The IFRC’s Disaster Response Emergency Fund (DREF) is our central pot of money through which we can release funds rapidly to Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies for early action and immediate disaster response. It’s the quickest, most efficient and most transparent way of getting funding directly to local humanitarian actors, and has supported more than 200 million people in crisis since its launch back in 1985.
We have been working closely with the DREF team to make it easier for National Societies to request funding from the DREF by incorporating the application, monitoring and reporting process on GO. This digital transformation makes the request process even quicker, more efficient and more transparent.
In this blog, we will explain the story behind this transformation, outline how it positively disrupts the DREF through process simplification, automation, improved analysis and feedback loops.
The IFRC’s rapid fund for ‘silent’ emergencies
Every year, hundreds of small and medium-sized disasters occur in silence. Without media attention or international visibility, they can struggle to attract funding — putting affected communities at risk of being completely neglected.
To support these smaller disasters, or to provide initial funding before launching an Emergency Appeal, the IFRC rapidly channels funding to Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies through the DREF — enabling them to deliver fast and effective local humanitarian action. Read more about the DREF here.
Over the past five years, the DREF has supported an annual average of 115 operations by Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies across the world. We are committed to increasing the DREF pot of funding to CHF 100M and for 25% of the funding to be for actions taken in anticipation of crises.
What’s changed?
GO is used for all large-scale emergencies requiring international assistance in the IFRC. As of late last year, we integrated the DREF on GO, meaning it will also increasingly be used for local, domestic, smaller-scale emergencies.
Digital transformation is a disruptive or incremental shift that allows us, the IFRC, to pursue new ways of humanitarian assistance by transforming current practices and developing new digital humanitarian services. IFRC’s Strategy 2030 identifies that this disruption, for better and for worse, is already happening within humanitarian assistance.
The IFRC’s Digital Strategy calls for urgent digital transformation to positively disrupt business-as-usual, and improve the relevance, speed, quality, reach, accessibility, resilience, and sustainability of services by our national societies.
The integration of the DREF on GO is part of a wider evolution of the mechanism. We are proud to say that, since its launch, more than 30 million CHF has been allocated in support of 70 DREF operations, targeting 12 million individuals in need.
Below are some more internal implications:
- Game changing use case — increasing visibility of GO and moving its use from reporting/monitoring to decision making, specifically around resource allocation
- Improved data structure, integrity and use — GO helps to structure the DREF data flow, and increases potential to use data for analysis
- Benefits at the start, during and end of an operation — Multiple entry points means we have the opportunity to track the “life” of an emergency operation
- New features and functionalities — the expanding requirements for the DREF have led us to find improved ways to import docs, export pdfs and pre-populate fields
And, what next?
One of the things that excites us most about introducing the DREF on GO is that there are always plenty more opportunities to improve the online process. We have a lot of further improvements in the pipeline, with some of our priority next steps below:
- Introduce historical (i.e. pre GO) data to allow for improved trend analysis and identification of recurrent crises, we are working with UCL data science students to mine DREF reports since its launch
- Enable earlier action by including the DREF early action protocol process, and linking this to risk and imminent crisis data
- Improve integration with other workflows and features on GO, including from national society Field Reports, Preparedness for Effective Response (PER), and operational learning
- Harmonise sectors, activities and indicators with other processes, including the Fed-wide 3w and Field Reports
- Automate translation of the DREF process to improve access
- Develop simple optional tools to improve planning and monitoring of DREF operations.
Nightingale DataViz Challenge
There is an untapped potential to surface and visualise DREF data to better describe, and encourage interpretation of its coverage and impact, as well as potentially even suggest future improvements to reach more rapidly and effectively those affected by disasters and crises.
As a result, we are focussing this year’s Nightingale Data Viz Challenge to invite the IFRC network to suggest potential approaches to visualisation of the DREF’s operational data. The intended users include humanitarian advisors, operations managers, and others who are looking at trends in Red Cross Red Crescent responses supported by the DREF.
Please find out more about the challenge here.
DREF Sprint Notes
For some years, we have organised GO’s development around an adapted version of the agile approach, including sprint weeks. Over the first half of 2023 we have doubled down on this approach, breaking down the GO workplan into smaller, more digestible chunks, and have tried to stick to the principles outlined here. The overall purpose is to increase our agility, speed of development, as well as the diversity of participation and ownership for features and workflows on GO.
A second dedicated DREF sprint was held in Budapest in March. For those interested and able to decipher our post-its and scribbles, please find notes on the digital whiteboard here. And below are bullets from the retro session we always organise to help us learn and improve.
The good
- Positive vibes and problem solving attitude
- Opportunity to work and socialise across the GO and DREF teams
- Well organised and facilitated sessions
- Dedicated time to deep-dive
- Solutions identified to share the workload
- Realisation of the complexity of the process leading to better estimation of the effort required
The could-do-better
- Should have at least one NS present to ensure we focus on the ‘downstream’, not just DREF team requirements
- Developers potentially to be present for some of the sessions — although only when business requirements are agreed
- DREF senior management to be present, to understand the complexity and propose / decide solutions
- Clearer upfront objectives to help evaluate ‘value’
- Hotel facilities were not set up for remote/hybrid work
