US $121.29 million sought for regional aid in 2004

Hoping to seize current momentum towards peace in the Great Lakes region of central Africa, humanitarian agencies have called on international donors to provide US $121.29 million for five main areas of intervention: protection of children's rights; prevention of sexual violence; assistance for internally displaced persons (IDPs); prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS; and advocating for adherence to humanitarian principles in all aspects of conflict resolution, including disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration. Speaking at the start of a round-table discussion to mark the launch of the Great Lakes Region and Central Africa 2004 Appeal, Valerie Julliand, head of the regional support bureau for central and east Africa of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said that the total $3 billion sought to help 45 million people in 21 countries through the inter-agency consolidated appeal process was only one-tenth of the amount the international community had pledged for assistance to Iraq - "not to take anything away from that crisis". One representative of a major international donor body called the Great Lakes appeals "too timid", and urged his donor colleagues to not allow crises elsewhere with higher media profiles to distract them from the urgent needs of the central African region. Julliand, however, said that 95 percent of the funding sought for the Great Lakes region in 2003 had been provided. The same could not be said for country-specific appeals. Speaking at UN headquarters in New York on Tuesday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan reported that only 66 percent of the $3 billion that was likewise sought in the 2003 appeal had so far been received - and that even that figure was misleading: while 91 percent of the amount requested for Iraq had been provided, Great Lakes countries such as Burundi had only received 28 percent of the amount sought. In a statement issued for the appeal launch in Nairobi, OCHA said that after a decade of conflict, the Great Lakes region was finally experiencing "promising prospects for peace", highlighting recent progress made in Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. "Nevertheless, the region's 127 million people still struggle to cope with continued conflict, repeated displacement, drought and disease, not the least of which is the HIV/AIDS pandemic," it said. Furthermore, as a result of improved humanitarian access to needy populations in previously unreachable areas, OCHA reported that the number of beneficiaries had increased significantly. "The multiplicity of humanitarian needs, from food, water, shelter, medical care to rehabilitation and reintegration of IDPs and returnees have correspondingly amplified to even more alarming levels," OCHA said. "Technical support and assistance provided by regional offices to their country programmes play a crucial role in the delivery of humanitarian aid to the needy populations of the region." OCHA said that the strategy designed by humanitarian actors in the Great Lakes region for 2004 was focused on five core support functions of regional offices, namely, enhancing skills and expertise of humanitarian actors; emergency preparedness and response planning; technical support; advocacy; and direct assistance. "Complementarity between and among regional stakeholders will continue to be developed, enhanced and promoted," OCHA stated, and, although not all stakeholders had included projects in the appeal, they had all "resolved to work together to meet the needs in a coordinated and principled manner". [For the summarized consolidated appeal for the Great Lakes region, go to www.un.org; for the complete appeal, go to http://ochadms.unog.ch/]