Our data source is the Financial Tracking Service (FTS), hosted by UN OCHA. FTS is a platform that captures contributions to humanitarian responses. FTS doesn’t capture everything. It is a platform that relies on voluntary reporting by organisations. But it is the most comprehensive source of data for humanitarian funding.
Let’s go through what is included, and what’s not included. Included in the analysis on each sector page is funding to this sector under different response plans. These may be Humanitarian Response Plans (HRPs), Regional Response Plans (RRPs), Flash Appeals, or any other type of Plan. Other types of plan could include ‘Needs and Priorities’ in DPRK, or ‘Joint Response Plan’ in Bangladesh for the Rohingya Crisis.
What is not included are pledges – which aren’t actual real world funding until they are turned into a commitment. Also not included is funding outside of response plans. That’s because throughout this page we’re talking about what is required, and what is required is determined by the response plans. Therefore, we’re using the same yardstick for both funding received, and the funding requirement: response plans included in the Global Humanitarian Overview. The list of these plans can be found on FTS on the appeals overview pages for each year.
The funding requirements are taken from the appeals overview pages, from 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 on FTS. Funding requirements can change and we will update the funding requirements every quarter when we update the forecast.
Eagle-eyed readers may notice a difference between the funding requirement, and some of the other numbers, in particular the donut which tells us the probability of reaching the requirement. The funding requirement is one of the inputs into our forecast model, and so we have had to estimate the requirement for each sector, instead of taking the current live requirement on FTS which may not be the final requirement. However, for ease of reading, the current requirement is shown throughout this page.
The funding received is also taken from the same appeals overview pages noted above.
Data used for the graph showing the equity (or in actual fact the inequity) of funding between different contexts was taken from each individual response plan’s page on FTS. The links to these pages can be found via this link. It is important to note that for this graph we are looking at funding by field cluster, which can differ from the global sectors. Everything else on this site examines the ‘destination sector’, as opposed to the ‘destination field cluster’. But we’ve chosen to use field cluster for this graph as that’s how things are defined in the response plans, and what we’re comparing is response plans. Where field clusters don’t map onto global sectors neatly, e.g. ‘Health and Nutrition’, we have not included this field cluster. Where requirements can be added together they have been. All COVID-19 requirements have been added to the cluster’s other requirement. For example, the funding received and funding requirements for WASH and WASH COVID-19 were added together, as they have been for all clusters.
Data for the ‘Key donors’ graph is, like all other data, only funding going to response plans included in the 2020 Global Humanitarian Overview. The data was analysed by looking at the ‘Source Organisation’ to a specific ‘Destination Sector’.
