UN Launches Appeal for Sahel Region Aid Plan Funds

By Jonathan Rozen Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 3 2014 (IPS) - The United Nations Monday appealed to the international community for two billion dollars as part of a three year Regional Strategic Response Plan to provide aid and support to the African Sahel region.

While providing immediate assistance to the urgent humanitarian needs of the region, the programme will also focus on supporting the root causes of the crises by engaging issues of governance, security and development. The UN led programme will also connect systemic and domestic levels, from international actors to the people of the countries involved.

This region — composing Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Gambia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal — is home to 20 million starving people, including 5 million children experiencing extreme malnutrition. These countries have also faced an influx of over 1.2 million refugees, as a result of nearby conflicts in Sudan, South Sudan, Central African Republic (CAR), Niger and Mali.

“More people than ever are at risk in the Sahel and the scale of their needs is so great that no agency or organisation can tackle it alone,” said Valerie Amos, Emergency Relief Coordinator, at the programme launch in Rome.

Many areas of the region have been hit with the perfect storm of natural and manmade disasters including drought, flood and conflict.

“Our first priority is to ensure that farmers in the Sahel have a successful planting season in the coming weeks, providing them urgently with agricultural inputs,” said José Graziano da Silva, U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation Director-General. “But our responsibility is also to make sure that the next drought will not lead to another major humanitarian crisis.”

In a meeting with Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in November 2013, Jim Yong Kim, World Bank Group president, added a pledge of 1.5 billion dollars in regional investments to its existing country specific programmes over the next two years. The European Union (EU) also announced it will provide 5 billion euros (6.75 billion dollars) to six countries in the region over the next seven years.

A similar Regional Strategic Response Plan appeal was made for the Sahel region in 2013, and was 63 percent funded.