Actions taken:
Resilience
Through multi-year humanitarian and development funding, Denmark is incentivizing that its partner organisations – both multilateral and CSOs – are contributing to building of resilience in protracted and recurrent crisis. DRC has supported several sister National Societies, particularly in Africa and Asia, in reproductive, maternal, neonatal and child health (RMNCH) programming. Evaluations from completed projects demonstrate achieving the target of increasing RMNCH coverage in all targeted communities, with more that 75% of the targeted population being women and girls. Domestically, DRC is testing the RC possible contribution to different community based resilience and fire prevention initiatives in cooperation with selected municipal rescue services. DRC is also exploring the possible integration of resilience activities in existing activities targeting survivors of SGBV. All of the resilience initiatives in Denmark support the Government’s national disaster prevention strategy.
NCDs
To address issues of NCDs, the MFA supports the “Defeat NCDs” a public-private partnership modality to support low- and middle-income countries in addressing NCDs.
Danish Red Cross is part of Partnering for Change with Novo Nordisk, ICRC which focuses on developing a new model of care for NCDs in humanitarian crises. With the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine, this partnership will also increase the evidence for innovative approaches to diabetes and hypertension care in crisis situations.
DRC has also significantly expanded its support to sister National Societies in NCD prevention and care (with a focus on Africa and MENA) and stepped up dialogue with partners such as Defeat NCDs, Novo Nordisk Foundation, World Diabetes Foundation and private sector partners for going to scale and mobilizing partners locally. In June 2018, Danish Red Cross together with the University of Copenhagen and NCDFree organized a Boot camp bringing together 70 young professionals and established experts from more than 30 organisations to inspire advocacy action on the challenge of addressing non-communicable diseases in humanitarian settings. The outcome of the Boot camp was six policy asks, supported by ideas for campaigns. The Boot camp also resulted in a Call to Action to civil society experts attending the UN Interactive Hearing on NCDs in early July 2018, which resulted in the inclusion of NCDs in humanitarian settings in the final Political Declaration.
In 2018, the MFA contributed 10 mio. DKK to the WHO’s contingency fund for emergencies, which supports rapid response during the outbreak of communicable diseases, as well as response in humanitarian crises with critical health consequences. Moreover, the MFA hosted a launch of a new tripartite partnership between the DRC, the ICRC and Danish Company Novo Nordisk on managing non-communicable disease in humanitarian settings, in order to show its support and appreciation of the initiative.
MFA also hosted a side-event at the 72nd World Health Assembly in May 2019 organised by the Danish Red Cross, ICRC and Novo Nordisk focusing on the integration of non-communicable disease care into humanitarian response operations and the potential of new models of collaboration to help address this growing challenge.
Forecast-based financing
Through the MFA’s Strategic Partnership with the Danish Red Cross, the government supports DRC’s initiatives to further develop Forecast Based Financing and has agreed to allow a larger part of flexible humanitarian funds to be disbursed based on FbF. DRC participates in global dialogue platforms on forecast-based financing (FbF) and has promoted and developed the FbF approach in 5 countries (Malawi, Mali, Nepal, Sudan and Zimbabwe), which aims at, among other things, documenting and demonstrating the results of forecast-based action, compared to late response. In 2019 DRC support selected RC partners (Malawi, Mali, Zimbabwe) in developing Early Action Protocols for submission to IFRC’s FbF window to the DREF. In partnership with German RC and the RC Climate Centre, DRC supports FbF research work in collaboration with the University of Copenhagen.
Moreover, in 2017 MFA contributed with early funding to enable early action to avert hunger crises in the Horn of Africa. In consultations with OCHA, Denmark and the Nordic countries are exploring innovative financing options, and the MFA is considering how to support these new initiatives.
