Growth in welfare aid stagnating, says report

GROWTH in humanitarian aid slowed for the second year running in 2017 as government spending virtually stagnated, according to a report published yesterday that said the industry needed to find new ways of funding its work.

Overall aid increased by 3 percent year on year, with private donors accounting for almost all that growth, the annual Global Humanitarian Assistance Report showed.

Just 10 governments account for 83 percent of all state contributions and 62 percent of the overall total, said the report compiled by Development Initiatives, an independent global development organization.

Harpinder Collacott, executive director of Development Initiatives, said the stagnation in public funding and reliance on a relatively small number of donors reinforced the need to find new financing mechanisms.

“This includes insurance, concessional loans and guarantees for long-term refugee hosting to complement humanitarian assistance,” said Collacott in a statement.

“We also need to look to wider sources of crisis financing, such as that from multilateral development banks.”

More than 200 million people across 134 countries were in need of international humanitarian assistance in 2017, according to the report, a fifth of them in Syria, Yemen and Turkey.