UN agencies face massive funding shortfall

UN humanitarian agencies announced on Wednesday that they are facing a shortfall of over US $2 billion to meet priority needs in complex emergencies and asked for increased donor support. The announcement, by Assistant Emergency Relief Coordinator and Director of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Ross Mountain, was made at a meeting to review progress and outstanding priorities halfway through the yearly cycle of the Consolidated Inter-Agency Appeals Process (CAP). "Today we have an estimated shortfall of US $2.2 billion to implement programmes designed to meet priority needs identified by the UN and its participating partners in the CAP in 19 complex emergencies", Mountain told representatives of donor governments and members of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee in Geneva. The "CAP Mid-Year Review Status Report" revealed that there has been "mixed" progress in getting humanitarian assistance and providing protection to populations at risk. It called for "timely, flexible and unearmarked contributions" to be provided early in the year to allow agencies to implement strategies designed to meet identified priorities and to plan based upon need rather than available resources, OCHA reported. The UN and its partners launched the CAP in November to fund humanitarian programmes for some 33 million people worldwide, many of whom are suffering from ongoing conflicts. African countries and regions included in the CAP are Angola, Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, the Great Lakes and Central Africa, Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan and Uganda.