GENEVA: Massive cuts to humanitarian budgets risk leaving more than 11 million refugees without desperately needed aid, the United Nations warned Friday.
That corresponds to a full third of the number reached last year by the UN refugee agency, UNHCR.
In a new report, the agency highlighted a deadly confluence of factors pummeling millions of refugees and displaced people globally: “rising displacement, shrinking funding and political apathy.”
“We are right now facing a deadly cocktail,” UNHCR’s head of external relations, Dominique Hyde, told reporters in Geneva.
“We are incredibly concerned for refugees and displaced populations around the world.”
Dramatic aid cuts by the United States and other countries have left UNHCR and other aid organizations facing gaping shortfalls.
UNHCR has said it needs $10.6 billion to assist the world’s refugees this year, but so far it has received just 23 percent of that amount.
As a result, the agency said it was seeing $1.4 billion of essential programs being cut or put on hold.
The impact, Hyde cautioned, risks being that “up to 11.6 million refugees and people forced to flee are losing access to humanitarian assistance provided by UNHCR.”
The agency said families were being forced to choose between feeding their children, buying medicines and paying rent.
Malnutrition is especially severe for refugees fleeing war-ravaged Sudan, where the UN has been forced to reduce food rations and nutrition screening, she said, decrying the “devastating impact for children who have fled to Chad.”
The cuts have also forced UNHCR to pause the movement of new arrivals from border areas to safer locations in Chad and South Sudan, “leaving thousands stranded in remote locations,” the agency said.
Health and education services for refugees are also being scaled back worldwide.
In camps in Bangladesh hosting nearly a million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, education programs for some 230,000 children risk being suspended.
UNHCR also said its entire health program in Lebanon was at risk of being shuttered by the end of the year.
Funding for aid programs is not the only issue.
Last month, UNHCR announced it would need to cut 3,500 staff – nearly a third of its workforce worldwide – amid the budget shortfall.
