U.N. Panel: $40B Needed to Aid People in War, Disasters

An estimated $40 billion is needed annually to help the rapidly growing number of people needing humanitarian aid as a result of conflicts and natural disasters — and one possibility to help fill the $15 billion funding gap is a small voluntary tax on tickets for soccer games and other sports, concerts and entertainment events, airline travel and gasoline, a U.N.-appointed panel said.

The panel’s report on humanitarian financing, to be launched later Sunday by U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in Dubai, says the world is spending around $25 billion today to provide life-saving assistance to 125 million people devastated by wars and natural disasters — more than 12 times the $2 billion that was spent in 2000.

“We have an exponentially growing problem,” said panel cochair Kristalina Georgieva, the European Commission’s vice president for budget and human resources. “The good news is that the world has never been so generous to people in need. The bad news is that never has our generosity been so insufficient.”

The nine-member panel calculated that an additional $15 billion is needed annually to reduce suffering and ensure that no one in need dies or has to live “without dignity” for a lack of money.

“This is a lot of money, but not out of reach for a world producing $78 trillion of annual GDP,” the panel said in the report to the secretary general released Sunday.

The 31-page report focuses on three interlinked solutions to address the widening financial gap: mobilizing additional funds, shrinking the need for aid, and improving the efficiency of humanitarian assistance.

The report says that today’s massive instability and its capacity to cross borders, demonstrated by the flight of people from Syria and other conflict areas to Europe, “makes humanitarian aid a global public good that requires an appropriate fundraising model.”

It recommends that at the first U.N. humanitarian summit, to be held in Istanbul in May, governments voluntarily sign up to “the successful model of a solidarity levy and create a steady flow of revenues for humanitarian action.”

The report points to a small levy on airline tickets, initially proposed by France, which raised 1.6 billion euros between 2006 and 2011 from just 10 participating countries — Georgieva estimated this at $2.3 billion — to help fund diagnosis and treatment for malaria, tuberculosis and other diseases in low-income countries.

Georgieva said in a briefing from Brussels before the report’s release that the panel couldn’t agree on the specifics of a levy because some members are against taxation.

But she said she is “more optimistic on a voluntary levy, especially combined with social responsibility.”

The report also calls for governments with greater wealth to provide more aid, for the humanitarian community to “harness the power of business to deliver its key skills and capabilities,” including supporting the delivery of aid and creating jobs, and for Muslim countries, which are most affected by conflict, to use “Islamic social finance” to help meet humanitarian needs.

To shrink the need for aid, the panel calls for world leaders to commit to preventing and resolving conflicts and to increasing investments in reducing the risk of natural disasters. In addition to putting more money in these areas, it recommends that aid should focus on “fragile countries” and countries experiencing shocks due to conflicts or natural disasters.

The panel also recommends that humanitarian aid should follow people in need, not countries. Georgieva said this means, for example, that when people fleeing conflict move from Syria to Lebanon and Jordan, those middle-income countries can get access to grants and low-cost loans.

To improve aid delivery, the panel calls for an end to competition between aid organizations and between humanitarian and development agencies.

It calls for donors and aid organizations to come together in “a grand bargain” in which donors provide more cash, long-term, with fewer strings, and aid organizations are more transparent so that everyone can “follow the money.”