This paper examines key trends in the financing of humanitarian assistance. It finds that humanitarian aid has increased, amid overall falls in the share of national wealth allocated to development assistance, and that disbursement channels are changing - donors are looking to NGOs, and earmarking more of their funding to multilateral agencies. In addition, it argues that data about humanitarian assistance is patchy and not easily available and that as humanitarian assistance grows, both in absolute terms and as a proportion of overall overseas development aid, improving data collection and analysis will become increasingly important.