United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA or OCHA for its acronym in English), is an agency of the General Secretariat of the United Nations created in December 1991 by Resolution 46/182 of the General Assembly. The resolution aims to improve the UN response to complex emergencies and natural disasters and replaces the United Nations Office for Disaster Response Coordination, which existed since 1972. OCHA was the result of the reorganization of the old office in 1998 in order to focus on major disasters. OCHA's mandate expanded to include the coordination of humanitarian responses, political development, and support for humanitarian activities by humanitarian aid.

The OCHA staff is more than 1000 people, distributed among the main headquarters in New York (United States) and Geneva (Switzerland), 7 regional offices, 24 field offices in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Middle East and Asia.

Its budget in 2008 was about 170 million US dollars, mostly from UN member states and donors. OCHA is led by the Undersecretary for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Response, currently Mark Lowcock.

To support news coverage of humanitarian issues, OCHA has founded two news centers with complementary objectives: IRIN and ReliefWeb.