The United Nations will ask for 25 per cent more money in 2023 to fund humanitarian aid operations globally, the UN aid chief told a Reuters NEXT event on Wednesday, where he also warned that while famine would not yet be declared in Somalia, people were already dying there of hunger.
The United Nations had appealed for a record $US41 billion to provide life-saving assistance for 2022 and is due to launch its appeal for 2023 on Thursday.
“It’s going to go up by about 25 per cent and that’s a shocker,” UN aid chief Martin Griffiths said without giving specific figures. “It’s gone up about each year by about 25 per cent in recent years…the gap between needs and funding is going to grow.”
He said that in 2022 the United Nations had only received about 44% of the money needed, adding: “In years gone by, we’ve seen 60-65 percent as a norm.”
Griffiths said the gap between funding and needs was growing because of the “knock-on effects of the last couple of years” from events like the war in Ukraine, conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic and other crises, like a spike in cholera outbreaks.
He predicted that the gap would be bigger in 2023 and “frankly we are going to continue to fail, in many more countries, the high numbers of people that we serve and we serve roughly a population which is equivalent to about the third-most populous nation in the world.”
“It’s a staggering and somewhat ludicrous responsibility,” Griffiths added.
Source – Reuters
