It's All About The Money - AID

Who holds the purse strings in the humanitarian economy?

 

There are plenty of gripes about the humanitarian system, but most of them boil down to money. According to the UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, less than one-fifth of the US$19.44 billion required for humanitarian response this year has been funded, creating frontline cash shortages and spending cutbacks across the board.
With protracted conflicts in Syria, Iraq and South Sudan driving record levels of displacement, migrant crises in Europe and Southeast Asia, and a string of natural disasters, most recently the earthquake in Nepal, demand has never been greater.
And as a result, the rising cost of responding to these growing needs – and how to plug that funding gap – is dominating debate in the aid sector and is likely to become one of the key themes at next year’s World Humanitarian Summit (WHS).

“There are an increasing number of concurrent chronic crises and the demands are becoming unsustainable,” Mike Noyes, head of humanitarian response at ActionAid, told IRIN. “The World Humanitarian Summit will not be a success unless financing is a central part of the agenda.”
In May, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon set up a high-level panel to come up with solutions for a more timely and predictable system of humanitarian funding, and to suggest ways that resources could be deployed more effectively.
Its nine members met together for the first time in late June and they are due to report back ahead of WHS next May.

 


There is more to read here, but it all stresses that everything is dependent on money. Within this global economic system it couldn't be any other way. The question so rarely posited is how much better could things be managed for the vast majority of the global population without these monetary constraints?
Think Socialism!