Annual Monitoring Report

In 2020, Yemen continued to be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, driven by conflict, economic collapse and the continuous breakdown of public institutions and services. An estimated 24.3 million people, 80 per cent of the entire population, required some form of humanitarian assistance. The situation in 2020 has been further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and severe underfunding of the humanitarian response. The Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan (YHRP) was only 57 per cent funded, with US$ 1.9 billion1 received out of the required $3.4 billion.

Despite access challenges, COVID-19-related restrictions and other constraints, the YHF conducted 165 monitoring visits in 2020, thereby fulfilling all of its 2020 monitoring requirements. However, the YHF changed the modality of many monitoring missions from the OCHA Humanitarian Financing Unit staff visits to monitoring by Third-Party Monitoring (TPM) companies.

Some of the key challenges for YHF monitoring in 2020 included travel restrictions; continued bureaucratic impediments, such as the need for prolonged negotiations with national and sub-national authorities to secure travel permits for TPM contractors; inadequate technical skills among some field monitors; poor quality of some TPM reports; long delays in providing required monitoring documents by some YHF partners; and poor mobile network coverage limiting the ability to reach some beneficiaries with phone interviews.