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Last Updated 8th February 2023.
This page will be updated with new forecasts for 2023 soon.
In the meantime, read on below for the last forecast for 2022.
Mine Action is a Protection “Area of Responsibility” (AoR). This means that it is not a designated global cluster like other sectors, but is an ‘Area of Responsibility‘ under the Protection cluster. This is similar to the Child Protection, Gender Based Violence, and Housing Land and Property sectors. However, unlike Child Protection and Gender Based Violence, there isn’t a clear ‘before’ and ‘after’ in the funding data in 2018 where the sector becomes ‘visible’. For these other two AoRs, data pre-2018 is unreliable and very small. However, for Mine Action, this is not really the case (at least pre-2017).
How much funding is the Mine Action sector forecast to receive in 2022?
Funding to the Mine Action sector is forecast to be between $132m and $178m in 2022. Our central estimate is $153m. For reference, the Mine Action sector received $54m last year.
This forecast is based on our 95% probability range. In other words, we are 95% sure that funding will be between $132m and $178m. Below are the other forecast ranges for the Mine Action sector. As we become less sure about our forecast, the range narrows. So for example, we think there’s a 50% probability that funding will be between $145m and $162m.
But we need to put this into context. What does the forecast mean in terms of reaching the funding that is required for the sector (also known as the funding requirement)? The total funding requirement globally is determined by how much is needed in each context. Given that we don’t have the information yet we have projected the funding required for 2022 and compared that to the funding forecast. If you hover over the donut below you’ll be able to see the chances of reaching 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of the funding that is required.
We think that it’s almost certain that the sector will receive 25% of funding required in 2022, but highly unlikely that it will receive 50% of what is required. The funding requirement is $332m – which is higher than any point in the last six years. This high requirement will make it difficult for the sector to half of what is needed in 2022.
How does the 2022 forecast compare to previous years?
Funding received by the Mine Action sector has fluctuated quite a bit in the last six years. Indeed, funding received had been in a cycle of ‘increase then decrease’. The sector is one of the more volatile in terms of funding received. Most other sectors with large changes in funding received mainly have an upward trajectory, with increases year-on-year (apart from Emergency Telecommunications).
However, we think that the sector will outperform previous years in 2022. We think that funding will be somewhere between 40% and 54% of the funding requirement.
The Mine Action sector funding requirement has increased over the last few years. The requirement rose to a six year high of $332m in 2022. Yet, the funding requirement is quite low compared to other sectors. Sectors with low funding requirements tend to be more volatile as they are dependent on a fewer number of contexts. Thus, if one context includes a funding requirement in one year, but then doesn’t in the next year, it has a greater impact on the change in the funding requirement.
What’s most remarkable is that there was no funding gap in 2019. This is a great achievement, and is one of only two times in the 2016 to 2020 period where this happened, the other being Emergency Telecommunications in 2017.
This also isn’t the first time we’ve mentioned the Emergency Telecommunications sector. It could be that sectors with a low amount of funding, i.e. below $100m, share similar characteristics: fewer contexts, thus more volatile funding requirements, more volatile funding into the sector, but also more likely to hit the holy grail of 100% funding requirement met.
Given that the sector opened up a big funding gap in 2020, which continued in 2021, the question is whether this will continue for a third year running? We’ve defined two consecutive years of a growing funding gap as a ‘real humanitarian recession’ in this story. Therefore, with two years already of a growing funding gap, will the Mine Action sector stay in recession?
We think that it’s almost certain that the sector will experience real growth this year (closing the funding gap), with only a remote chance of a continuation of the humanitarian recession for the Mine Action sector in 2022.
How does the 2022 forecast compare to other sectors?
We’re fairly sure that the Mine Action sector will rank 14th of the sectors in terms of funding received in 2022. The sector is fairly low value (in monetary terms) compared to others. It’s quite unlikely that funding will drop as low as Emergency Telecommunications.
