In 2015, OCHA and its partners estimated that 125 million people needed humanitarian assistance. What if those 125 million people were a single country in need? What would its development profile look like? Taking into consideration all crises with an appeal lasting a year or more and the corresponding indicators, this infographic presents an estimated development profile of the country in need.

Conventional wisdom argues that humanitarian action mostly takes place in conflict situations. An oft-quoted phrase that attempts to support this argument is that 80 per cent of humanitarian action takes place in conflict situations. The origin of this argument can be traced to a financial statistic used in the report of the Secretary-General on strengthening the coordination of humanitarian assistance of the United Nations (A/69/80): “Between 2002 and 2013, 86 per cent of resources requested through United Nations appeals were destined to humanitarian action in conflict situations ($83 billion out of $96 billion).”

In 2015, the conflict in Afghanistan continued to cause extreme harm to the civilian population, with the highest number of total civilian casualties (deaths and injuries) recorded by the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) since 2009. Conflict-related violence increasingly harmed the most vulnerable people: in 2015, one in 10 civilian casualties was a woman and one in four was a child. Overall civilian casualties increased by 4 per cent in 2015, compared with 2014. UNAMA documented a 37 per cent increase in women casualties and a 14 per cent increase in child casualties.

Under international humanitarian law, parties to armed conflict must respect and protect medical staff, facilities and transports, as well as the wounded and sick. The parties must take all feasible precautions to verify that targets are legitimate military objectives, and to choose weapons and tactics so as to avoid and minimize incidental harm to medical personnel, facilities and transports, as well as the wounded and sick. Unfortunately, respect for the rules of war has been eroding over the last few years, with the number of deaths and injuries of medical staff increasing, as well as the number of facilities attacked.

Women, girls, men and boys all suffer in a crisis, but women and girls face greater challenges and risks to reaching their full potential and leading safe, healthy and dignified lives due to structural gender inequalities. The capacity, knowledge and impact that women and local women’s groups consistently display in a crisis is also rarely recognized, supported or enabled due to these structural inequalities. The World Humanitarian Summit emphasized the importance of achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment and called forgive core commitments to achieve this: empower women and girls as change-agents and leaders; ensure universal access to sexual and reproductive health; implement a coordinated approach to prevent and respond to gender-based violence; ensure that humanitarian programming is gender responsive; and comply with humanitarian policies on women’s empowerment and women’s rights. This infographic provides baseline information on each of these commitments to illustrate the enormous challenge moving forward: beyond political will to realize gender equality, there will need to be tangible investments if gender equality and women’s empowerment is to become a reality in humanitarian crises.

Gender-based violence (GBV) crimes have devastating immediate and long-term effects on the lives of survivors and their families, altering the development and future of their communities. There is wide recognition that GBV against women and girls increases during conflict, including domestic violence, sexual violence and exploitation, and child marriage. Men and boys also experience sexual violence, especially in the context of detention and torture.

People move from their country of origin for many reasons: family, in search of better economic prospects, to flee conflict and violence or for professional advancement, among others. People who leave their country in a predominantly voluntary nature are considered international migrants, to be distinguished from refugees and IDPs. Refugees have a specific legal status, while IDPs are forced to leave their homes but stay in their country of origin. However, these categories are not as rigid as they appear. International migrants sometimes leave to escape situations of extreme deprivation, casting doubt over how ‘voluntary’ their move was. A person may also be considered an IDP, refugee

Currently, over 1 billion people globally are living with a disability, 93 million of whom are children. Differences exist among developed and developing countries, but people with disabilities suffer from a lack of care or access to services. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted in 2006, provides that States shall take all necessary measures to ensure the protection and safety of people with disabilities in situations of risk.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides an ambitious 15-year vision that aims to leave no one behind and reach those furthest behind first, including those affected by humanitarian crises worldwide. In order to deliver on this, the Secretary-General, ahead of the World Humanitarian Summit, called on humanitarian and development actors to adopt a new way of working that transcends humanitarian-development divides to achieve collective outcomes, over multi-year timeframes and based on the comparative advantages of a wide range of actors. A collective outcome is the result that development, humanitarian and other actors want to achieve in a particular context at the end of three to five years as installments towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Data are changing the face of humanitarian response, providing unprecedented opportunities to innovate and better assist affected people. The Secretary-General, in his report One Humanity, Shared Responsibility, called for humanitarian action to be driven by shared data and analysis. Accurate data is crucial in humanitarian response. Data contributes to planning

Traditionally, the provision of humanitarian assistance has relied on grant mechanisms, i.e., a transfer made in cash, goods or services for which no repayment is required. However, in an age where humanitarian needs and funding requirements are increasing due to crises that are crossing the billion-dollar mark, humanitarians need to get creative about funding, using loans, grants, bonds and insurance mechanisms. This shift also requires donors to be more flexible in the way they finance responses, including giving longer-term funding. And it requires aid agencies to be as efficient and transparent as possible about how they spend their money.

One of the commitments in the Agenda for Humanity is to reinforce local systems, including by investing in local capacities. Local organizations face significant barriers to access international funding. In this context, country-based pooled funds (CBPFs) are an agent of change in the fulfilment of commitments to greater localization of aid. CBPFs promote the equitable inclusion of local and international actors in the collective prioritization, programming and delivery of humanitarian assistance, which is critical to ensure context-appropriate interventions. CBPFs leverage the comparative advantages of local and national NGOs, such as their proximity and access to affected people; knowledge of the territory; culture; language; social networks and dynamics; understanding of needs; and likeliness to remain on the ground after the emergency.

The World Humanitarian Summit (Istanbul, May 2016) was a pivotal moment for the global community. Ahead of the Summit, the Secretary- General, Ban Ki-moon, put forward a new Agenda for Humanity, calling on global leaders to stand up for our common humanity and reduce human suffering. The Agenda consists of five Core Responsibilities and 24 transformations that are needed to achieve progress to address and reduce humanitarian need, risk and vulnerability.