Funding Crisis
- UN Agencies are facing an unprecedented funding crisis after donors have dramatically cut their humanitarian
- The UN hoped to raise $3.85bn from governments at a pledging conference in March 2021 to avert widespread famine; yet it only received $1.7bn – less than half.
- “Millions of Yemeni children, women and men desperately need aid to live. Cutting aid is a death sentence,” UN Secretary General, António Guterres said in a statement.
- The UK has cut aid by a massive 60% to just £87m, whereas Germany has doubled aid
- Saudi Arabia and the UAE, despite being parties to the conflict, have has cut their funding compared with former levels
- The World Food Program has had to cut rations in half. The number of people the UN agencies can feed has dropped from 13 million to eight million
- Save the Children has been forced to cut services for children suffering from severe acute malnutrition to just 20% of its normal levels as funding dies up
- Fifteen of 41 major United Nations humanitarian programmes in Yemen have already been reduced or shut down and 30 more will be affected in coming weeks unless additional funding is received
“It’s an impossible situation,” said Lise Grande, UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen.. “This is the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, yet we don’t have the resources we need to save the people who are suffering and will die if we don’t help. The consequences of under-funding are immediate, enormous and devastating,” she added. “Nearly every humanitarian worker has had to tell a hungry family or someone who is ill that we can’t help them because we don’t have funding”