Making available start-up funds to NGOs and UN agencies, and
Making funds available to NGOs and UN agencies in cases of rapidly changing circumstances and humanitarian needs where gaps need to be filled and other donor mechanisms are not immediately available.
To date Emergency Response Funds have been used in Angola, the DRC, Indonesia, Liberia, Somalia, and Ethiopia, among others.
Characteristics of the funds include:
Ensuring that humanitarian needs are addressed in a collaborative spirit, fostering understanding and coordination within and between clusters and humanitarian organisations;
A set limit on maximum funding sourced from the ERFs for a specific project (however in some cases there have been exceptions);
Majority of the funds are used for NGOs;
Cluster leads and advisory boards are used in the selection processes to advise the Humanitarian Coordinator whether to provide funding or not.
A recent review of ERF’s by OCHA highlighted that "If humanitarian response is categorised into immediate response to a new emergency, addressing on-going needs and post-crises recovery, ERFs have provided greatest added value in the middle phase, by filling a range of gaps in humanitarian response, increasing humanitarian access and enabling NGOs to scale up their activities."
For more information and recommendations from the January 2007 Humaniatrian Funding Workshop report, please click here.