The Real Story Behind a Major Flash Appeal

Developing WASH Components as Part of Humanitarian Response Plans

Flash appeals and humanitarian response plans often appear as polished documents — clear figures, clear logic, priority activities, funding requirements, and neat tables of needs and gaps. What is less visible is the intense, imperfect, and highly political process that produces them.

Having coordinated WASH clusters and responses, and led the development of WASH components for major appeals and response plans in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, South Sudan, Nigeria and Palestine, I have seen how much of the real work happens off the page: in hurried bilateral meetings, tense inter-sector negotiations, late-night drafting sessions, and careful navigation of government, donor and partner interests.

This is not a technical account of how to write a good appeal. It is a reflection on what the process actually feels like, what shapes the final product, and what I have learned about advocacy, negotiation, managing expectations and partnership under pressure.

The pressure of the blank page

When a new crisis escalates, an existing one deepens, or a new planning year begins, the cluster system is expected to produce a credible WASH chapter or flash appeal component within days or weeks. The expectations are high: accurate needs analysis, realistic targets, prioritised interventions, clear costing, and a narrative that can persuade donors while remaining acceptable to national authorities. The UN agency serving as Cluster Lead Agency also brings its own agenda and expectations into the process.

In Ethiopia, whether during the 2016–17 drought and cholera responses or later in the Northern Ethiopia / Tigray and Amhara contexts, the process was shaped by the scale of need, the number of partners (often 40–60), and the need to align with government systems and evolving access realities. In Palestine, particularly during the intense period from late 2023 into 2024, the challenges included severely constrained access, rapidly changing operational conditions, the involvement of actors such as COGAT and municipalities, strong donor expectations, and the need to maintain principled engagement while still producing documents that could unlock resources.

In South Sudan, developing the Humanitarian Response Plan in a protracted crisis — where limited progress has been made over a decade in a highly challenging context — required producing a document that could still appeal to donors and secure partner agreement. In all these settings, the WASH component had to serve multiple audiences at once: OCHA and the Humanitarian Country Team, national and local authorities, donors (ECHO, FCDO, USAID, World Bank and others), the UN Cluster Lead Agency (which often also implements projects and has its own funding expectations), and the partners who would eventually deliver the response.

Advocacy is continuous, not a final step

One of the biggest misconceptions is that advocacy happens after the technical document is ready. In reality, advocacy begins the moment the decision is made to launch or revise an appeal.

It involves explaining why certain interventions must be prioritised even when they are less “visible” than water trucking or emergency latrines. It means defending the inclusion of hygiene promotion, solid waste management, or institutional WASH (schools and health facilities) when the pressure is to focus only on the most immediate life-saving activities. It requires translating field realities into language that resonates with donor strategies and funding cycles.

In Palestine, bi-weekly donor briefings and advocacy notes were essential to keep WASH visible amid competing sectoral demands and a highly politicised environment. In Ethiopia, South Sudan and Bangladesh, sustained engagement with donors helped convert needs analysis into actual commitments and contributed to significant resource mobilisation in earlier responses.

Advocacy also means managing expectations — both upward (with donors, the UN Cluster Lead Agency, government counterparts and senior leadership) and downward (with partners who may feel their priorities are being diluted).

Negotiation is the hidden core of the process

Every flash appeal or response plan is a negotiated product. Targets are adjusted, often with little time. Budgets are scrutinised and frequently reduced. Geographic priorities are debated. The balance between emergency response and early recovery or resilience elements is contested.

In cluster coordination roles, much of the work consists of facilitating these negotiations rather than simply compiling inputs. Partners push for inclusion of their operational areas or preferred modalities. Government counterparts may insist on certain standards, locations or implementing arrangements. In some countries, governments engage toughly and strategically; in others, there is limited strategic or technical engagement from authorities. Donors signal what they are likely to fund — and what they are unlikely to support.

The quality of the final WASH component often depends less on the sophistication of the needs assessment and more on the ability to broker workable compromises without losing technical integrity or leaving the most vulnerable behind.

Partnerships determine what is possible

No cluster coordinator produces an appeal alone. The document is only as strong as the relationships that underpin it.

Effective WASH components rely on trust with key partners who provide reliable data and realistic planning figures. They depend on constructive working relationships with government institutions (such as water authorities or municipalities) so that the appeal does not become disconnected from national systems. They require open channels with OCHA and inter-sector coordination structures so that WASH priorities are not sidelined. The Strategic Advisory Group (SAG) of the WASH Cluster also plays a critical role in supporting the Cluster Coordinator throughout this process.

In Ethiopia, Bangladesh and Palestine, partnerships with national and local actors, as well as with donors willing to engage beyond simple funding decisions, made a material difference to the credibility and usefulness of the plans.

Broader lessons from current trends

Looking across these experiences and at wider sector trends, several points stand out:

• Speed and quality remain in tension. The system demands rapid products, yet rushed appeals can lock in weak prioritisation or unrealistic targets that later undermine implementation and accountability.
• Localisation is still unevenly practised in planning processes. While there is strong rhetoric about local leadership, the actual drafting and decision-making around major appeals often remains dominated by international actors. Meaningful inclusion of local NGOs and national institutions in the design phase is still more the exception than the norm.
• The Nexus is easier to write than to operationalise. Many response plans now include language on resilience, early recovery and links to development. Turning that language into concrete, funded priorities during an acute crisis remains difficult.
• Transparency about uncertainty is still rare. Appeals often present figures with a confidence that the underlying data does not fully support. Being honest about information gaps and access constraints can strengthen, rather than weaken, credibility with experienced donors.
• The Real Story Behind a Major Flash Appeal. The trust built (or damaged) during the appeal process influences coordination, resource mobilisation and joint problem-solving long after the document is published.
• The role of the Cluster Lead Agency is decisive. A UN agency that genuinely believes in the cluster coordination system can significantly strengthen the response plan, support fundraising, and help produce plans that work for the wider partnership. Conversely, a weak, disinterested or under-capacitated Cluster Lead Agency can undermine the importance and principles of coordination. I have seen both realities. Bringing the CLA into active support of the cluster system is essential, particularly because the CLA has a voice at the Humanitarian Country Team level.

Final reflection

Developing the WASH component of a major flash appeal or response plan is technical work, political work and relationship work at the same time. The published document is only the visible tip of a much larger process of analysis, advocacy, negotiation and compromise.

What I have come to value most is not the elegance of the final narrative or the precision of the costing tables, but whether the process produced a plan that partners could actually use, that donors could defend, that authorities could accept, and that retained a clear focus on the people most in need.

The real measure of a good appeal is not how much money it raises in the first weeks, but whether it helps the response stay coherent, prioritised and accountable as the crisis evolves.