​This report, commissioned under ALNAP’s Humanitarian Performance Project, aims to provide a system-level mapping and assessment of international humanitarian assistance. To this end, the report 1) defines key criteria for assessing system performance and progress, 2) assesses the system’s performance over the past two years against these criteria, 3) presents new, previously unavailable descriptive statistics and 4) highlights some new initiatives in policy and practice. The research team synthesised the findings of roughly 500 global survey responses, 100 recent evaluations, 89 interviews, staffing and budget information of over 200 aid organisations and a financial analysis of global humanitarian aid flows. The resulting report represents a pilot effort to broadly assess the ‘state of the system’ with the intent, if it is found useful, to repeat the exercise once every two years.

Harvey, P., Stoddard, A., Harmer, A. and Taylor, G.