The 2010 Humanitarian Response Index, launched today in Brussels, is an annual report published by DARA that aims to identify and promote good donor practice and contribute to greater transparency, accountability and impact in humanitarian action. It assesses the quality and effectiveness of humanitarian aid and examines the role of donor governments in supporting responses to humanitarian crises.

This year’s report covers donor governments’ response to humanitarian crises in 14 countries. Together, these crises received over 60 percent of the funding mobilised to respond to crises in 2009 and over 50 percent of OECD/DAC humanitarian funding allocations.

The report finds that donor governments have collectively made slow progress towards fulfilling their commitments to the 23 Principles and Good Practice of Humanitarian Donorship (the GHD Principles). It also finds that donors are still not acting in a coordinated and coherent manner and that a more leadership is needed from donor governments to promote good practice.

It is still an open question how to measure donor performance with reporting humanitarian aid flows as there is limited information available. The differences between humanitarian and development aid and the systems used for collecting information on it makes the data difficult to compare. The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) does not exclude humanitarian aid from its remit. In the longer term, we would like to see all aid flows, including development cooperation, climate financing and humanitarian aid included in IATI.