Remarks by Joyce Msuya, Assistant Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator, at the ECOSOC Humanitarian Affairs Segment
“Underfunding and the Cost of Inaction: How to address one of the main challenges to humanitarian response”
As delivered
Good afternoon and thank you very much for joining the ECOSOC Humanitarian Affairs Segment side event on underfunding and the cost of inaction. It is a pleasure to be here with you all, alongside many humanitarians in the room, as well as donors who support humanitarian assistance across the globe.
When I presented our Global Humanitarian Overview for 2024 in Geneva in December last year, I asked everyone to imagine how much we could achieve, how many more people we could reach, how many more lives we could help rebuild if we received the funds we needed.
Halfway through the year, I am sorry to report that this remains a distant dream.
Instead, the Global Humanitarian Overview mid-year update paints a deeply concerning picture.
Following the worst funding shortfall in years last year, we went to great lengths this year to define our financial ask more tightly and to focus assistance on the most vulnerable populations.
Sadly, however, halfway through the year, we have received less than 20 per cent of the US$48 billion required. This is 18 per cent lower, in absolute terms, than we had received at the same time last year.
This lack of funding, combined with other factors such as obstructed access, is forcing the UN and our humanitarian partners to make even tougher decisions about who receives aid.
Full programmes have had to be halted or severely cut back.
The World Food Programme has had to reduce or abandon assistance to people facing crisis levels of acute food insecurity – or IPC level 3 – to focus on those facing emergency, catastrophic or famine levels of hunger. The result is a risk of driving even more people towards these higher levels of food insecurity and hunger.
In Syria, where people are facing their worst humanitarian situation in 13 years of conflict, WFP had to suspend its emergency food assistance for several months. Thankfully this assistance has since resumed, but only to one third of people who need it.
In Burkina Faso, 1.3 million people will be left without assistance to face acute levels of food insecurity during the upcoming lean season.
And for refugees in South Sudan, WFP has had to reduce rations to 70 per cent for those facing catastrophic hunger conditions, and by 50 per cent for those facing emergency levels of food insecurity.
Healthcare is also suffering.
In Syria, for instance, where around two-thirds of hospitals and half of primary care facilities are out of service, almost 15 million people risk losing access to health and nutrition support due to funding shortages.
Lack of funding for primary healthcare services directly translates into an increased risk of non-communicable diseases, worsening maternal and child mortality, and loss of mental health and psychosocial support.
Likewise, when water, sanitation and hygiene assistance is not adequately funded, people face a heightened risk of disease.
In Afghanistan, lack of funding has led to a surge in acute watery diarrhoea and cholera, with more than 25,000 cases in the first quarter of the year, mainly affecting children under the age of five.
We are facing the same troubling consequences of underfunding and inaction across all areas of humanitarian action, including education, gender-based violence services, and cash support for internally displaced people and refugees.
And the impacts of these funding shortfalls are not uniform.
The cost has been particularly hard-felt in the nine most underfunded crises – Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Honduras, Mali, Myanmar and Sudan – where on average, funding has been 15 percentage points lower than elsewhere.
The consequences are direct: The number of people reached with assistance in these places is around 18 per cent lower.
Meanwhile, impediments to access are adding to the challenges of reaching people in need.
The severe access challenges in both Sudan and Gaza – and the serious potential for famine – are well known.
In addition, in Gaza, there are no international Emergency Medical Teams deployed in Rafah or northern Gaza due to huge levels of insecurity, while the medical evacuation of critically ill or injured patients remains suspended.
In Burkina Faso, access impediments have meant that 52 per cent of the total new displacements – nearly 29,000 people – did not receive any assistance in the first quarter of 2024.
And in Mozambique, due to recurrent attacks by non-State armed groups, development and peace actors have been unable to implement projects, particularly in Cabo Delgado, leaving humanitarians to try and cover the gap.
I visited Cabo Delgado at the end of last year, and I know how much this support is needed – I met young women exposed to huge risks on a daily basis, as they struggle to provide for themselves and their families.
None of this is for want of sacrifice, resolve and courage on the part of the humanitarian community.
Even when faced with enormous operational challenges and significant threats to their own security, humanitarian workers, as always, have rallied to the cause and continue to provide assistance in the most fragile settings.
In the first five months of the year, humanitarians were able to reach almost 40 million people with some form of assistance.
Local partner organisations continue to be at the forefront of this.
For example, in Ukraine, 80 per cent of the 500 organizations that provided support to 4.4 million people in the first quarter of this year were local and national organizations.
However, despite their incredible ability to do so much, with less and less, we cannot expect humanitarian workers to be miracle workers.
Underfunding and access challenges in the first half of the year have meant that just 27 per cent of the people we aimed to support in the 2024 Global Humanitarian Overview have received assistance.
We all know that this is a persistent problem, and one that is likely to continue as long as the drivers of need remain unaddressed.
That is why at OCHA we are taking steps to find solutions.
We are making humanitarian responses more efficient and effective, through innovations such as anticipatory action and early action.
We are also making humanitarian responses more localized and accountable to people in need.
We are lightening the Humanitarian Programme Cycle.
We are asking donors for more flexible funding, that can be disbursed rapidly, support underfunded emergencies and multi-regional responses, and is available for preparedness and anticipatory action.
And we continue to work with our partners, including through the Inter-Agency Standing
Committee, to increase the availability of development finance in emergency and fragile settings, to lessen the burden on humanitarians to provide basic services.
But as we go into the second half of the year, the unavoidable reality is that nothing fully replaces the need for donors to step forward with outstanding funding – funding for our partners, for our country appeals, for country-based pooled funds, for the Central Emergency Response Fund.
Every cent matters.
So, alongside efforts to transform humanitarian assistance, this is what we continue to advocate for at every opportunity, including this week here.
And we really need all hands to the pump on this one.
Thank you.
