smith. As Brazil said: "[The Brazilian government believes that]
development cooperation is not limited to the interaction between donors and
recipients [and] understand[s] it as an exchange between peers, with mutual
benefits and responsibilities."

Many non-western donors do not distinguish short-term humanitarian aid from
longer-term "development aid" - perhaps because they know the distinction to
be blurred - which could help plug the gaps in the usually under-funded
relief-to-development continuum.

Further, tapping into aid from "new" sources can in some circumstances
increase aid agencies' access to those in need - most aid workers agree that
humanitarian space has shrunk over the past two
decades<http://www.odi.org.uk/events/details.asp?id=2646&title=humanitarian-s...>
.

    <http://www.irinnews.org/photo/Details.aspx?ImageId=201110190802060296>
Photo: US Air Force/Master Sgt. Jeremy Lock
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/mateus27_24-25/5749883846/> Brazil leads the
UN Stabilization Mission for HaitiFor example, India is one of the few
humanitarian donors in Afghanistan that is not involved in the conflict; in
Myanmar, many western-backed NGOs found it hard to respond to Cyclone Nargis
but those working with ASEAN donors were able to intervene more quickly,
partly because of its long-term relationship with the Burmese authorities.

Non-western donors may also take a more sensitive approach to respecting a
country's sovereignty, say analysts. India puts sovereignty at the heart of
its humanitarian response policy, having refused an onslaught of aid after
the 2004 tsunami. In future, aid agencies will need to pay greater attention
to "non-intrusive support", wrote Randolph Kent of the humanitarian futures
project, in Death of
Hegemony<http://www.humanitarianfutures.org/content/death-hegemony>
.

"When western agencies rolled up after the Sichuan earthquake in China, the
Chinese told them flatly they were not needed. Generally, greater
sensitivity to regional culture, gaining real knowledge of what is wanted by
governments and communities in disaster-prone regions and building contacts
in those regions well before another humanitarian disaster, is the way in
which the west can continue to play an international humanitarian role -
rather than the presumption that it is wanted and needed."

*Reaching out
*
As the donor picture shifts, aid agencies are starting to build new
relationships, but too slowly, said Meier. "Not enough dialogue is going on
yet."

One exception at a policy level is the UN-based humanitarian dialogue
platform, chaired by Sweden and Brazil, which tries to "bridge the
artificial donor-affected population gap and to discuss humanitarian
assistance among all states on a consistent basis", said Meier.

Some UN agencies have also been fairly active at forging relationships with
new donors, say analysts, including World Food Programme, the UN Children's
Fund, and the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which respectively
received 2.5 percent, 1.7 percent and 3.6 percent of their humanitarian
funding from non-DAC donors in 2008, after significant reach-out -
particularly to Gulf donors.

OCHA, which coordinates the Emergency Response Fund, Country Humanitarian
Fund and the Central Emergency Response Fund, has made a big effort to reach
out to new donors, said Arakaki - and the results are starting to show.

The ERF and CHF have increased their donor bases in the past 15 years, with
40 donors, including Brazil, UAE and Mexico, Nigeria and Gabon among the top
10 contributors to the Haiti emergency Response Fund, she said.

The CERF is even more diverse, with 140 donors in 2010. Unique to the fund
is that 40 of its donors are also recipients. "The more new members that
come on board, the more of an example it sets... Donors also realized
today's donor can be tomorrow's victim," said Arakaki.

The draw of such pooled funds to some emerging donors is ease: they can
write a cheque and OCHA does the rest. "Many of them want to identify the
simplest mechanism to give money as quickly as possible," said Arakaki.

This is particularly true for governments that do not have the legal set-up
to administer and track foreign funding. The law in Poland, for instance,
means it can take up to three months to disburse money to a national or
international NGO; thus the government finds it much easier to give to
pooled funds or UN agencies and the International Federation of the Red
Cross, according to Development Initiatives' Smith.

The amounts are still small, however: 90 percent of CERF funding in 2010
still came from the same "traditional" 10-12 donors.
*
NGOs catching up*

Whether it is murky entry points for dialogue, emerging donors' penchant for
pooled funds, or a host of other reasons, NGOs appear to be behind UN
agencies in reaching out to new donors. Most of the big international NGOs
are building relationships: World Vision for instance, fund-raises in
Thailand, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia and
Chile through its country offices, according to spokesman Christopher Weeks,
and the South Korea and Taiwan offices now donate funds, rather than receive
funds, he said. But the numbers remain small.

Gulf donors contributed just $1.5 million to Oxfam's $473 million annual
budget, according to Faye. But building relationships with these donors is
still important. "Rather than just going after money, we are trying to build
real partnerships, as well as seeing how Oxfam can influence them on a
policy level."

GPPi acknowledges the challenges involved in finding "entry points for
dialogue": many emerging donors - such as South Africa - do not have
separate development ministries to administer aid; Brazil has a fragmented
aid system, with no legal framework to regulate, monitor or evaluate aid,
according to the Overseas Development Institute, while the aid motivations
of India remain largely unknown.

There is "great variance" in donor transparency, according to PWYF's
Christiansen: Estonia is "extremely transparent" at one end of the scale,
while China is "not as murky as everyone thinks", she said. PWYF will be
releasing a report on emerging donor transparency in November. For those
donors still honing their humanitarian and development financing systems:
"There are benefits to setting up good transparent systems from the
beginning... If you have to retrofit, then it is much harder," Christiansen
says.

For relationships to work, emerging donors need more respect, a
representative from one emerging donor's foreign aid ministry told IRIN in
Dakar: many of them have been giving aid for decades without being noticed,
he said. Meier added: "They all of a sudden have been discovered as cash
cows, while still not getting a say in international governance."

The DAC still does not include China, Russia, Saudi Arabia or Brazil, and no
meeting ground exists for all donors to discuss humanitarian assistance
other than the annual UN General Assembly and the Economic and Social
Council (ECOSOC). "This reinforces the idea of aid being part of the western
agenda," said Antonio Donini, researcher at Tufts University's Feinstein
institute.

An NGO, One.org <http://www.one.org/>, has called on emerging donors to join
existing coordination structures. But Christiansen says these structures
themselves need to change to be more welcoming to new members. She hopes
forging a mutually respectful dialogue between aid agencies, new and
established donors, will be on the agenda at the aid effectiveness
conference <http://www.aideffectiveness.org/busanhlf4/> in Busan, South
Korea in November.

"Things may get messier before they become clearer, but it is already
incredibly messy - we need a bit less hubris, and a bit more action," she
said.

For more on aid policy, visit IRIN's in-depth: The rise of the "new"
donors<http://www.irinnews.org/IndepthMain.aspx?reportid=94004&indepthid=91>

aj/mw

Read report online <http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=94011>
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