Funding the frontline: How an Oxfam Emergency Response Fund facilitated local humanitarian action

This research examines the viability of the Emergency Response Fund (ERF) in enabling more direct funding to local actors so they can better prepare and shape their own response actions when disasters caused by natural hazards strike (as currently designed, it is not applicable in certain contexts such as large-scale humanitarian emergencies and conflict situations). From 2014 to 2020, Oxfam America embedded an ERF in three projects in donor-funded, multiyear disaster risk reduction (DRR) programs in Asia-Pacific and Central America.

The following recommendations from the research findings apply to the wider humanitarian sector and call for addressing key challenges and taking advantage of opportunities:

•  Address the challenge of transboundary disaster management.
• Explore anticipatory finance.
• Rethink the development-humanitarian divide.
• Rethink layered risks and hazards and local emergencies.
• Include learning.
• Fund women’s rights organizations (WROs) and gender interest organizations (GIOs) directly.