[00:07:55] Damian Lilly: Thanks for having me.

[00:08:39] Damian Lilly: Um, well, we first thought of doing the report when the, uh, Global Humanitarian overview was launched last year. And I think that we felt, uh, along with many that although the humanitarian programme cycle has improved significantly over the years, the confidence in the numbers that it is producing are becoming more scrutinized and more debated. And I think we felt that the process as a whole had seen significantly improved, but really had major flaws and in need of reform. And so that's where we suggested to do this report, to look at this in more depth, to look at the positive parts and the improvements that were made. But also many of the shortcomings that we felt could be addressed. So that was a real kind of genesis of doing this report.

[00:09:48] Damian Lilly: I mean, I think I think it is down to the fact that we have less money. This process is being scrutinized in far greater depth. Obviously, donors and others have always used this products of this process for how they allocate funding, but with much more limited funding. The, um, scrutiny of the numbers has just increased. And I think that's brought into focus some of the shortcomings of the process and some of the parts that, uh, needs to improve. I think that is inevitable. I think the other thing is that, um, it's become increasingly more politicized. So on one level, it was very much dealt with as a technical process for many years, and it was producing figures and numbers that people generally were going along with. But now, given this scrutiny of resources, everything's become more politicized. And I think this is the inherent tension that you can't have a process that is one hundred percent technical if you're save time trying to accommodate a political narrative and present a political, um, uh, version of humanitarian aid. And that's this inherent tension behind it. And I think trying to reconcile that what we found through this research is this increasingly difficult to objectively assess needs, plan according to their needs, and then put a realistic pitch of the financial requirements that were required from donors. There's an inherent tension, and trying to do all those things at the same time inevitably leads to inconsistencies. And that's when all the questions start to be posed.

[00:13:19] Mike Pearson: You know, we start with asking what's the scope. Right. Um, and then we look at, you know, severity of needs. And we look at after that, how many people are in need of assistance. And I think historically it was felt that actually who was in scope, out of scope was probably quite inconsistent across crises. Um, you know, some contexts took a narrow scope, some, um, took the whole, whole, whole country, for example. Um, and so there's been a greater emphasis in recent years on more shock based approaches, shock based analysis. Um, you know, a shock could be, um, a natural disaster, uh, a resurgence in conflict, epidemic, that type of thing. So you can, so, you know, you define who has been affected by the shock, but, you know, defining that scope in the first place isn't always easy. Uh, there could be areas, uh, that sit outside your scope, uh, for example, high food insecurity that might sit outside the scope we had in, in the course of this report, one interviewee, um, say that in one instance, a person ceases to be a person affected if they're an IDP for longer than six months in one context. Um, so there's lots of decisions and judgments that you need to make at that kind of primary level.

[00:15:05] Mike Pearson: Exactly. Yeah. And so there's been more of a emphasis in recent years to provide more consistency to that judgment, to have more kind of shock based approaches. But with the shock based approaches, then that also means that there isn't a shock. Then things might fall outside of that.

[00:17:50] Olivier Singer: Yes. They are changed. Um, for a particular context. So for example, Yemen is, is an example where it is difficult to understand why some areas have had a pin reduction or it's not the max sectoral pin. The actual pin figure is difficult to to understand from the data that is provided. So there is a layer of analytical judgment or expert judgment that is applied to the figures. This, of course then has implications for comparability across time and across geographies, is what you're saying? Yes. Yes.

