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Inklings | The angst over ‘prioritisation’

Notes and musings on how aid works, from The New Humanitarian’s policy editors.

The header image for the Inkling's newsletter entry of 31 October, 2024. On the top left you see Inklings written in a serif font with an ink bleed effect and underlined with a burgundy-coloured line. On the bottom right we see a list of the main topic: The angst over ‘prioritisation’

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If a trade show can be a temperature check for an entire sector, then humanitarians appear to be running a fever about one thing: money.

This is another edition of Inklings, where we explore all things aid and aid-adjacent unfolding on the front lines of emergency response, or in a boxy convention centre beside Geneva’s airport.

It’s also available as an email newsletter. Subscribe here.

Today: Budget boundary-setting, UN leadership and race, and imagining Donald Trump as a localisation evangelist.

On the radar|

‘Something has to give’: What do you prioritise when everything is a priority? That’s the rhetorical question humanitarians have been asking for the past year. Under pressure from donors and the UN’s humanitarian coordination arm, OCHA, aid planners last year scrimped, scraped, and squeezed back their yearly demands for response plans in 2024 to about $46 billion. Terms like “prioritisation” and “boundary setting” entered the humanitarian lexicon. The assignment was to tame budgets by trying to limit what emergency aid would do. The sector is in the midst of the same painful exercise for 2025, and the discussions are as angsty as ever. “If we’re going to say there is less money coming in, something has to give,” said Hazel De Wet, UNICEF’s deputy director for emergency programmes, speaking at a panel during the AidEx trade show in Geneva last week.

  • Doing less with less: Those doubling down on prioritisation say tough choices must be made when donor funding is limited. Others say it over-emphasises what’s considered “life-saving” at the expense of other crucial programmes. The same types of things get cut whenever budgets are tight: safeguarding against abuse and exploitation, emergency education, and gender, for example. Concentrating on only the most dire hunger needs also means kicking the can down the road for tens of millions of people facing slightly less severe hunger. And some worry broad scope-setting exercises will simply see real needs go uncounted. “We don’t do more with less,” De Wet said. “We just do less.”

  • New money: So if the usual donor governments aren’t fully funding emergency response, then more cash must be found elsewhere, right? That was the vibe behind AidEx side events on innovative finance. Sessions on blended finance, public-private partnerships, innovative fundraising, and scaling finance in crisis settings were on the menu, drawing a few finance-curious humanitarians. But there’s no quick fix. Blended finance mixes the usual grant-based humanitarian money with funds from other sources – the private sector or development banks, for example. It has been used to fund infrastructure projects in so-called fragile settings, and shows promise for more. It’s the kind of model that might help address longer-term needs across the elusive nexus – building wastewater systems in a difficult environment, for example. But its biggest cheerleaders also say it’s not a solution for underfunded humanitarian appeals – in other words, the emergency aid that planners are struggling to prioritise now.

  • ‘Most aid workers don’t look like me’: If not more money, then what? Making aid more predictive and more locally driven are often floated as answers. But as the last analysis by Development Initiatives (#RIP) noted, less than 1% of humanitarian funding went to so-called anticipatory action. As for shifting power: Several AidEx panels continued the dubious tradition of not having any local NGOs at the table. This included the aforementioned “prioritisation” session, which saw panellists paper over the awkwardness by spending 10 minutes or so talking about the importance of local humanitarian responders rather than the subject at hand. “Most aid workers don’t look like me,” said Erik Abild, the new director for humanitarian assistance at Norway’s newly reorganised development agency, NORAD, during a separate solo appearance. But at AidEx, and plenty of other aid forums, most panellists do.

Donald Trump and localisation: Parts of the world are gritting their teeth for the results of the US presidential election on 5 November. What would a second Trump presidency mean for crisis response? Some have been turning to the Project 2025 “presidential transition project” for clues. Often described as a right-wing wish list, the manifesto was published by the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank. Chapter nine has the pertinent bits for aid. There are the attacks on perceived progressive policies (USAID, it claims, has an agenda that “promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism”), which are leading to real fears of a return to rights-denying restrictions on aid funding. There are also lines that extol the virtue of localisation, which, the foundation’s Max Primorac writes, “correctly assumes that more funding through local organisations produces better aid outcomes”. Of course, that narrative is based purely on cost and efficiency, rather than the equity and decolonisation elements that local aid leaders say are just as crucial but often missing from global discussions (and from institutional policies).

German aid and localisation: We know Germany’s humanitarian funding outlook looks “grim”. What about its new humanitarian strategy? An analysis by the Berlin-based Centre for Humanitarian Action says there are some “cautious steps” toward locally-led action. But it’s still “outsourcing” risk and responsibility for localisation to international NGOs and others – a common complaint. And the old power imbalances are baked in: “Local knowledge and leadership are not fully trusted or even entrusted with independence,” research fellow Darina Pellowska writes. “Local actors are rather framed as participants who require support and oversight.”

Data points|

35%: Research from the team behind the Blue Smoke newsletter looks at race and senior UN appointments. Eleven of 31 people appointed to lead 10 key UN bodies since 2007 have been “non-white people”, according to the research, which was launched in September. Four of the 11 are Chinese men appointed to lead the Department of Economic and Social Affairs – typically dominated by China under the UN’s not-very-hidden horse-trading convention. Of course, the total doesn’t include the October appointment of Briton Tom Fletcher as UN relief chief (and OCHA boss). So make that 11 of 32? “There remains a concerning lack of racial diversity in UN senior leadership positions,” the report’s authors write.

End quote|

What if artist Marina Abramović could improve those frustrating coordination meetings? No talking; just silence. Maybe some intense eye contact.

“…”

The next best thing, at least if you’re OCHA, might be these Abramović-signed prints commemorating her “participatory work” leading attendees at June’s Glastonbury festival in seven minutes of silence. Prints are £275 a pop. Proceeds go to the OCHA-managed CERF pooled fund.

Similar collabs with Yoko Ono have raised about $430,000. The fund has an annual target (mostly aspirational) of $1 billion, which adds up to roughly 2.8 million Abramović prints (and 37 collective years of silence).

Have any tips, recommendations, or indecipherable acronyms to share with the Inklings newsletter? Get in touch: [email protected]

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