The Somalia Humanitarian Fund (SHF) is a multi-donor country-based pooled mechanism created in 2010 to allocate funding for the most urgent life-saving interventions in Somalia. Combining flexibility and strategic focus, the Fund ensures timely allocation and disbursement of resources, enables effective humanitarian action and strengthens coordination.
With the SHF, governments and private donors can channel their contributions into a common, unearmarked fund to deliver life-saving assistance to people who need it most.
SHF funds are prioritized and managed locally. The Fund supports the highest-priority projects of the best-placed responders – mainly international and national NGOs and some UN agencies – through an inclusive and transparent process that meets priorities set out in the Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP). This ensures that funding is available and prioritized locally by those closest to people in need.
The Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia decides on SHF allocations based on strategic prioritization led by the inter-cluster coordination structure and upon the endorsement of the SHF Advisory Board. On a day-to-day basis, the SHF is managed by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
Since inception, the SHF allocated more than $700 million for critical humanitarian response in Somalia, gaining trust from donors due to its distinct comparative advantages – the unearmarked nature of the Fund and its flexibility, its robust and established accountability systems and its integration within the existing coordination systems.
2022 SHF priorities
The Somalia Humanitarian Fund’s (SHF) demonstrate its comparative advantages through the un-earmarked nature of the Fund; its accountability systems; integration within the existing coordination systems; and flexibility, which also allows for a quick deployment or redeployment of the SHF funds in sudden onset situations.
The following principles and priorities are guiding the SHF allocations in 2023:
- Continued emphasis on life-saving humanitarian response with focus on underserved and hard-to access areas and persons as per priority needs as recommended by the Advisory Board on a quarterly basis.
- Ensuring the centrality of protection and accountability to affected people in all SHF-funded interventions paying special attention to women and girls, and people with disabilities.
- Prioritizing direct implementation through international and national non-governmental partners, accounting for at least 95% of available annual SHF funding.
- Supporting local partners as best-positioned responders by striving to channel at least 65% of available funding directly through national partners (if, when and where feasible). The SHF overarching objective remains that funding should be channeled through partners that are best placed to deliver prioritized activities in accordance with humanitarian principles in a timely, effective and impactful manner.
- Continued emphasis on integration of response across clusters by channeling at least 40% of available annual SHF funding to integrated projects while striving for complementarity with other funding sources in support of a stronger collective response.
- Funding enabling programmes and other support services that provide critical security, logistics, and capacity building support to NGOs, up to a maximum of 5% of annually available funds.
- At least 20% of each allocation will be reserved for new partners, contingent on the capacity pf the pool of new partners in allocation priority clusters and areas.