Duration of funding from donors

There is no commonly used definition of multi-year funding nor agreed duration for funding to be considered “multi-year”. Some donors use the OECD and Good Humanitarian Donorship guidance^[1] defining multi-year funding as that which spans a minimum of two years. However, these definitions are not universally endorsed or used in reporting, and two other main interpretations of multi-year funding emerge: funding that covers at least 18 months, and funding with a duration longer than 12 months.

• Between 2016 and 2018, almost a third (32%) of reported humanitarian contributions were multi-year, while over two thirds (68%) were short-term, based on donors’ own definitions.
• Regardless of the definition applied by donors, 92% of all reported contributions of multi-year humanitarian funding were for a period of 24 months or more.
• Where donors use definitions of “multi-year” for funding with a duration of “more than 12 months” or “more than 18 months”, only 14% (US$922 million) of their total multi-year contributions over the period 2016 to 2018 were for a period of less than 24 months.
• Donors using the two-year (24 month) definition of “multi-year” account for 76% of total short-term funding. This reported short-term funding may capture arrangements with a duration of between 13 and 23 months, however, granular data is not available to gauge the volume of funding of this duration.
• Close to half (49%) of the reported multi-year contributions had a duration of up to 36 months. Of these, 84% spanned between two and three years. However, there remained a significant share of contributions classified as multi-year that were provided for a period of more than two years (17%), but for which the exact duration of the funding was not provided.