Donor nations are falling short in funding UN humanitarian work in Africa where nations like Angola and Somalia, among others, are in severe need of assistance, officials here say.

Although the United Nations and its partners need 796 million dollars this year, to assist more than 12 million people in Africa, so far the world body has received only 352 million dollars.

“As a result, humanitarian programmes have had to be cut back, and even life-saving assistance in many instances is not being provided where it is urgently required,” says UN spokesman Fred Eckhard.

Sergio Vieira de Mello, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, warns that the shortfall is hurting UN efforts in Angola, where 200 people are estimated to die each day in renewed fighting, and Somalia, where one million people are threatened by famine.

In the worst case, the UN humanitarian appeal for Congo- Brazzaville has not received even one dollar of aid from donors, Vieira de Mello says.

He blames the inattention paid to Africa on the lack of visibility of the region’s recent crises, as well as on “chronic instability” that has made top donors wary of assisting some nations. But other officials also point to the recent upheaval in Kosovo, which has drawn attention away from African conflicts.

Last month, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata told the Security Council that, although appeals for more than 265 million dollars for Kosovo had been filled easily, so far only 60 percent of her agency’s 137-million-dollar budget for Africa had been funded. “There is the perception of disparity in the assistance given,” Ogata observed.

Vieira de Mello says that “major donors have been assuring us that their contributions to the crisis in Kosovo in recent months…were additional.” But the high level of attention on Kosovo could distract governments from paying heed to equally important crises.

In Angola, for example, some three million civilians are affected by fighting between the government and rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). UN aid workers are scrambling to provide food shipments by air to prevent mass starvation, he says.

Nevertheless, in some war-affected towns like Malange, roughly four children are estimated to die each day from hunger, preventable disease or other consequences of the war, Vieira de Mello says.

Other countries in Africa sorely needing assistance include both Congo-Brazzaville and the Congo-Kinshasa, as well as Burundi, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and Eritrea. Yet official development assistance (ODA) and humanitarian funding worldwide has declined over the past decade.

Since 1991, there has been an overall drop in ODA by 30 percent among the top 21 donor countries, falling to a level of only 48 billion dollars by 1997, Vieira de Mello says..

“This does not reflect the will of the taxpayers,” the under- secretary-general adds. When people in major donor nations have been shown the plight of civilians in recent conflict zones like the Sudan, he noted, they have responded by pushing for humanitarian aid.

Still, there is a likely “Kosovo effect” on African aid, with the United States and European Union particularly concerned with providing sufficient assistance to Kosovo in the coming months.

Last month, Denmark cited Kosovo as a reason why it will have to cut its funding to the UN Development Programme by 23 percent in the coming year, in what it says will be a “one-time” cut.

Such a policy, says UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown, would, in essence, “tax Africa to fund Kosovo” – since African nations would be affected most by the loss in UNDP funding. “That is a dangerous trend, and I hope other countries will not follow it.”