With the UN chief calling on “the world’s collective and prioritized attention” to help the Government of Pakistan meet the enormous challenges brought on by the ongoing floods, the international humanitarian response is expected to accelerate.Under the UN’s stewardship, a Flash Appeal of $160 million has been launched to provide “5.2 million people with food, water, sanitation, emergency education, protection and health support,” as part of government’s ‘Pakistan Floods Response Plan 2022’.
As per the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA), a Flash Appeal is defined as “An inter-agency humanitarian response strategy to a major disaster that requires a coordinated response beyond the capacity of thegovernment or any single agency. The appeal addresses acute needs for a common planning horizon, normally up to six months.”Flash Appeals are effective in complementing the affected country’s own efforts in dealing with the disaster.
The $160 million appeal is a significant start, and it should help the government in coordinating a global response. Considering the mounting scale of the devastations, Pakistan may require much more international support to overcome the magnitude of this challenge across all provinces and regions.Recall that back during Pakistan’s ‘Great Floods’ in Jul-Aug 2010, the UN had initially launched a Flash Appeal of $460 million to meet the immediate relief requirements. Then UN chief also visited Pakistan in mid-August that year.
The international response at the time eventually summed up to $2.65 billion, as per the UN-OCHA figures. Out of that amount, 26 percent of the funding was provided by the United States, 13 percent by private individuals and organizations, 11 percent by Japan, 9 percent by United Kingdom, and 7 percent by the European Commission. (India also provided $26 million of support in that crisis). Global funding continued to trickle in long after the crisis had passed, focusing on rehabilitation and reconstruction.
Can Pakistan receive a similar international response as it did back in 2010? Keeping geopolitics of global aid aside, it is clear that donors are already responding to multiple crises this year. Right now, several UN appeals are active, most notable of them being the Ukraine Flash Appeal ($4.3 billion), Afghanistan’s Humanitarian Response Plan ($4.4 billion), the Ukraine Regional Refugee Response Plan ($1.85 billion), besides multi-billion-dollar humanitarian response plans in Yemen, Syria, Ethiopia, Sudan and the DRC. (UN appeals and plans are also active for dozens of more countries).
There is already a severeshortfall in global humanitarian funding. As per the UN-OCHA estimates, some $49 billion in funding is required to meet the financing needs of all active UN appeals and humanitarian plans during 2022. Whereas the funding received thus far is about $16 billion, indicating that two-thirds of financing requirements remain unmet. Covid-19 has indeed strained the balance sheets of advanced countries’ governments as well as private philanthropic organizations.
Only a handful of countries meet bulk of global humanitarian funding requirements. Analysis of UN-OCHA data show that roughly 80 percent of the $16 billion in global humanitarian funding receivedthus far this year is made by just a few countries (mainly in North America and Europe). Almost half of those funds are provided by the US, a quarter (combined) byGermany, Sweden, Canada, UK, Norway and Japan, and a tenth by the European Commi-ssion.Government of Pakistan may do well to liaise more with these countries, as well as with brotherly countries, for sizable and immediate floods-related foreign assistance.
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