[00:18:34] Damian Lilly: So if you take maybe one practical example, um, uh, the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is experience, you know, thirty years, it's one of the countries, I think they've had nearly thirty years of these appeal documents. Uh, Democratic Republic of Congo is the size of Western Europe. It has one hundred and twenty million people. And until two or three years ago, the scope of the appeal was the whole country. Imagine the size of Europe. That's where it was deemed. And there are still many people in quite food insecure places, uh, that were deemed potentially in need of, um, a humanitarian assistance. And I think the PIN number came out at something like twenty five, thirty million people two or three years ago. Given the precipitous fall in funding, the decision was made just to focus on three provinces in the East. This is a very small fraction of the country. Now, there were all very good reasons for doing that, given that that's where the greatest needs were. That's where the, you know, the conflict and other problems have been. And we're seeing Ebola and violence there today. I mean, it was clearly a sensible thing to do, but in quite a sweeping, you know, change in the methodology, you could go from, you know, focusing a whole country just to one specific area, even when the situation hadn't really changed, like the number of people who are food insecure was pretty much the same. And if you even look it over, and I worked in, you know, Congo twenty years ago, there was same amount of violence. There was probably the same amount of IDPs. There was the same amount of people who were food insecure. So the challenge of this is that it is very rational. When you have less resources, we need to focus it and define it. But if you do it to such an extent that you make this completely incomparable to what went before, it makes it very challenging. Imagine if you had the, you know, calculation of inflation or some or GDP that is suddenly you changed, you know, the the way that it was calculated from year to year, it one makes the consistency and the numbers difficult in within a conflict and between others. But it also changes quite radically who really might be even deserving of humanitarian assistance in, in the past. And so that's why it's so crucial, the objectivity, independence of establishing these numbers that are transparently made, scrutinized, and trying to take the political element out of it as much as possible.

[00:22:30] Lars Peter Nissen: I really agree with this, and one of the things I find frustrating about this debate is that it is so technical, right? Just think about the way we are talking about it right now. It is very, very difficult to understand. And this is basically what the four of us spent most of our time doing. Right? And still, I don't know all of the intricacies of of different severity levels and whatever, but I just have this sense. I mean, I hear what you're saying about scope that that's a big step forward, that we don't just shoot at everything with humanitarian assistance because there's a, there's a development, um, a protracted development issue. But at the same time, there's also an element here of, of narrowing the scope to an extent where there almost, I mean, we just silence the needs that we can't meet. We shoot the arrow first and then paint the target in a sense or shrinkflation we shrink the problem so it still looks like we're solving it is. I mean, where are we? Are we are we more professional because we now only scope out humanitarian needs and humanitarian situations and don't get into business? That is none of our business? Or are we narrowing the problem we're trying to solve so that it still looks like we're solving it?

[00:25:33] Lars Peter Nissen: So this is the kind of gaps that you're alluding to that kind of is, is becoming much, much more severe now inherent in this is we have, you know, these three questions, identify needs, the planning response and trying to raise money. But actually the bigger question that overshadows all of this actually is what is the limit of humanitarian action and what is the scope of that? And within those few questions, actually, we're answering it by, well, it's whatever we can afford. Right. Um, and therefore that has, that is the tension that Damien's talking about. It's that we're answering that question really through the funding ask, but actually we're trying to do lots of different things at once and we don't necessarily have, um, I think on the needs analysis side or the response planning side, a good way to answer that question. Um, aside from what we can afford, and perhaps we need better ways to answer that question, uh, more transparency in the process so that we know actually, how are we answering that question of where the limits are of humanitarian action? Because at the moment it's very much funding driven. That's what makes my head explode. Right? We have a concept that is called people in need. It's not called people we can afford to help. Right. And, and I think as a community, we have a problem if we're not, I mean, if the if the if the pin number varies according to how much money is there, I, I don't know what we're doing. And I don't know how we can be accountable if, if we we are making the whether we we're supposed to be evidence based. We're supposed to be principled. And if we can inflate and deflate the PIN number, so say, oh, now there are less people in need because we have less money, then I don't know how we can be accountable for the decisions we make and how we prioritize.

