DG ECHO committed in the 2021 Communication on Humanitarian Aid to explore new ways of engaging private finance to help address humanitarian needs – in particular through launching a pilot initiative looking at blended finance for humanitarian aid. After three years of funding for this pilot initiative and five projects in progress, DG ECHO is publishing a preliminary ‘lessons learned’ paper to summarise the experience so far, draw some initial conclusions on the impacts of the initiative, and to inform future work in this area.
This paper highlights the progress to date within DG ECHO on humanitarian blended finance projects, the state of play in the wider sector, and the key gaps and issues to resolved if humanitarian blended finance projects are to be scaled up.
