The Human Response Index uses The Principles and Good Practice of Humanitarian Donorship (GHD), a set of 23 principles and guidelines agreed by the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)/ Development Assistance Committee (DAC) donors and the European Commission as a framework by which to assess donors’ performance. In this way, the HRI assesses how well donors are working towards the standards of good practice to which they have committed themselves.

Major failures of the humanitarian system during the genocide in Rwanda and other crises were the impetus for a series of initiatives to reform and improve the quality, performance, and accountability of the main actors engaged in humanitarian assistance.

However, most of these initiatives focused on operational organisations’ work on the ground, without looking at the unique role of donors within the system. The Good Humanitarian Donorship initiative was a step in the right direction to correct this. In 2003, representatives of several donor agencies, many with long experience working on humanitarian issues, tried to systematically bring together lessons learned and good practices on how donor policies and decisions resulted in the success or failure of previous responses to disasters and conflicts – resulting in the GHD Principles.

The aim of the GHD initiative is to ensure that one critical component of the humanitarian system, namely donors, works in ways that strengthen rather than undermine efforts to save lives, alleviate suffering, and restore livelihoods. The GHD Principles reinforce the idea that donors have a role which complements the other parts of the humanitarian system, and that they have a special responsibility to ensure that their policies and decisions help uphold and promote impartial, neutral, independent and effective humanitarian action. The GHD works towards achieving efficient and principled humanitarian assistance based on a set of 23 Principles of good practice of humanitarian donorship. The GHD Principles were adopted in 2005 by 22 members of the OECD/DAC and the European Commission.