[00:30:03] Damian Lilly: Yeah. One of the proposals we make in the report And under each of the parts of the HPC that we analyzed, we go from these more modest changes to the process of the more transformational. But under the pin, the basic thrust is that the PIN number should be sacrosanct. It should be objectively, you know, assessed, it should be calculated consistently, and you should present it in the same way for all contexts. And the only way to do that is to have some level of independence in the way that it's at least, um, analyzed and validated. So clearly each country will have to calculate it, but they should be. And many organizations such as yourself, who are scrutinizing this, why not have some sort of interagency mechanism that would come together to scrutinize these numbers and to make sure that everyone has the trust and to really see there's consistency. And if you take the same parallel, the IPC just on food security, it does that. And it does have an element and it has a famine review committee. I mean, the most serious, you know, times and speak to anyone that's been on that committee, the judgments that they have to make in order to declare someone that's a famine. They're all independent. Uh, you know, there's a whole process under it to, you know, keep its, its independence. And that shows one mechanism that's clearly gone that way because at the moment, having it just led by the UN is also going to lead to criticism by them. And so establishing some sort of independence to it, maybe it's quite radical to completely take this out of the UN and have somebody do it completely separate, which is our most radical proposal, but at least some independent, uh, inter-agency body that was scrutinized. The numbers before they're published would seem like a good step forward.

[00:32:32] Damian Lilly: So I think we in the paper, what we do, we go into, as you say, the planning part of it. And I think the starting point from what we've seen is it's very much a one size fits all approach to planning, that all crises are the same. There's a set template that you put the numbers in. And actually generally what happens is you just look at the last version, you pretty much produce the same, you change the numbers, the years, and you just literally do the same as what you did last year. And, uh, with these one year cycles, um, you never really, uh, establish a planning framework that is really tailored to the context and the different kinds of crises that we see. And so there is, there is a flash appeal process every time you have a quick onset, uh, crisis, but a very acute crisis that we've seen in, you know, Venezuela after the earthquake or even Gaza more recently, is very different from your somalias and your Afghanistans that have been going on for thirty years. And so, um, also this one size fits all and very much, uh, um, um, approach to planning is there's no foresight into it. It takes a situation at the end of a year and plans a response based on that situation, assuming the situation is going to stay the same, which it clearly isn't. And so there's no dynamic dynamism to the, the process to change your plan as the context evolved. And so I think what we tried to say, on the one hand, we are very much champions of consistency and coherence and adopting the same approach. But somehow we we need to have a planning framework which accounts for these. And I think the single most important of it is trying to grade and recognise that contexts are different. And so we would like to see in the same way, I think if you have in, you know, kind of in form or, or other index that all the appeals would be ranked and seen on their kind of severity and how far they're moving towards transition. Because all appeals, their main planning objective is to get out of the country, to transition out and to reach certain benchmarks, to begin to transition. So you could have a system where you could see which which countries are managing to transition, which are not, and also having and this is being proposed by others, this kind of circuit breaker idea, where each year you would reassess what is the posture should you be moving towards more developed, more to peace? Are there different mechanisms that you would bring in? So what we do in the paper is we kind of set out the different parts of the planning framework that actually could kind of change within the appeal system to have this kind of more context, context specific, but more more accountable approach to planning. And of course, the challenge here is again, that on one side, you do need comparability because we are distributing funding at a global level. And so of course there needs you can't be comparing apples and oranges in that sense.

[00:35:52] Mike Pearson: Yeah. So with hyperpolarization, I think you had many of the old assumptions kind of break down. Like Damien said, you would do the same plan, um, from the year before. Essentially you'd tweak a few numbers, but essentially your target numbers, your funding requirements are broadly similar. Um, but then and so your target numbers, your funding requirements, you know, should be what's realistic really for the humanitarian community to do. But then that broke down over the last few years with the funding cuts. And then that question of actually what is realistic and then changed massively again, because the goalposts shifted because the funding was cut. So that's why we now have, in twenty twenty five, a hyper prioritized number in twenty twenty six, a prioritized number, um, which is essentially a second target. Right. Um, which is who do we think we can target? It's essentially a de facto lower bound target. And in twenty twenty six, um, as you can see in our paper, I think that's thirty eight percent of people in need. Um, so I think within this, we obviously shouldn't underestimate the impact of the cuts on the process. And that's obviously jolted the system to think about targeting again. But and I can understand midway through last year, um, with many of the old assumptions kind of breaking down over funding, I need to rethink their targeting. But I think the question is moving forward, do we need two targets? Do we need to prioritize targets, prioritize target and a target target. Um, are they is having two meaningful. Um, especially when you know, the formulas used to calculate them. Not necessarily, um, always followed and standardized globally anyway. So um are these numbers meaningful. Um, I think that would be our kind of um provocative question.

