Over the past decade, there has been a growing recognition of the importance of official donor governments in financing humanitarian action. Whilst analysis, for the most part, has been limited to significant members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), over the past few decades a number of non-DAC donors have become increasingly active in responding to a range of international humanitarian crises.

This background paper is one of three regional studies on the role of non-DAC donors in humanitarian action. It explores the role of the Gulf States as official aid donors, and looks in particular at the humanitarian aid programmes of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) as three of the largest official donors in the Gulf.