Since 2007, the first year of the Humanitarian Response Index, DARA has been sending research teams to the field to collect comparable information about the overall  response to humanitarian crises, with a specific focus on the OECD/DAC donors’ performance. The responses to a questionnaire in hundreds of face-to-face interviews feed the construction of the annual donor ranking, the main analysis and individual donor assessments. Examples of relevant good and poor donor practice are extracted from the internal reports our field teams elaborate after each field mission and aggregated into the overall picture.

Here you will find a group of case studies of the response to humanitarian crises included in the HRI 2011. During 2011, our field research teams spent 54 days interviewing 328 humanitarian organisations in Chad, Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Kenya, the occupied Palestinian territories, Pakistan, Somalia and Sudan. While the HRI field research visits are of short duration (one to two weeks), the scope of the research and the variety of organisations interviewed allow our teams to gather invaluable information about each humanitarian crisis and response. A large part of the field teams work  feeds into the larger process of analysis of donor performance and trends in how the humanitarian sector is working. Much of this information never goes public. Nevertheless, the opportunity to share what we were told by humanitarian partners in the field is an opportunity too good to be missed. For us, these crisis analyses are a token of gratitude to all those humanitarian workers and organisations that thought meeting the HRI teams – in some cases, for the second or third time – was worthwhile. We hope they find the crisis analysis a fair reflection of the difficult contexts where they work, their not-always acknowledged efforts to help those in need and their ideas for the common effort of improving the quality of humanitarian aid.
(click on the map or click on the name of a country in the sidebar on the right):