[00:39:30] Damian Lilly: I think one of the other big though challenges of the planning point is around transition context. So with this hyper prioritization that you were speaking to, you know, eight countries were decided that they would no longer be considered humanitarian contexts and will be transitioned out of. And clearly, you know, the massive funding context, you know, something needed to give and some context needed to be removed. Although I think many people and if you look at Nigeria, that's on the list. Situations got worse. Mozambique, where I am, we were nearly on the list. The situation has got dramatically worse. You know, it was done in anonymously, quite an imperfect way. And so that's been one of the consequences. These eight countries, and I think there's another two or three plans that have also dropped out as well, just given a change in the context. And so why these contexts and why not others? And the question I would have is that we need the same. It's not just choosing which countries are, you know, transitioning out everything. Every context. The ultimate goal must be to clear benchmarks to try and transition to something else. That has to be everyone's objective. It's not saying that one country's, that one country's not. And so what you see not only these countries, but you've seen most of it. What you what has been another improvement is there's three standardized objectives life saving resilience, the protection of the general kind of objectives, which again, is uniformity. But the resilience one is almost entirely dropped out. So whereas, you know, a few years ago, supporting IDPs to go home used to be a humanitarian action. As Mike noted earlier, some people are saying, if you're an IDP for more than six months, you're not deserving of humanitarian assistance. That's how much things have changed now. And so the dropping out of all these resilience activities, again, quite an understandable thing to do when you have less money. But now they're not really in the planning thing at all. And two, they are the one kinds of activities that you need to stop the cycle of just constant life saving needs. So, um, it is again, a big dilemma, but it points towards having a different planning framework for transitional settings, of which, you know, nobody's come out with the solution for.

[00:44:06] Mike Pearson: I take the point. Um, but I do think there is that again, just to go back to what we said earlier, the common thread between those different things, right? Whether it be the transition, the resilience, the prioritization, um, understanding needs a scope setting, boundary setting, it all gets back to the same thing. What is, what is humanitarianism, right? And and, and there were decisions made about how to calculate numbers, how to plan, how to coordinate, whether to transition out and whatever those decisions are, they all kind of come back to that same kind of central dilemma. I think we're not in a really good place to really understand that, because a lot of that happens underneath the surface as well, which is, I think, why we wanted to surface some of that with our paper.

[00:45:22] Damian Lilly: Yeah. And that's a very strong message that we have is that basically project the people in need, regardless about whether you can assist them or you think you'll get the money to do it. That's our primary responsibility. And all, you know, our primary responsibility should be to report the needs of people, even if they're not going to be assisted. Otherwise, you know, they have no chance at all. That said, you do have to make a realistic choice to say, what can I do within the money that I am likely to receive, but do that in a consistent way, like having two numbers, a target number and a hyper prioritization is just confusing. Uh, when they're basically trying to do the same thing. And the single most important thing, which is I've been flabbergasted for years, is we spend all our time assessing the needs, planning on it, and we give no attention to actually reporting whether we've done what we said we were going to do. You still cannot see in these plans or appeal documents, reliable figures to how many people was assisting is absolutely crazy that we have a billion dollar industry that costs enormous amounts of money, and yet we cannot say not only how many people's lives are actually, you know, a threat from the crisis. We can't say how many people's lives we're saving, let alone how many people are assisting. And that can't go on. We've got to be much, much better at reporting on the results of what we're doing.

