In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) a crisis of ongoing and protracted displacements and underfunding is forcing humanitarian actors to compromise on quality and coverage, making it harder for displaced people to rebuild their lives.

Armed conflicts, intercommunity conflicts and natural disasters continue to push millions of people in the DRC to flee their homes. According to a recent overview of humanitarian needs (from the UN humanitarian agency, OCHA) more than six million people are currently displaced within the DRC.

Many people are living in makeshift shelters and informal settlements, with limited access to drinking water and no education for their children. To meet these needs, the inter-agency humanitarian response plan for the DRC focuses on two main objectives: saving lives and improving living conditions for affected people. This approach aims to meet the most urgent needs, while strengthening resilience and fostering the link with development and peace-building efforts. However, this ambition is thwarted by the challenge of funding. Rather than aligning with these strategic objectives, the responses are shaped by the nature and level of available funding.

This article aims to outline the extent to which funding allocated to the shelter sector, which is by nature emergency-oriented, limits the ability of humanitarian actors to ensure access to decent, dignified housing for displaced people.

Underfunding and persistent gaps in the humanitarian response

The DRC is facing a situation of persistent crisis, with needs that continue to increase while funding does not keep up, or even decreases, year-on-year. The UN-based Financial Tracking Service data shows that over the last three years, less than 60% of the funds required to cover the DRC humanitarian response plan have been received. The shelter sector is one of the least well financed with only 30% of funding received in the same period.

The multiplicity of crises around the world has reduced the capacity of the main donors to honour the principle of needs-based funding. This has increased the gap between humanitarian needs and available funding for many countries. The volume of funding is also influenced by international media coverage of the crisis, providing an incentive for action. Finally, many donors choose a strategic set of countries on which to focus their sustained interventions, and these choices are often guided by historical links, geopolitics and national interest.

Assisting an increasing number of people with limited and decreasing funding is one of the main challenges faced by humanitarian actors in the shelter sector. This challenge is made even more significant because the ongoing conflict can cause multiple displacements that lead to renewed crises and plunge people back into precarity or vulnerability, even after they have been assisted.

To cope with this challenge, humanitarian shelter actors have opted for a prioritisation approach, focusing on those people who have been displaced in the last 12 months and in areas where there are at least two other crises such as epidemics, food insecurity or malnutrition. So, an area severely affected only by internal displacement is automatically excluded from the response, even though the people there are often living in very precarious conditions.

Even after this double prioritisation, the allocated funding is still insufficient to cover the planned response. So, millions of people are still living in informal and inadequate shelters. Most of them are hosted in rural areas where infrastructure, access to basic social services and job opportunities are very limited. This makes them totally dependent on humanitarian aid, which is not sufficient to cover their basic needs.

This situation has dire consequences for the affected population’s physical and mental health, sense of dignity, safety and ability to protect themselves against threats, particularly gender-based violence. The lack of adequate shelter has a direct impact on protection, dignity and access to essential services for conflict-affected people. It also has wider indirect impacts on health, community integration, livelihoods and instances of gender-based violence.[1]

Overcrowded shelters with poor air quality and thermal stress are detrimental to health and lead to an increased risk of infectious disease and child mortality. In the DRC, the areas most affected by displacement are also those most affected by epidemics such as cholera and Ebola.

Adequate shelter is essential to the process of recovery, accessing livelihoods and re-integrating into the social and economic sphere. The lack of decent shelter means not having a stable base from which to access other services including healthcare, education and safe water and sanitation facilities.

The impact of compromise

Humanitarian shelter actors are constantly challenged to find a balance between the quality of the response to be provided and the coverage rate to be achieved. Very often, the quality is compromised in favour of coverage.

The humanitarian shelter response is a process that starts with the distribution of life-saving emergency shelter kits and should lead to providing durable shelter for those affected. To meet donor requirements and deal with the funding gap, the shelter cluster has reduced the cost of the intervention package to USD 150 for an emergency shelter and USD 350 for a durable shelter. At this cost, it is impossible to meet the minimum standards required to guarantee access to adequate shelter for those in need. The concept of ‘adequacy’ underlines the importance of including a settlement lens, and considering cultural identity, protection, physical well-being and the availability of basic services in a shelter response.[2]

More than 80% of funding allocated to the shelter sector is used for emergency interventions, consisting mainly of light shelter kits and the construction of semi-durable shelters. The lack of funding limits the shelter response process in its initial relief phase to just saving lives. This means that the people assisted in emergency shelters (whose materials have a limited lifespan of around six months) do not benefit from any renewal, even when they stay in the camps for a long time.

Ways forward

This case study shows the impact that lack of finances for protracted displacement response can have in the context of the DRC. In this country, which has one of the highest numbers of internally displaced people in the world and one of the lowest levels of funding, humanitarian actors regularly face the challenge of balancing cost, coverage, quality and durability.

Financing will continue to be a challenge over the coming years as more and more countries are affected by crises and climate displacement. In this context, the following recommendations should be considered to improve the response:

Enhance localisation to optimise operational costs, facilitating the transfer of skills and strengthening capacity to mobilise funding. One example of this is the ToGETHER Programme which seeks to encourage localisation in the DRC.
Strengthen the humanitarian-development nexus to leverage additional funds from development actors and the private sector. Development funding offers the opportunity to be more flexible and long-term, to cover the rest of the process up to durable housing in areas of protracted displacement that no longer receive humanitarian funding. One initiative trying to do this is UN-Habitat’s programme – Controlled urban development, housing and reducing inequalities – which aims to improve access to durable housing, but more and larger-scale initiatives are needed.
Develop an integrated approach with other sectors to improve provision and ensure that households benefiting from shelter also have easy access to water, energy and other basic facilities.
Help people to access work so that they can be more self-reliant and able to handle the rest of their housing improvement process, reducing the pressure on the humanitarian system.

Rémy Kalombo
Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist, UNHCR
kalombor@unhcr.org
linkedin.com/in/rémykalombo/

[1] InterAction and USAID (2019) The Wider Impacts of Humanitarian Shelter and Settlements Assistance bit.ly/wider-impacts-humanitarian-shelter

[2] www.spherestandards.org/handbook-2018/

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