The World Humanitarian Summit in Turkey was conceived by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to draw attention to the growing humanitarian crisis. Photograph: Sedat Suna\/EPA<\/p>\n
A deal which will see disaster victims being given cash instead of vouchers or food, and which requires aid agencies to be more transparent and efficient in the way they spend money, is generally seen as the most significant step forward at the UN\u2019s first ever aid summit this week.<\/p>\n
But there was no progress on the growing problem of breaches of international humanitarian law – from bombing of hospitals to fighting in built-up areas – which are leading to horrifyingly high rates of civilian death and injury. And some felt that important opportunities for radical change to the system had also been missed.<\/p>\n
Four years<\/a>\u00a0in the making, the\u00a0World Humanitarian Summit<\/strong>\u00a0– the first time the humanitarian sector has ever come together on such a large scale – was conceived by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon as a way to draw attention to the growing global humanitarian crisis, where global costs have risen from\u00a0$3.7bn in 2004 to $2obn last year<\/a>. But it also aimed to look at the sector itself, generally seen as an ad hoc system evolved for dealing with one-off emergencies and now put under untold strain by the demands of long-running crises like Syria or Sudan over the last decade.<\/p>\n After months of anxiety within the sector that the summit would be a closed UN shop and would bring about little real reform, most admitted to being pleasantly surprised by the\u00a0Grand Bargain<\/a>, a mutual agreement between donors, who will be more flexible and give more directly to local organisations, and aid agencies, who will have to make serious changes to the way they work.<\/p>\n $1bn a year can be cut from aid spending by back-room efficiencies, believes one of the deal\u2019s architects, the EU commissioner Kristalina Georgieva. Speaking to the Guardian, Georgieva pointed out that the big donors and aid agencies had all signed up; \u201cEven more signed up than we hoped for. Now, we need to make it happen. If we don\u2019t reform, shame on us.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is really exciting,\u201d said Charlotte Lattimer, of Global Humanitarian Assistance which tracks spending in the sector. \u201cAt the moment we know very little about what happens to the money after it passes from donors to UN agencies and international NGOs. We know that it is often transferred on to other organisations before it reaches people in need, but lack of reporting prevents us from understanding those transaction chains better. Publishing to IATI on funding given and how it\u2019s spent can begin to transform that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n One of the most contentious issues in the sector has been the unfair distribution of aid, with less than\u00a02% of all funding<\/a>\u00a0going directly to local NGOs despite the fact that, according to relief chief Stephen O\u2019Brien, they take the majority of the risks. The Grand Bargain commits to a target of 25% of funding by 2020, a move described by Degan Ali, head of Kenyan NGO Adeso, as \u201cone of the successes of the whole WHS process.\u201d But she added that \u201cWe need to work to ensure that this target is not static and keeps increasing year on year.\u201d The newly-launched Network of Empowered Aid Response (of which Ali is one of the founders), a global network of local and national NGOs, will aim to keep that pressure on.<\/p>\n