[00:47:14] Mike Pearson: Sure. So one thing we wanted to look at in the paper was, okay, you have prioritization now. You know, um, maybe what that's doing is actually able to help prioritize across crises, right? You know, we saw big differences in prioritization. Um, so for example, over a one year period, we saw seventy seven percent reduction in Afghanistan between targeted and prioritized in Yemen, a sixteen percent reduction, right? So big variation. So you think, okay, maybe the targeting, like changing targeting prioritization is linked to how severe a crisis, maybe we're able to maybe this is actually helping us prioritize globally between countries, but then consider actually in Afghanistan, uh, if you examine the informed severity index, uh, there was no change in the score across that one year period that we looked at despite the seventy seven, seventy seven percentage reduction in targeting, whereas Yemen, sixteen percent reduction, um, actually did see a decline in severity. So I think what we show in that paper, in that chart essentially, is there's no correlation between the targeting change in targeting slash prioritization and the severity of a crisis. Um, now you could also argue that maybe we looked at the wrong thing. Maybe we shouldn't have looked at the change in, In severity, but maybe the absolute severity score of a crisis and the extent to which it's prioritized. But again, um, there isn't a correlation. So, you know, at that global level, cross country, I think there's a question here around the extent to which there's any kind of consistency by which prioritization is being undertaken.

[00:48:53] Olivier Singer: We said, and we work on this index, as you say, you do that every day. And and then you see a graph like this. What's the implication for us? If anything, it makes me want to explain even more the importance of having the index. Because if you look at Afghanistan's inform score over the last three years, um, actually twenty twenty five to twenty twenty six, it did increase by not not greatly, but it did increase even though it's already within the very high severity category. I think it increased by a couple, uh, like naught point one or zero point two. And that's despite the decrease in the pin figure which we have taken from the giraffe. Um, this to me shows the strength of using again a composite index for prioritization ranking because you it shouldn't be based on one sole indicator. We need to look at all the contextual factors and the informed severity index takes, um, what we refer to as impact indicators, which are much more dynamic. That's displacement. That's fatalities. That's the actual population within the affected area as a proportion of the affected area. And then we do take um giraffe data, which I should say is only for about twenty, twenty five percent of the crises within the index. I have to remember it's, it's not, you know, for cat doesn't cover the globe. And then, um, and then also developmental indicators, which are important to also consider within, um, I think response planning. So the, the infrastructure governance indicators. Access the operational environment, health indicators. Those are all within the index, which um allows it to be a strong model and ensures that even if there is a drop in pin, that's not the only indicator that's having an influence on the overall severity score.

[00:51:17] Mike Pearson: So yeah, one thing we've had in our time again is that with that funding requirement, which is essentially the funding ask to the donors, um, you know, is that that is being used to send a specific message, a signal to the donors, right. And there are two schools of thought here. One is the aim for the stars reach the moon strategy. It's like, let's ask for more funding because by doing so, you send the signal, hey, we really need funding here. And then you get more funding. Not as much as you ask for, but, you know, maybe you'll get sixty percent or whatever. The other strategy is a defensive strategy. It's saying, you know, so let's ask for less money in this context because by doing so, you're sending a different signal, which is don't worry, Mr. and Mrs. Donor, you're not sending good money after bad here. We're achieving things. Please continue to fund us and then you get more funding, right? So two different strategies. You ask for more, you ask for less, but both with the intention that you'll get more as a result of that strategy. Uh, but then when you look at the data, as you just said, you know, actually there's no correlation between how much funding you're asked for and how much funding you actually get. Um, so for me, you know, messing with the funding requirement really is kind of a pointless exercise at best. But actually it's worse than that because by messing with the funding requirement, you then create pressure throughout the entire process backwards to adjust the numbers earlier in the process. So I think it's the tip of the iceberg for a whole other set of issues really, when you ask.

