For more details on Methodology click here. For more details on terminology click here.
All graphs on this page are interactive, hover over them to see more.
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.
How much funding is the Emergency Shelter and Non Food Items (NFI) Sector forecast to receive in 2022?
Funding to the Emergency Shelter and NFI sector is forecast to be between $902m and $1222m in 2022. Our central estimate is $1014m. For reference, the Emergency Shelter and NFI sector received $466m last year.
This forecast is based on our 95% probability range. In other words, we are 95% sure that funding will be in this range. Below are the other forecast ranges for the Emergency Shelter and NFI 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 $988m and $1099m.
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 Emergency Shelter and NFI sector will reach 25% of the funding required in 2022, but there’s only a remote chance of reaching 50%.
How does the 2022 forecast compare to previous years?
Our forecast is that the Emergency Shelter and NFI will receive between 27% and 37% of the funding requirement. But our central estimate is that there will be $1041of funding for the sector. This would be nearly double last year’s number.
This leap in funding would be a huge departure from the steadiness of the sector in previous years. Funding fluctuated between $427m and $466m between 2016 and 2021.
On the whole, however, Emergency Shelter and NFI is actually the most stable of all sectors in terms of funding received. Stability of funding received is no bad thing. However, it does mean that funding to the sector is growing less than the growth of all humanitarian funding. In the table below, the column on the right shows the difference between these. Notice how Shelter has grown less than all humanitarian funding for the past five years.
| Year | All humanitarian funding growth | Growth in the Shelter and NFI Sector | Difference |
| 2017 | 21% | 1% | -20% |
| 2018 | 5% | 2% | -3% |
| 2019 | 16% | 0% | -16% |
| 2020 | 9% | -3% | -6% |
| 2021 | -5% | -8% | -3% |
Furthermore, since 2017, the sector has also had a growing funding requirement. In fact the combined funding of 2017 to 2020 would still not have been enough to meet the 2020 funding requirement. In 2017, the funding requirement stood at $1.4bn, growing to $3.3bn by 2022. The stagnation of the funding received versus a growing funding requirement equals a growing funding gap – 81% in 2021.
In this story, we’ve defined a real humanitarian recession as two consecutive years of a growing funding gap. Currently, the Emergency Shelter and NFI sector has experienced two consecutive years of negative real growth, in other words: a growing funding gap. So what are the odds of the sector that the sector will stay in a humanitarian recession and experience a third year of a growing funding gap?
We think that it’s almost certain that the sector will experience real growth (closing the funding gap) in 2022, whilst there’s only a remote chance that the sector will experience a real recession.
How does the 2022 forecast compare to other sectors?
Compared to other sectors, we think that the Emergency Shelter and NFI will rank ‘mid-table’ at 6th of 16 sectors. The central estimate is $1042m, just ahead of Education in 7th place.
The current state of things
The Emergency Shelter and NFI sector recorded $466m in funding in 2021 which is more than any other year, and it looks almost certain that the sector beats this again in 2022. By the end of December 2022, funding to Shelter and NFI sector nearly reached the levels of the whole of last year ($888m so far this year), and nearly double the same point in previous years ($463m last year).
Looking at how funding has flowed to the sector over the past three years, we can see how similar it is each year. This is slightly unusual when compared to other sectors, and reflects the stability of the sector as noted previously. 2021 similarly tracked the path of recent years, albeit at a slightly lower level.
Features of the Emergency Shelter and NFI Sector in 2021
The average funding requirement was only 19% met in 2021. This isn’t great, and it benchmarks below average compared to other sectors (the median is 24% across sectors). Within the sector, there are some success stories. Colombia achieved over 100% of its requirement (703%), and the Afghanistan Flash Appeal (101%), Libya (78%), Mali (60%), and oPt (53%) all received over 50% of their requirement.
However, the number of success stories is outweighed by the number of sectors without adequate funding. Most contexts didn’t even receive 25% of what they asked for. One question this raises is: why is there such inequity in funding across contexts? What factors influence whether a country receives less or more funding? We will soon be producing an inequity index to measure this. Perhaps a context receives a small amount of funding for the sector only because the overall appeal isn’t well-funded. Alternatively, perhaps the inequity reflects the size of the funding requirement, with smaller funding requirements likely to be more funded due to the smaller overall amounts required? We’ll go into further detail on this in the Stories section in the future.
The Emergency Shelter and NFI sector is a very diverse sector in terms of funding: no one donor contributed more than 14% of the sector’s overall funding. The top donors to the sector in 2021 included ECHO (14%), the US Government (14%), the Central Emergency Response Fund (13%), the German Government (9%), and the UK Government (5%). These donors contribute 55% of the sector’s funding in total. There are also another 64 donors contributing around 45% of funding to the sector.
We can try to calculate just how diverse the sector is using the Herfindahl Hirschman Index. On a scale of 0 to 10,000, a sector is unconcentrated and competitive with a score under 1,000 or 1,500. The Emergency Shelter and NFI Sector has a score of 761 indicating an unconcentrated sector.
One potential benefit of the diversity in funding sources is that the sector may be more resilient to shocks. Indeed, the stability of the sector as noted above may have something to do with its wide donor base. Another implication of the diversity of funding sources is that programme quality may increase due to lack of monopoly in the sector. This is less testable, however.
On the recipient side of things, two UN agencies dominate: IOM and UNHCR. More than 50% goes to these two UN agencies, followed by ‘Other’ (in other words we cannot tell exactly where that funding went), NRC, and UNRWA.
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).
