United Nations Children's Fund (Unicef) is facing shortage of fund to run its programmes in flood-hit areas and needs urgent funding to meet the needs of the victims. A recently released Unicef Flood Progress Report states that without further funding, Unicef will not be able to sustain its current response scale to meet the needs of women, children in nutrition, health, education, wash and protection in flood areas.
It further stated that Unicef requirement for flood areas was $251.1 million but Unicef received $169 million from donor. In this situation the current funding gap is $82.1 million.
Report disclosed that huge magnitude of flood in Pakistan and their progression along the Indus River caused dramatic increase in the numbers of affected people over August and September 2010. As a result, the funding required to respond grew steadily between August and November. Unicef released resources twice from its Emergency Programme Funds making loans available immediately for response efforts.
In report, it has been further stated that Unicef also accessed the Central Emergence Response Fund (CERF) receiving two grants to continue the immediate response activities in the first few weeks of the emergency. In August both Anthony Lake ,Executive Director of Unicef and Dan Toole, Unicef Regional Director for South Asia visited the flood affected areas to survey the damage and to reinforce an urgent plea for support on behalf of flood victims.
There have been ten top donors which excluding pledges vowed to contribute $21,203152, United Kingdom to $14,035,950, German Committee for Unicef to $10,504,095, Australian Committee for Unicef $5,532,257, French Committee for Unicef $4,224,637 and Netherland Committee for Unicef to $3,979,239. In report Unicef requested donor to fulfil their promises for flood victims otherwise Unicef will not able to sustain its current response scale to meet the needs of people in flood areas.
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