[00:56:28] Mike Pearson: I think donors pay a lot of attention to Penn. We know of several donors that use it directly in their humanitarian allocation models. And and I actually think some donors, um, and I think that's a good thing. I mean, what's the whole point of going through this very heavy process if. I mean, yes, the pin figures are helpful. As we said to some extent for sectoral planning, etc. but they are being used in allocation models. Um, however, I guess I would say that to use that as a sole determinant for where you should put your where to put limited resources, um, is shortsighted. And I, and I do think maybe that's not the full story as well is that, um, you know, donor governments of course will look at their humanitarian business cases as well as their development business cases. And that should be a joint conversation because I also think in this whole conversation about humanitarian financing, we also have to talk about the development financing and where where is it meeting? Where is it not meeting? And that should come into the calculus, surely. Um, because I mean, that's the whole resilience debate and a nexus that used to be such a hot topic that I do think has maybe faded into the background a bit because it's just too costly. But we do know that if you stop providing aid and severity to areas, they will become severity. Three and those people need to be captured with either what we call development or humanitarian. But just to say that donors are paying a lot of attention to. But I think perhaps there are other indicators. And this is where I will say the Informed Severity Index does provide at least another indicator that takes in the developmental it takes into the impact, the more dynamic indicators into that calculus, which I do think is very important.

[01:00:58] Lars Peter Nissen: So this has been a really good and really rich discussion. It's also a troubling one because we we are in a situation where this has been on top of the humanitarian policy agenda for fifteen years. We've been working on this for a long time, and it's been a big part of the grand bargain. The a lot of resources go into improving these things, and the sense when you. There are good explanations for why this is difficult. There are good explanations for why things don't work. I still feel like when I take a step back and look at your report, we have to take seriously that that this is just not together. I mean, you use the expression is this useful fiction at the end of, of the report. And as you said earlier, this is not just a theoretical exercise. This has real, real life implications for people in need. And so I, I sometimes wonder why we as a community are not more troubled by this than we actually are. I also want to say that it's easy to sit on a podcast and say all these things and be critical. Right. And it's a critique that I think we need to have. We also need to understand why it's happening. How do we get out of this? I maybe we should ask, I think your three brilliant minds. I think we should ask Tom Fletcher to step aside for a day, and then we nominate the three of you to be IRC for a day, and you then have to come with your solution on how to reform this. We start with Olivier.

[01:06:56] Damian Lilly: Yeah. I think first of all, from, from from my side, I think, you know, we really do very much believe in this. Um, you know, this HPC process, I think, you know, we don't want the report to come across as, uh, overly critical of it. We've looked at this quite a lot. We're fans of it. We think there's been improvements. We just want it to be we think it can be improved. Um, more, uh, we've set out a whole list of, um, uh, options in the paper and we presented drafts of this. And to be honest, there doesn't seem to be a great willingness to make any really major changes to it. And okay, don't go along with, um, you know what we've recommended if you don't like them, but I do think that it needs to evolve more than it's had. I think the second thing is around hyper prioritisation, that that was clearly a logical thing to do when there was funding crisis last year, and it was inevitably what needed to happen. But it's kind of run its course now, I think from the people that we've spoken to. There's an incredible amount of dissatisfaction about it. And in one sense, it's a lightning rod for dissatisfaction about budget cuts. But at the same time, I think people see the limitations in this approach. It just doesn't add up anymore. And so we need to kind of, you know, evolve from that. I think we need to go back into a situation where hopefully the funding will be stable. And we need to present this in a in a different way. Three concrete things that I would propose doing and just repeating some of the stuff we've always said. I think as we've been all saying, the pin needs to be really the, um, the crown jewels that we, we don't mess with and we really invest in that. And I think the only way that that comes about is having this independent mechanism to validate the numbers and using organisations such as yours and, and others are looking at that and doing an inter-agency way that takes it out of just being the UN to validate the numbers. So making the the pin that second and an easy one, I think just don't have two target numbers. I think it's just confusing. Just have one and have it, uh, accept that it's based on, um, uh, funding forecasts and, um, base and plan it around that. Uh, and I think that would be the, the second move. And then thirdly, um, around, um, the transition context, I think the idea, and as you said, there is, there's, there's challenges with it, but I think the gradation of, of, uh, crisis to make sure that there are benchmarks to move into transitional things and seeing these plans, just not as humanitarian plans, really concretely linking them up with what development actors. I think until we do that, we're going to be caught in a vicious circle of providing life saving assistance and never getting out of it. So I think that's the the final thing to crack as well.