Donorkonference i januar lovede mere end 1,5 milliard dollars til hjælp i Syrien. Halvdelen er nu er hus efter at Kuwait har afsat 300 millioner til at hjælpe ofrene for borgerkrigen.
DUBAI, 18 April, 2013 (IRIN): UN officials are lauding as a “big achievement” today’s announcement that Kuwait has officially allocated $300 million promised for humanitarian aid in Syria.
Only once before has a Gulf country contributed such a large amount of money through multilateral channels – when Saudi Arabia made a $500 million contribution to the World Food Programme (WFP) in 2008, the single largest cash donation ever made to a UN agency.
Kuwait’s announcement is a follow-through of the pledge it made at a major international conference on 30 January, in Kuwait, which saw more than US $1.5 billion in aid promised; it was one of the largest and most successful fundraising events in UN history (See the full list of pledges here ). Yet hundreds of millions of dollars pledged at the conference by other donors have yet to materialize, and aid agencies in Syria are threatening to cut programming because of funding shortages.
Kuwait has already begun handing over $275 million in cheques to UN agencies, with another $25 million going to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
“We are … matching our words with our deeds,” Dharar Abdul-Razzak Razzooqi, Kuwaiti ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, told journalists at a press conference today.
With Kuwait’s allocations, about half of the $1.5 billion has been committed or contributed, meaning the donor has provided details of the amount each recipient agency will receive or has actually transferred the money.
“Without the Kuwait timely contribution now, we would all be in extreme difficulties, immediately,” Antonio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said at the press conference. “This gives us the breathing space to allow [us] to wait for other countries to commit themselves as Kuwait did and to make their pledges transformed into reality.”
In December 2012, the UN appealed for $1.5 billion to help people both inside and outside Syria in the first six months of 2013, through two UN-coordinated response plans. As of 18 April, aid agencies had received approximately $810 million towards those appeals – or about 52 percent of the requested funding.
While the January conference was meant to meet those financial needs, not all the $1.5 billion pledged at the event will go towards the $1.5 billion needed for the response plans, with some donors choosing to fund project through other channels.
FTS has so far tracked $336 million committed for humanitarian aid towards the Syrian crisis in 2013 outside of the two appeals.
Revised UN-coordinated plans, including the financial costs of aid programs for the second half of the year, will be presented at the end of May. Guterres said the number of refugees by year end could easily be triple the number accounted for in the current plans.
Gulf donors
Læse hele artiklen på IRIN News: http://www.irinnews.org/Report/97877/Promised-aid-funding-for-Syria-reaches-half-way-point
