Corporate report

FCDO response to the Independent Commission for Aid Impact review of the UK’s humanitarian response to COVID-19

Published 5 December 2022

This was published under the 2022 to 2024 Sunak Conservative government

The Government welcomes the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI)’s review of the UK’s humanitarian response to COVID-19. Independent scrutiny is critical to ensuring that our humanitarian work continues to maximise efficiency, effectiveness and value for money as we support those who need it most.

The UK launched its central humanitarian response to COVID-19 before the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a global pandemic. By February 2020, FCDO had developed a plan to allocate £218.7 million of COVID-19 focused humanitarian funding. The FCDO directed this to trusted humanitarian agencies, quickly and flexibly addressing the most urgent needs. The UK was the fourth largest donor to the UN’s global appeal and the largest donor to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ (IFRC) appeal for COVID-19. Alongside the central response, individual country teams and departments also pivoted and reprioritised their programmes to deliver a response at the local level.

ICAI’s review highlights the substantial contribution that the UK made to the international humanitarian response; saving lives, reducing hardship and building future resilience. It highlights the FCDO’s rapid recognition of humanitarian need. It notes FCDO’s effective coordination and mobilisation of the international system and choice to provide un-earmarked funding to trusted United Nations and Red Cross partners. This enabled partners to step in quickly to save lives, including procuring essential medical supplies in the context of faltering global supply chains. ICAI assesses the UK response as based on clear and appropriate objectives, well-coordinated, and effectively integrating lessons learnt from past pandemics where possible.

ICAI’s report underlines that the Government’s humanitarian response was delivered in a highly uncertain and fluid context, with limited past precedent to guide the approach. It notes that the response was impacted by reductions to the UK aid budget, requiring rapid and rigorous reprioritisation of resource. The report highlights areas where the use of existing programme channels, while an efficient mechanism, meant that groups made newly vulnerable by the pandemic were not always given priority, acknowledging that there was a lack of evidence on these groups initially. It makes the following recommendations:

1. Recommendation 1

The FCDO should undertake an after-action review of its COVID-19 response, to identify lessons on information management, management processes and programming options, to inform its future responses to complex, multi-country emergencies.

1.1 Response: Accept

The FCDO agrees on the importance of learning the lessons of the pandemic response and embedding them in the approach to future crises. FCDO’s response to COVID-19 included a focus on learning throughout. This has ranged from engagement with the UN on the plans to evaluate the global response, through to lessons work on the individual response tools used by FCDO. Centrally-managed COVID-19 humanitarian response programming has undergone an internal Programme Completion Review.

As the report acknowledges, the humanitarian response to the pandemic was characterised by rapidly emerging and evolving evidence on the direct and indirect impacts of COVID-19. The report highlights concerns around the volume of information being shared with country offices, sometimes without processing and prioritisation, making it hard for teams to absorb. It states that attempts by the centre to gather large volumes of information e.g. through daily updates and data requests, sometimes overwhelmed country teams.

There was limited precedent on which to base programmatic and policy responses. Gathering as much data as possible to build an evidence base was imperative. The uncertainty created by COVID-19’s impact on affected populations, humanitarian partners’ operations and FCDO’s own capacity to operate, significantly compounded the challenges. Information gathering and dissemination processes evolved over time and increasingly took into account the burden on overstretched country teams.

FCDO worked to harness resources within its Research and Evidence Department and more widely across HM Government to translate complex evidence into quality assured and accessible knowledge products, guidance and scenarios. This helped teams grasp the complexities of COVID-19’s indirect impact, consider policy responses, and prioritise the most cost-effective investments. Anecdotal feedback from governments and development partners indicated other donors did not have similar products and these played a significant role in helping influence partner governments’ positions

FCDO’s Humanitarian team engaged in informal quarterly meetings with its centrally funded multilateral partners, covering key areas of learning and challenges. A separate internal review of FCDO’s NGO partners contributed further to learning as the response evolved. This evidence and learning informed the first internal FCDO Annual Review of the COVID-19 response, and to a more limited extent, the second Annual Review (which concentrated on the IFRC COVID-19 response). FCDO continues to monitor for public health emergencies and emerging infectious disease risks, including through the cross-Government Epithreats group. This helps ensure that relevant expertise can be brought to bear quickly in the event of a future crisis.

