The DERF is running low on funds

The demand for the Danish Emergency Relief Fund has in the first half of 2022 been higher than ever before. The war in Ukraine, but also the persistent drought at the Horn of Africa, raises concern in Denmark and around the world. The DERF has managed to respond to these crises and has proven its relevance and importance for our users. This may, however, change during the second half of the year, as the relatively small funding mechanism is running low on funds.

The DERF has decided on a few adjustments to stretch the remaining funds to as many projects as possible and over the rest of the year.

Reduced grant size under the call for the Horn of Africa

7 million DKK are set aside for the current call for applications responding to the drought at the Horn of Africa. We know that more than 70 CSOs are active in the crisis affected areas, says Christoph Lodemann, the Fund Manager of the DERF; we also know that users could absorb much more than the funds set aside for this crisis. Therefore, it was extraordinarily decided only to approve grants up to DKK 700.000 per organisation. This way, the available funds may be spread to more organisations.

Restricted periods where incoming alerts are assessed

After the completion of the current call on the Horn of Africa, the DERF remains with DKK 8,5 million for the rest of the year. To keep some of these for crises that may occur at the end of the year, the DERF has decided only to make half of the remaining funds available each quarter. This means that the DERF cannot activate new calls for applications during the current quarter, up to DKK 4,2 million DKK can be allocated for calls during quarter 3, and the remaining funds will be allocated for quarter 4. Therefore, you may experience that the DERF rejects alerts with the reason of “no funds available during this quarter”.

The DERF team is working on different strategies to increase the pool of funds. Unfortunately, these have not brought any results yet.