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Aid agencies warn of lack of funds for Pakistan flood relief

Aid agencies warn of lack of funds for Pakistan flood relief:

Agencies say programmes to help flood victims could be cut back because of a sluggish response from donors

Talk point: Why have donations for Pakistan been so low?

Flood relief programmes in Pakistan could be forced to close in the next couple of months because of a lack of funds, aid agencies warned on Wednesday.

Oxfam, Save the Children, Care and Acted (Agency for Technical Co-operation and Development) say programmes could be cut back in the new year unless the donor community increases its response to flooding that has hit the Sindh region since August.

Oxfam said it would have to cut back its programmes after December because it had not raised as much money as it had hoped. A spokesman said the organisation had wanted to raise $36.1m (£22.5m) for flood relief this year, but had only raised around $12.8m. Save the Children said it was operating with a shortfall of around a third, having raised $10m out of desired $30m. Care is facing a shortfall in funds of 91%.

The UN, which has raised just $96.5m of the $357m it wants for flood relief, called the appeal "distressingly underfunded". The agency has warned that if more funding is not received, relief supplies would run out within weeks.

The Pakistan government is also facing a funding crisis and might have to scale down its relief efforts.

Pakistan was still recovering from severe flooding in 2010 – in which 10 years worth of rain fell in just three weeks – when monsoon rains this year brought flash flooding in the south. More than 9 million people have been affected by this year's flooding and more than 1.58m homes in Sindh and 26,000 in Balochistan have been destroyed or damaged.

According to the aid agencies, more than three-quarters of the affected households have not received any shelter, while 800,000 people are still displaced. Around 3 million people are estimated to be in need of emergency food assistance. At least 2 million adults and 3 million children are at risk of disease, they said.

A lack of media coverage has been blamed for the sluggish response to the funding appeals.

"People were not aware of the scale of the disaster," said David Wright, Pakistan country director for Save the Children. He called the floods a "mega disaster", on the scale of the south-east Asian tsunami in 2004 in terms of the destruction of livelihoods and homes and basic infrastructure, although without the high number of fatalities. "The DEC [disaster emergency committee] appeal [for the floods] was successful last year. It does come down to lack of coverage."

Wright said Save the Children's programmes had already been hit by the shortfall of money. "We had ambitions of meeting 1 million people with our integrated response … We deployed teams very quickly, as soon as the government declared a disaster. But our shelters were left idle as we ran out of equipment. We're not cutting back, we're already operating under capacity."

A spokesman for Oxfam said its flood response aims to provide clean water, sanitation and hygiene facilities, animal fodder, kitchen kits and toolkits to around 3.9 million people. "Though we have reached over 1 million people we have not been able to provide everything we had planned to in the communities where we are working," he said. "Due to lack of funds in certain cases we have had to choose between what is most urgently needed and provide that instead of following our set plan of action. Due to the limited funds we have also not been able to provide water and sanitation to as many people as we had aimed for."

Earlier this year, NGOs criticised the international community for not doing enough to help Pakistan recover from the 2010 floods, putting the country on the back foot when this year's monsoon season began.

Calculations on the amount of money allocated per person affected by the 2010 Pakistan floods, conducted by Global Humanitarian Assistance, was estimated to be $120, compared with $3,752 per person for the 2004 tsunami. The amount for the Horn of Africa drought and famine this year is estimated to be around $123.

Both Oxfam and Save the Children rejected suggestions that the number of emergency appeals launched this year – from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March to the food crisis in Africa – or the global financial crisis had diluted the response for Pakistan. Wright said that it wasn't unusual for two or three emergency appeals to be launched in one year.

• Pakistan
• Natural disasters and extreme weather
• Aid

Liz Ford

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