UNITED NATIONS CENTRAL EMERGENCY RESPONSE FUND ALLOCATES $84 MILLION TO 15 UNDERFUNDED CRISES
(New York, 18 January 2011): The United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator, Valerie Amos, has allocated some US$84 million to boost humanitarian response in 15 neglected emergencies around the world, where people are suffering the effects of hunger, malnutrition, disease, displacement and conflict.
The funds were made available from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF). They will be granted to United Nations humanitarian agencies, the International Organization for Migration, and to partner organizations, and through them to non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to support humanitarian projects in the affected countries. The humanitarian teams in these countries and territories were selected to receive CERF grants based on analysis of the funding levels of their aid programmes and the severity of the humanitarian needs.
Humanitarian actors in Somalia received the largest single allocation of some $15 million. United Nations agencies in Ethiopia will receive the second-largest amount of $11 million. Agencies working in Chad will receive $8 million, while humanitarian partners in Kenya will receive $6 million to assist refugees in 2011. Programmes in the Central African Republic, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Sri Lanka, and Zimbabwe have each been allocated some $5 million, while programmes to assist people in Burundi, Madagascar, and the occupied Palestinian territory will receive $4 million apiece. Humanitarian actors in Colombia, Djibouti, and Myanmar will each receive $3 million to bolster their emergency programmes, and the Islamic Republic of Iran will receive $3 million for Iraqi and Afghan refugees.
This is the first round of allocations from CERF’s window for underfunded emergencies in 2011. The second round will be July. In 2010, a total of $139 million was allocated to 17 underfunded emergencies. Since 2006, nearly a third of the $1.9 billion allocated from CERF has gone to chronically neglected crises in more than 50 countries.
CERF is funded by voluntary contributions from Member States, NGOs, local governments, the private sector and individual donors. This year, donors have so far pledged nearly $358 million in support of CERF. CERF commits one third of all funds each year to redress imbalances in global aid distribution by supporting neglected crises.
CERF was established in 2006 to help agencies respond rapidly to new or deteriorating humanitarian situations. Since then, more than 120 Member States have pledged or contributed more than $2.3 billion to the fund, which is administered by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. CERF has disbursed nearly $2 billion to help millions of victims of natural disasters and conflict in nearly 80 countries since 2006.