Here are just 10 highlights of the year:  

1. The Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), innovating again, made the first-ever allocation to address the needs of people with disabilities, and it expanded its support for early, preventative humanitarian action. When Typhoon Rai (locally known as Odette) pummelled the Philippines in December, we immediately released CERF funding to boost the Government’s response. 
2. The Country-Based Pooled Funds
   (CBPFs) increased funding to local organizations, which received over a third of the grants. We also launched the first Regional Pooled Fund for West and Central Africa to foster a coordinated, coherent response in Burkina Faso and Niger initially, as the region faced weather shocks and mounting violence. 
3. The Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) — the coordinating body of the formal humanitarian system, which the Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC) chairs  — declared a system-wide scale-up in Afghanistan and Ethiopia, effectively bringing all IASC members together to rapidly expand operations. 
4. Fundraising was boosted through pledging conferences for Afghanistan, raising $4.4 billion; for Syria, raising $5.3 billion as the crisis entered its tenth year; and for Yemen, raising $2.2 billion by the year’s end. In January, we launched a Flash Appeal to raise funds for the hunger crisis in Madagascar’s Grand Sud region, in response to extreme drought. 
5. We launched anticipatory action pilot projects in Malawi and the Philippines, and we continued pilots in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Somalia. This approach protected 100,000 people from emergency hunger conditions, prevented the spread of disease and reduced displacement.  We also collaborated with the African Union to develop anticipatory insurance policies for vulnerable people in select countries. 
6. We deployed experts in protection, gender and accountability to affected people to dozens of crises, including Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Haiti, Kenya, Myanmar and Niger. Gender specialists helped ensure humanitarian assessments and operations responded to the specific needs of women and girls, while experts in protection ensured it was woven into every humanitarian response sector, from food aid to camp management. 
7. As ERC, my first mission was to Ethiopia, including the Tigray region to advocate for humanitarian access and civilian protection, and to help scale up the humanitarian response. OCHA also led the advocacy effort that succeeded in exempting humanitarian assistance from UN sanctions on Afghanistan, and we advocated with the de facto authorities to uphold the rights of women and girls throughout the year. 
8. I led a high-level task force, convened by the UN Secretary-General, on preventing famine, which coordinated prevention efforts, resource mobilization — including co-hosting our first pledging event for famine prevention — and information sharing. 
9. When a 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, affecting 800,000 people, followed just days later by Tropical Cyclone Grace, OCHA stepped in to support the Government’s response with coordination, funding and information management.  
10. In the run-up to November’s UN Climate Change Conference, in Glasgow, we launched our climate crisis campaign, #TheHumanRace, to mark World Humanitarian Day, which mobilized 570,000 participants in over 183 countries.  

These and many other efforts throughout the year succeeded because of our donors’ generosity. Thank you for your continued commitment to humanitarian action, and to OCHA