U.N. triples coronavirus aid appeal to help most vulnerable countries

UNITED NATIONS, May 7 (APP):The United Nations more than tripled its humanitarian aid appeal on Thursday from $2 billion to $6.7 billion to accommodate its updated global plan to help “fragile countries,” which include Pakistan, fight the coronavirus pandemic.
The enormous expansion of the appeal, announced by Mark Lowcock, the U.N.’s top humanitarian aid official, reflected what he described as an updated global plan that includes nine additional countries deemed especially vulnerable: Benin, Djibouti, Liberia, Mozambique, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Togo and Zimbabwe.
He said that the world’s poorest countries are not expected to experience the peak of COVID-19 until sometime in the next three to six months, but that already those areas are seeing lost jobs and income, as well as tighter food supplies and children going without vaccinations.
An earlier appeal asked for $2 billion in funding, and the agency said Thursday it needs a total of $6.7 billion.
“If we do not support the poorest people – especially women and girls and other vulnerable groups – as they battle the pandemic and impacts off the global recession, we will all be dealing with the spillover effects for many years to come. That would prove even more painful, and much more expensive, for everyone,” Lowcock said.
Lowcock said “In the poorest countries we can already see economies contracting as export earnings, remittances and tourism disappear.”
“Unless we take action now, we should be prepared for a significant rise in conflict, hunger and poverty,” he warned. “The specter of multiple famines looms.”
World Food Programme Executive Director David Beasley said the U.N. food agency helps nearly 100 million people on any given day and “unless we can keep those essential operations going, the health pandemic will soon be followed by a hunger pandemic.”
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said the caseload in most of the developing countries targeted for assistance in the U.N. appeal “may seem small, but we know that the surveillance, laboratory testing and health systems’ capacity in these countries are weak.”
“It is therefore likely that there is undetected community transmission happening,” he said.
U.N. refugee chief Filippo Grandi said the impact of the pandemic on people who fled wars and persecution has been devastating.
He said the needs of refugees, people displaced in their own countries, stateless people and their hosts are vast but not insurmountable.
Only collective action to curb the threat of the coronavirus can save lives, Grandi said.
Lowcock, the humanitarian chief, said the COVID-19 pandemic is unlike anything we have dealt with in our lifetime.
“Extraordinary measures are needed,” he said. “As we come together to combat this virus, I urge donors to act in both solidarity and in self-interest and make their response proportionate to the scale of the problem
we face.”