The Tsunami coincided with a new era of public demand for accountability and transparency in the use of funds donated to the UN and other humanitarian relief organisations to respond to humanitarian crises worldwide. The unprecedented scale of resource flows and the proliferation of donor sources (public, private, corporate) for the tsunami created an environment of enhanced expectations for accountability: implementing agencies are expected to account for the funds entrusted to them, in a fully transparent and real-time way. To meet these expectations, the UN has created a Tsunami Flash Appeal expenditure tracking system (ETS) to complement its existing Financial Tracking Service (FTS), which records humanitarian contributions. The ETS provides a common platform showing not only contributions but also the specific uses and expenditure rate of funds under the Tsunami Flash Appeal for projects implemented by both UN agencies and NGOs.

What does this site show, and what does it not show?
The Expenditure Tracking site shows how much of the funds received by UN agencies and NGOs for projects in the Tsunami Flash Appeal have been spent, and for what projects, sectors and countries. The expenditure information is provided by the agencies that are handling Tsunami Flash Appeal funds. The site does not show expenditure for projects not listed in the Flash Appeal, or for agencies that did not list projects in the Appeal. (However, links are provided to other websites that contain information on tsunami response activities outside the Flash Appeal.) It is important to emphasise that the Tsunami Flash Appeal amounts to only 8% of the total funds pledged for relief, recovery, and reconstruction. The large majority of Tsunami funds are with the Red Cross / Red Crescent, non-governmental organisations, or donated bilaterally to the governments of the affected countries.

Which agencies are participating?
All organizations that listed project proposals in the Flash Appeal are welcome to share expenditure data for this new website. In preparing this new information sharing system, the UN has worked especially closely with the ten UN agencies that appealed for the largest amounts in the Flash Appeal, to ensure that their information is shown in the pilot version. Participation of the remaining UN agencies as well as NGOs is also much encouraged.

The Tsunami Flash Appeal Expenditure Tracking database and website are maintained by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

The database and website have been constructed to operate in parallel with the Financial Tracking Service (FTS), also maintained by OCHA. The FTS contains detailed information about funding in the Flash Appeal, as well as reported tsunami funding outside the Appeal (and indeed funding for any humanitarian situation).