Donors play a critical role in the Rohingya response. In 2019, the United Nations appealed for a total of US$650 million for the Rohingya emergency response (UNHCR, 2020). Moreover, the World Bank has provided US$480 million in grants to enable Bangladesh to deal with the Rohingya crisis, adding to the US$100 million the Government of Bangladesh received from the Asian Development Bank (World Bank, 2020).
However, the total level of funding is hard to determine, since many bilateral donors also channel substantial funds through various United Nations agencies.
Without doubt, these are large sums of money, and compared with other crises worldwide, funding for this emergency was stable in 2017, 2018 and 2019, with almost 70 per cent of the requested funding provided under the Joint Response Plan (The Business Standard, 2020). However, when the crisis entered its third year in 2020, there was a noticeable decrease in funding, and many NGOs had to reduce their services, staff and equipment.40 One respondent from an INGO describes the situation in the following way:
Interview 10, representative of an INGO. |
Agencies mostly depend on donor funding, and donor funding is reducing day by day. When we started in 2017, we got around US$300 million for three months, while last year it was more or less US$350 million for a whole year […]. So it is reducing day by day. |
Although funding alone should not prevent NGOs from mainstreaming their activities, many service facilities require remodelling to become accessible for persons with disabilities and a reduction of funds will inevitably delay the achievement of this objective. Moreover, funding for technical support and staff capacity-building of humanitarian actors is decreasing, which further impedes disability mainstreaming. These findings once more highlight the importance of creating an enabling and accessible environment for persons with disabilities from the very beginning of the humanitarian response. Moreover, and perhaps more importantly than the level of funding, the time frames for project implementation are too short for the NGOs to develop a meaningful vision of how to include persons with disabilities into their response. Consequently, some respondents highlighted that they only used data disaggregated by age, gender and disability for reporting purposes but not for programming.41 An interview partner explains:
Interview 28, representative of an INGO. |
In terms of funding cycles, the maximum that you can usually get here at the moment is one year, and that’s when you are lucky. This makes it difficult to implement sustainable, long-term activities. |
As mentioned, many donors make the participation of persons with disabilities a prerequisite for their funding. Yet, it is puzzling how donors expect mainstream NGOs with little experience to invest in capacity-building of their staff, engage in comprehensive needs assessments, develop disability-inclusive action plans and ensure that the activities under the project are inclusive for all beneficiaries with funding cycles of less than a year. In this light, it is hardly surprising that NGOs often only use disaggregated data for reporting purposes, without really mainstreaming disability into their interventions.42 One interview partner elaborates:
Interview 22. |
Your assessment takes a lot of time, then you have also to organize focus group discussions and involve your beneficiaries, collect their opinion and then you have to think about the [inclusive] design, to develop the design, procure the material […]. Basically, [doing this] in nine months, it’s very challenging. |
Donors should therefore recognize that field staff needs time to develop the skills to collect and analyse disaggregated data with the WG-SS and that building knowledge on how to construct accessible facilities requires more than participating in one or two training courses. Increasing the length of the funding cycles to allow sufficient time to build expertise is therefore indispensable if donors want disability mainstreaming to be successful.