The impact of Covid-19 means humanitarian funding is being spread more thinly than ever. With the gap between needs and finance continuing to grow, funding from public donors (referring to funding from governments and EU institutions) is not keeping up with requirements.1 In 2020, total international humanitarian assistance failed to grow for the second year running and in light of the ongoing impacts of the pandemic, calls to diversify and widen the resource base of the humanitarian system, including increasing private donor funding, are more relevant than ever.2 Private actors play many different roles in humanitarian response, including as service providers, investors and funders. This briefing focuses on the role of private actors as donors of international humanitarian assistance (rather than of domestic assistance). Private individuals, trusts, foundations, companies and corporations have long been important contributors of international humanitarian financing and have consistently provided more than a fifth of total humanitarian funding every year – more than the humanitarian budgets of the second- and third-largest public donors (Germany and the UK) combined.

Despite the large contributions from private donors, there is a stark lack of data available on who provides it and where it goes, with no systematic reporting of private contributions from either donors or recipients. In an effort to fill this data gap, DI compiles an annual dataset through a survey to recipient organisations to calculate the annual volume of private humanitarian funding, broken down by donor type. We publish this data each year as part of the Global Humanitarian Assistance (GHA) report. While this provides a top-line estimate of the quantity of humanitarian assistance from private donors, it does not provide information on the characteristics of that funding.