2017 ICT4D Conference

Climate change, population growth, increased urban densities and the complex nature of today’s conflicts, has led to humanitarian crises becoming more frequent and more complicated than ever before.

To keep up with the worsening nature of humanitarian disasters, the way we respond must evolve. When a humanitarian crisis occurs it takes institutional donors an average of 80 days to disperse funds for interventions at scale. Funding is only triggered once a crisis has escalated and hits the front pages of the media. By this stage many lives have been lost and livelihoods destroyed.

Money is available, but the humanitarian industry paradigm about the occurrence of a crisis is still driven by “if” rather than “when” the crisis will happen. Acting early saves lives and costs, and we are at a critical juncture in shifting our humanitarian ecosystem from one of reactive response to proactive anticipation and risk management. Underpinning this are advances in early warning and scientific modelling that allow humanitarians to understand and quantify risks in their areas of operations.

The quantification of risk allows for an increasing number of innovative financial mechanisms that can enable systematic and collaborative pre-planning for disaster response, prediction of funding requirements, and disbursement of funds that are triggered objectively and pro-actively based on a set of humanitarian and crisis profile criteria. Building on this are new financial techniques for risk transfer and financing, such as parametric insurance, which can enable timely funds of sufficient quantity to be pre-positioned and released to enable the critical first phase of response by NGOs in a major crisis.

We will present during this session how risk transfer mechanism -particularly parametric insurance- are transformative of the humanitarian sector, then we will focus on the provision of early warning information with the support of ICT4D solutions and the collaboration between governments and NGOs resulting from this shared information provision, and the contribution to the SDGs.