In new white paper, The ONE Campaign calls for more transparent and standardized reporting of donors’ pledges and disbursements

WASHINGTON – As the outbreak of Ebola spread last fall, and pressure on the global community to contribute to the fight intensified, national governments, foundations, and philanthropists stepped up with aggressive public pledges of support. Keeping track of those pledges and monitoring their disbursement, however, proved difficult and — at times — impossible because of inconsistent, inefficient, and often opaque reporting processes and standards.

That’s the message of a new report from The ONE Campaign, which worked to track pledges and disbursements during the crisis. It was released ahead of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Ebola Recovery Conference, to be held this Thursday and Friday in New York with the goal of mobilizing the resources necessary to accelerate West Africa’s recovery from the outbreak.

The white paper can be downloaded as a PDF here, or found on Medium here.

“One of the most fundamental questions asked during a humanitarian crisis is, ‘how much have donors promised to this effort?’ But in the case of the Ebola outbreak, this question has been incredibly difficult to answer — and that’s a huge problem,” ONE’s Global Health Policy Director Erin Hohlfelder said. “If we don’t know what has really been pledged and delivered, no one can adequately match promised resources to the needs on the ground. That means gaps cannot be easily identified and we risk losing time, resources, and lives.”

“When the world gears up to confront a humanitarian crisis like the Ebola outbreak, generosity has to be paired with accountability,” ONE’s President and CEO Michael Elliott said. “We worked with partners for more than six months to document the pledges made to fight the outbreak so that the world could ensure that those promises were kept. This was literally about saving lives. In this age of unprecedented access to data and technology, surely we can do better. Until the global tools for tracking pledges and disbursements are modernized and made more transparent, we are doomed to repeat these mistakes in future humanitarian crises.”

The report highlights several cases that demonstrated the problems with the current system:

• The amount an individual donor reported frequently varied depending on which source they were reporting to and what was being counted. For example,
  • At one point in April, the amount pledged or contributed by the German government was reported differently by four different tracking systems, and reported amounts varied by almost $100 million.
  • The amount of Ebola response funding reported by the Swiss government on one tracking site actually declined over the course of the crisis.
• Confusion over how to count in-kind contributions and disbursement further muddled the picture. For example,
  • As part of their reported monetary pledges, China included about $30 million in in-kind supplies; the United States and the United Kingdom have included military costs; the Danish and Dutch included the costs of vessels used to transport their in-kind donation of supplies, but not the cost of the supplies themselves.
  • The European Commission’s system is not adequately set up to track disbursed funds, so it reported funds obligated by law, which closely reflected their pledge.
  • The Australian government announced in April – with the outbreak still underway – that it had redirected nearly $8 million of its pledged funds back to government accounts.

“Without clarity around what has been disbursed, it will remain difficult to assess the amount of funds still needed to properly respond to an emergency,” the report notes. “This may result in one of two equally unhelpful outcomes: responders continuing to ask for additional pledges when in reality the funds have already been pledged, but not reported, committed, or disbursed; or, donors believing that funding needs have been met when they in fact have not, leading to overall funding shortfalls.”

ONE’s report calls for the development of a modern tracking system that can collect and dispense unambiguous information about crisis donations, and for donors to commit to supplying more clear and consistent data about pledges and disbursements.

Researchers reviewed the tracking systems utilized after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, finding similar unaddressed challenges. “History has shown that it is easier to repeat our mistakes than to invest in lasting solutions that promote accountability as these crises emerge,” the report notes.