International aid and the media: Improving the effectiveness of aid allocations

The number of people around the world in need of humanitarian assistance is escalating rapidly - driven by protracted conflicts, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the effects of climate change. Unfortunately, donor governments' willingness and ability to maintain even current levels of humanitarian spending is under increasing strain due to growing populist political forces in many donor countries, alongside deepening global economic uncertainty. As a result, since 2010, UN humanitarian response plans have, on average, only had 60% of their funding needs met.

There are also huge disparities in the amount of funding different humanitarian crises receive. For example, in 2020, some UN appeals were almost fully supported, such as for Iraq (92%) and Lebanon (84%). By contrast, there was relatively very little financing for crises in Zimbabwe (26%) and South Sudan (10%) - leading to significant cuts to food rations.

Our previous, award-winning research demonstrated that news coverage is one of the key factors shaping government's inadequate and unevenly distributed aid budgets. It also revealed two specific misperceptions and knowledge gaps within aid bureaucracies that negatively affect their decision-making. First, we found that sudden-onset, national news coverage can divert aid spending towards certain countries - even when the level of unmet need does not require it - and that this is driven by the misperception that mainstream news coverage is a reliable indicator of public support for aid spending. Second, our research revealed that policy makers are often unaware of specialist humanitarian news organisations, which provide more up-to-date, in-depth, and contextualised information that would help them to make more needs-based aid allocations. Such specialist coverage can also be used strategically by policy makers to resist unwelcome political pressure to deviate from needs-based aid allocation decisions. Unfortunately, specialised humanitarian journalism is chronically under-funded and would therefore benefit greatly from further financial support from government donors themselves.

In this project, we aim to correct these misperceptions and knowledge gaps and thereby contribute to ensuring that humanitarian aid is spent where it is needed most. We will achieve this by disseminating our research findings amongst senior policy makers within at least twelve of the largest government aid donors, over a twelve-month period. We will engage with them though a combination of private meetings, public presentations, and multi-stakeholder workshops. This is possible because of our significantly expanded professional networks within this field, including with key UN agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) - which have longstanding relationships with all major donors.

To help us to explain our research findings to policymakers, we will produce a range of creative resources including a co-produced video and policy brief, and several infographics and illustrations. These will be designed in collaboration with our steering committee to help ensure their suitability. These materials will also be disseminated widely via our existing networks, online presence and an open-access Future Learn course.

We are very confident in our ability to achieve our planned impacts as we have already successfully influenced governments' aid spending as part of another recent research project. We have also already helped to persuade private foundations to increase their support for specialist forms of humanitarian journalism - without compromising its independence - as part of the original project. We did not target government donors within our original research project because, at the time, we did not anticipate how relevant our findings would be for them nor have sufficient means to access them.