PRESS BRIEFING ON 2004 HUMANITARIAN APPEAL

PRESS BRIEFING ON 2004 HUMANITARIAN APPEAL

Calling this year’s appeal one for “forgotten emergencies”, Jan Egeland, United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator, and Mark Malloch Brown, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, briefed reporters at Headquarters today on the launch of the Organization’s Consolidated Inter-Agency Appeals for 2004, which asked for $3 billion for 45 million people suffering from complex emergencies, wars and natural disasters in 21 nations.

The humanitarian appeal, described by Mr. Egeland as the “most comprehensive, most consolidated appeal ever”, included the work of, and the appeals on behalf of, 136 humanitarian organizations.  In coordinated efforts with the International Red Cross, non-governmental organizations and other partners, humanitarian agencies were now able to reach beneficiaries in places where they once could not work, as new headways were being made in helping groups that had not been seen or aided for years, he said. 

“We are doing that in a very effective and efficient manner,” said Mr. Egeland.  Today, humanitarian assistance could reach victims in 24 hours anywhere in the world. 

However, the hope for the 2004 Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP) was to make donors respond in a way that created a more balanced approach to emergencies that received a lot of attention and funding, and those equally acute crises, which were forgotten and received very little funding.

In northern Uganda, for example, which Mr. Egeland called the most forgotten emergency situation in the world, there existed 1.3 million internally displaced people, and 10,000 children had been abducted in the past 12 months to become child soldiers and sex slaves for the rebel army.

Adding that while delivery assistance had never been more efficient, funding for 2003 had shown that humanitarian assistance did not reach all those that could have been helped, as many African nations received less than one third of what was asked for.  “Lives were lost, and peoples were not cared for because we did not get the money our humanitarian partners asked for”, said Mr. Egeland.  In addition to funding, there was also the need for recipient nations to maintain humanitarian workers’ security and provide access, especially in light of the number of deaths this year.

Mr. Malloch Brown said that a striking reminder to donor nations was that as new nations entered the list, others graduated, via transition, towards reconstruction and development.  “Being on this list is not a permanent status”, he said.  “It’s people in countries whose means of livelihood is being completely removed from them because they’re displaced from their homes and jobs.  But the story of the link between humanitarian and reconstruction is we can get them back on track, we can get them back into their homes.  We can get them back into gainful employment.”

The emphasis was on transition, he said, such as in Angola, Sierra Leone and now Liberia, where reintegration, the rule of law, and community level services, were now evident.

“It’s our success in making that link work, which allows us to come back year after year with these relative modest numbers of what we need in pure humanitarian assistance”, he said.

Responding to a correspondent’s question regarding funding, Mr. Egeland said last year’s appeal was higher than this year’s because it included aid for Iraq.  This year’s appeal did not include Iraq, which would receive its own, independent launch appeal.  Similarly, Afghanistan did not appear on this year’s appeal either, as it would also have its own separate one.

Asked why it was difficult to raise money for Africa, Mr. Egeland responded that it had much to do with “too little political and media attention”, adding that the goal was to focus on the forgotten and neglected emergencies.  To date, meetings with donor countries on such crises had yielded some good results.

Newly emerging nations that could be tapped as donors included those with the most rapidly growing economies in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, as well as oil-rich countries, he added.  Equally important was the need for the United Nations to better communicate the need to be generous.  As such, it would also seek non-traditional donors, in-kind donations, personnel and experts.  Kuwait, he noted, had recently become a substantial donor.

As for which nations had managed to make progress and come off the donor list, Mr. Malloch Brown said Ethiopia had made remarkable progress in the area of food security, and Sierra Leone’s needs this year had moved from humanitarian to transitional aid.  Asia, which had been highly dependent on food aid, had also made a dramatic transition, as had the Balkans.

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