FUNDING REQUIRED $25.32B
FUNDING RECEIVED $10.63B
UNMET REQUIREMENTS COVERAGE $14.69B
COVERAGE 42%
PEOPLE IN NEED 133.8M
PEOPLE TO RECEIVE AID 97.4M
COUNTRIES AFFECTED 41
Spotlight on the recent disaster in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia
On Friday 28 September, a 7.4 magnitude earthquake and tsunami struck Central Sulawesi, Indonesia. On 5 October, the Government and country team/regional office issued the Central Sulawesi Earthquake Response Plan to support the six priority areas identified by the Government. Some existing programmes in Sulawesi will be augmented and others entailing WASH, health, camp management and logistics activities will be developed.
The response plan will focus on immediate response over a three-month period. On 2 October and Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, and Emergency Relief Coordinator Mark Lowcock (USG/ERC) announced an allocation of US$15 million from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) to bolster relief assistance for people affected by this emergency.
Global appeal status
At the end of September 2018, 21 Humanitarian Response Plans (HRP) and the Syria Regional Response Plan (3RP) require $25.32 billion to assist 97.4 million people in urgent need of humanitarian support. The plans are funded at $10.63 billion; this amounts to 42 per cent of financial requirements for 2018. For the remainder of 2018, humanitarian organizations require another $14.69 billion to meet the needs outlined in these plans.
Global requirements are $1.13 billion higher than at this time last year. Overall coverage and the dollar amount were only marginally higher in late September 2018 than at the same time in 2017.
High-level events
The USG/ERC made a strong appeal for HRP funding for South Sudan and Yemen at two high-level events at UN headquarters last month. At an event on 25 September on the crisis in South Sudan during the General Assembly, the USG/ERC asked that donors sustain their generous and large response to the crisis to enable life-saving activities and to encourage a multi-year approach to crisis response with stronger focus on stabilization, resilience and recovery from the conflict. In his statement to the Security Council on Yemen on 21 September, he announced that we may now be approaching a tipping point beyond which it will be impossible to prevent massive loss of life as a result of widespread famine across the country.
Three days later, the Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen reiterated the call for more funding and more humanitarian partners on the ground to respond to the unprecedented emergency in Yemen.
The UNHCR Commissioner and USG/ERC ended a mission to Afghanistan last month with a call for donors to urgently increase and sustain support for humanitarian response in the country, and to take measures to find durable solutions for millions of people caught up in Afghanistan’s displacement crisis.
On 3-4 September, in a follow-up event to the 2017 Oslo Humanitarian Conference on Nigeria and the Lake Chad Region, Germany, Norway and the UN co-hosted the High-Level Conference on the Lake Chad Region in Berlin. On this occasion, UN Member States, international organizations and civil society actors discussed humanitarian assistance, stabilization and development cooperation in the region. Humanitarian and development announcements made at the conference totalled $2.17 billion and it is estimated that $1.02 billion was for humanitarian assistance in 2018 for Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria. Of that amount, approximately $875 million (86%), has been made available to recipient organizations.
International financial institutions pledged an additional $467 million in concessional loans.
Concerning pledging conferences this year, according to data reported to FTS by donors and recipient organizations as of 18 September, 95 per cent of pledges have been fulfilled for Yemen, 91 per cent of pledges have been fulfilled for Somalia, and 82 per cent of pledges have been fulfilled for DRC. In each of these countries, many donors have contributed above and beyond their original announcements.
For Syria and the Region, the EU recently published a tracking report on announcements made in Brussels in April which can be accessed here:
www.consilium.europa.eu/media/36437/syria-report-six.pdf Donors are urged to quickly fulfil outstanding pledges made at the conferences and to consider providing additional funding before the end of the year.
Pooled funds
Between 1 January and 30 September 2018, the Emergency Relief Coordinator approved $395 million in grants from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), including $265 million from the Rapid Response Window and $130 million from the Underfunded Emergencies Window, for life-saving activities in 38 countries. A total of $40 million was released in September to assist people affected by underfunded emergencies in Angola, Bangladesh, Burundi, Central African Republic and Rwanda; as well as people affected by flooding in India and Myanmar, and Venezuelan refugees and migrants arriving in Ecuador and Peru.
Country-based pooled funds (CBPFs) have received a total of US$667 million from 31 donors between January and September 2018. During this period, the 18 operational funds have allocated $478 million to 921 projects, implemented by 525 partners. Over 60 per cent of all CBPF allocations were disbursed to NGOs, including 21 per cent ($100.6 million) directly to national NGOs. Another 36 per cent was allocated to UN agencies and a smaller portion to Red Cross/Red Crescent organizations, which have received 1.2 per cent of funding ($5.8 million) for direct project implementation. The first allocation for 2018 of the Yemen Humanitarian Fund (YHF) for $90 million is ongoing and focuses on covering gaps in first-line responses in cluster strategies and providing life-saving support to people in newly accessible and hard-to-reach areas. In Ethiopia, the Humanitarian Coordinator launched a $30 million reserve allocation targeting immediate and life-saving activities in the nutrition, health, WASH, agriculture/livestock, emergency shelter/NFI, education and protection sectors. Finally, reserve allocations were also ongoing in Afghanistan and Myanmar during September.
In Myanmar, an integrated CBPF and CERF allocation strategy ($1 million CBPF reserve and $2.95 million CERF) prioritized projects aligned with the Myanmar Humanitarian Fund (MHF) operating principles and the CERF Life Saving Criteria, aiming at achieving the main objective of addressing critical unmet needs of flood‐affected people across the country, particularly the most vulnerable people.