Jan Kellett is programme leader of the Global Humanitarian Assistance Programme

Humanitarian intervention is not only about the amount of money; it's also about how and where it is spent. Every choice made - to which country and through which organisation, by which mechanism, to which sector of life - has an impact, not only in-country but also well beyond the individual intervention itself.

The Global Humanitarian Report of 2009, by mapping out trends in humanitarian financing, illuminates the sum-total of these choices.

It notes the increase in funding from traditional donor countries, it shows the continued and increased use of pooled funding mechanisms supposedly able to get money more efficiently, cheaply and faster to places and people that are in need.

It also indicates the increased contributions to humanitarian aid from countries not often seen as donors - Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia, South Korea etc - and the substantial resources available to the NGO sector, where public support to some individual international NGOs dwarf many donor country's spending.

The report also highlights the connections between humanitarian aid, chronic poverty and conflict where the same people move from crisis to crisis to crisis, challenging our artificial distinctions between humanitarian and development assistance.

Yet this is only part of the picture. There are still gaps in knowledge. There is for example little known about humanitarian financing within countries in crisis. Government and in particular civil society spending on interventions are poorly counted if they are considered at all by the international community. The importance of remittances sent back home is acknowledged but little has been done to understand how much of that is driven by humanitarian need.

WHAT IS NEED?

Meanwhile that need itself is still a complex area. There are no clear common denominators of what constitutes need and no clear agreements on exactly what is a person affected by conflict or natural disaster, or at least none that translates across sectors and across to other countries.

Without a full and complete picture on humanitarian needs and all the attempts to meet those needs how can we evaluate the choices made within and between countries, how can stakeholders judge how well the humanitarian dollar is spent?

We should look a little closer at those stakeholders too. Information on aid still rarely reaches those who are supposed to receive that aid; it stops with humanitarian policy makers and implementers, donors, the UN, NGOs, and Governments.

Yet surely only by providing the people who are supposed to obtain benefit from humanitarian aid with the information on what they should be receiving can we truly gauge the aid's truth and real value. Such empowerment remains a great challenge.

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