U.N. increases humanitarian aid need to $4.9B for 2011

The U.N. on Wednesday said during a donor meeting in Geneva that "it needs $7.9 billion this year, $500 million more than it had originally sought, to fund relief operations in the face of spreading humanitarian crises in Africa and Asia," Reuters reports (7/20).

"U.N. agencies and their partners had asked for $7.4 billion for humanitarian emergencies in 2011, but that figure has since risen to $7.9 billion as a result of increasing needs in some regions, including the Horn of Africa, where a severe drought has left 11.5 million people in need, Valerie Amos, under-secretary-general for Humanitarian Affairs, told reporters in Geneva," the U.N. News Centre writes (7/20). "But so far only $3.4 billion had been received towards the initial appeal total of $7.4 billion, a shortfall of 55 percent, Amos said," Reuters notes.

The funding request falls under the U.N.'s Consolidated Appeals Process (CAP), "which brings its own agencies involved in humanitarian operations together with non-governmental and voluntary aid organizations … [to] plan, coordinate and implement an agreed response to natural disasters and complex emergencies like wars and civil conflicts," the news agency writes (7/20).

Also on Wednesday, Somali President Sheikh Sharif Ahmed "issued an urgent appeal for international aid" for famine assistance in his country during an exclusive interview with CNN at his residence in Mogadishu. "The situation is very severe. The conditions are very harsh," he said (7/21).

"According to the U.N., more than six out of every 10,000 people are dying of hunger every day in some parts of the Bakool and Lower Shabelle regions of Somalia, with more than half the children there suffering from acute malnutrition. This is far above the normal famine threshold of two deaths per 10,000 people a day, and 30% malnutrition levels, U.N. agencies say," the Guardian writes (Rice, 7/20). The Guardian also published a Q&A addressing the U.N.'s famine declaration in those regions (Tran, 7/20).