Even as overall humanitarian funding rose to a record-high of $28 billion in 2015, an Oxfam report, using the context of the last year’s El-Nino phenomenon affecting vulnerable economies and the impact aid response to it had, makes it clear that parts of the aid system simply don’t work. Despite the mandate to prevent human suffering, humanitarian funding must wait for the aftermath of a crisis—a flood or the El-Nino linked famine—to kick in while development funding is not naturally geared towards short-term action. Humanitarian response must wait for visuals of starving children or flooded homes—by which time, the damage is too extensive for it to remedy—before it is put into action. On the other hand, development funding is always projected over the mid- to long-term and has inflexible terms of usage guiding it. Thus, global aid’s efficacy under-delivers, with millions of vulnerable people perpetually falling through the gaps.
This is why Oxfam and the World Bank are pushing for an Early Response system that envelops both humanitarian aid and development funding in a manner such that there is rehabilitation of wells, rather than water-trucking, in drought-prone areas and the focus is on community-driven nutrition programmes, rather than therapeutic feeding centres. Otherwise, it would remain an unfortunate system—one that an Oxfam official likens to ‘a fire-brigade passing the hat before being able to respond to a fire.’