FCDO is undertaking a range of processes to incorporate learning from the humanitarian COVID-19 response into how it manages emergencies. This includes ongoing organisation-wide work to review crisis doctrine and improve agility; and work to incorporate humanitarian issues into FCDO’s crisis response by default. Lessons on crisis management in complex emergencies and crisis communications were identified through reviews into the FCO consular response and are informing the wider approach to future crises. FCDO will ensure that the issues raised by ICAI in this report are fully considered and incorporated into these processes.

2. Recommendation 2

To fulfil its commitment to localising humanitarian response, the FCDO should make long-term investments in building national disaster-response capacities, including mechanisms for directing funding to local non-state actors.

2.1 Response: Accept

As outlined in the UK’s International Development Strategy (IDS), the UK is committed to unlocking the potential and agency of people trapped in crisis. FCDO agrees that patient development of systems and institutions – including national capacity to manage shocks – is a critical tool in delivering this objective.

FCDO already works to reinforce the resilience of communities and countries to humanitarian shocks, many of which rely on increased support to local non-state actors. A significant amount of UK investment in this area is channelled through the multilateral system. For example, through the World Bank, the UK has helped to strengthen the capacity of countries such as Ethiopia and Kenya to manage shocks. UK support to the Red Cross aims to bolster the capacity of National Societies made up of local volunteers which together constitute the world’s biggest humanitarian organisation. UK investments towards climate adaptation and resilience, health and nutrition, resilient food systems and social protection, all strengthen national capacity to prevent, anticipate and manage shocks. We continue to refine our approach to capitalise on the comparative advantage of local actors, as well as building their capacity long-term.

More widely, the UK is a strong advocate of the Country-based Pool Funds (CBPFs) run by the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). CBPFs provide a swift and effective mechanism for channelling humanitarian funds where they are most needed, with targeting and decision-making at country level. The UK led as the co-chair of the Pooled Fund Working Group between 2020 to 2021, championing a series of successful regular webinars on key humanitarian issues, including localisation. By the end of 2021, CBPFs allocated $977 million to partners, of which $338 million (nearly 35%) were allocated directly to national NGOs.

Through funding of the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), of which the UK is the largest overall contributor since its inception, UN agencies work through extensive partnerships with international NGOs and national/local partners. This ensures greater coordination and enhanced knowledge and capacity.

FCDO also delivers this work bilaterally. For example, through the Building Resilience in Ethiopia Programme, we have supported the Ethiopia Disaster Risk Management Commission with dedicated technical assistance to improve the early warning systems used to inform the distribution of emergency food and cash transfers, and to improve harmonisation between the Productive Safety Net Programme and Humanitarian Food Assistance Programme. The aim of this work is to ensure more timely, well-targeted and harmonised distributions between Ethiopia’s two flagship safety net interventions.

3. Recommendation 3

Building on its past investments in cash-based humanitarian support and national social protection systems, the FCDO should invest in flexible social protection systems which help the most vulnerable in times of shock.

3.1 Response: Accept

The UK is a long-standing champion of strengthening national social protection systems so that they are ‘shock-responsive’ and able to scale-up to help people affected by shocks including droughts, floods, and economic crises. The FCDO has supported the development of shock-responsive social protection systems through advocacy, our bilateral and multilateral programming, research, and technical assistance. For example, during COVID-19 the FCDO established a specific helpline (SPACE) that provided more than 40 countries with expert advice on how to maintain, adapt or expand social protection systems to respond to the economic impacts of the crisis, and guidance on delivering a more efficient, coordinated, and inclusive response.

This shift to national social protection systems being able to flex in response to shocks is part of the FCDO’s approach to humanitarian reform and building national disaster response capacity. COVID-19 accelerated this shift, but it also highlighted that many social protection systems are not yet ready to fully flex, in part because of weaknesses in core social protection systems. As the ICAI report highlighted, social protection payments to groups that were especially vulnerable to lockdown measures were particularly effective where there had already been long-term investments in strengthening social protection systems.

Advocating for and supporting flexible, shock-responsive social protection systems therefore remains a priority for FCDO, alongside continued efforts to strengthen core national systems as a strong basis for helping the most vulnerable in times of shock. For example, in Ethiopia and the Sahel, FCDO is supporting interventions to improve the effectiveness of social protection systems and their ability to flex when needed.