The current state of things
Funding to the Mine Action sector by December this year had reached $125m – over double the amount it had received at the same point last year. This is slightly unexpected – especially as previous years seem to follow a similar trend over the year. Whilst it is tempting to posit that this could be a front-loading of funding by donors given the crisis in Ukraine, the graph shows that funding to the sector was higher at all points in 2022 (not just after March). Could this all reflect a higher equilibrium of funding for the sector?
In regard to previous years, we can see that 2018 and 2020 are actually quite aligned in terms of funding received, and how funding progressed throughout the year. 2019 and 2021 look aligned, until we look at the ‘final’ figure. Was 2019 an anomaly? Could it be that the base level of funding for the sector is the 2018 and 2020 level, and 2021 fits into that range? We’ll have to wait to find out.
We will update this graph throughout the year for 2022, but don’t expect funding to pick up until the second half of the year. When we look at previous years, funding is normally quite flat for the first six months of the year, and starts to pick up properly in July.
Features of the Mine Action sector in 2021
The average Mine Action response was funded at only 12% of what was required in 2021, which isn’t great. Five contexts failed to report any Mine Action funding – despite requiring funding.
In terms of successes, one context received over 100% of the funding requirement (oPt Flash Appeal), and another three contexts received over 50% of the funding requirement: Colombia (68%), Libya (60%), and Afghanistan (55%).
This begs the question: why are some contexts more funded than others? Is it just year-on-year variation, donor preferences, underreporting, or something else? We’ll explore this in more detail in the future in our Stories section. We’re also currently working on an “Inequity Index” to measure the extent to which a sector is unequal – stay tuned!
One noticeable feature of this when we compare to other sectors is that there are only 18 identified funding requirements for Mine Action in 2021 on FTS. This is far fewer than many other sectors (Food Security had 46 requirements in 2021), and still fewer than Mine Action’s “AoR” cousins, Child Protection and Gender Based Violence (43 each).
The Mine Action sector is not hugely diverse when it comes to sources of funding. Around two-thirds of all funding came from just three donors in 2021, namely the Governments of the USA (34%), Germany (23%), and Norway (11%). Other contributors included the Governments of Canada and Switzerland, and the Yemen Humanitarian Fund.
It is notable that some of the most significant donors in the previous year, such as the UK Government, appear much smaller in the diagram above. This highlights the instability of the funding system as donors change from year to year, thus increasing volatility in the sector.
We can measure the diversity of a sector’s funding by using a metric called the Herfindahl Hirschman Index. On a scale of 0 to 10,000, a sector is highly concentrated with a score over 2,500. Mine Action has a score of 1,846 indicating a moderately concentrated sector. One implication of the lack of diversified funding sources in the sector is that it is not that resilient to shocks. The coronavirus pandemic was undoubtedly a shock to many actors and sectors, and the funding received to the sector has declined on 2019 levels.
In terms of those receiving funding, specialist Mine Action agencies receive much of the funding. This includes the specialist Mine Action organisations: HALO Trust (38%), UNMAS (14%), CCCM – a Colombian Mine Action organisation (13%), and MAG (7%).
2021 Forecast
Last year’s forecast can’t yet be judged against what the reality was as the 2021 numbers aren’t ‘final’ yet, despite it being 2022 already. It varies year-to-year, but there is still a non-trivial amount of funding that is logged after the end of the year. Therefore, we can’t really judge last year’s forecast until some point later in 2022. It’s at this point that we’ll do a post-mortem on our 2021 forecasts and see how well we did.
Methodology
The usual health warning: 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.
For forecast methodology, click here. We’ll be keeping a record of all our forecasts and success over time, which you can find here.
To find out methodology and sources for other things on this page which aren’t the forecast, click here.
Note: Numbers in ‘The current state of things’ graph may differ from elsewhere on the page as the data was extracted on a different date (13th January 2022) than other numbers that also show how much was received in 2022 (e.g. the column chart).
