UN provides $2m to Nepal

United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Valerie Amos today allocated $2 million to United Nations agencies in Nepal. The funding from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) will be used for seven life-saving humanitarian projects in the country. “Three-quarters of the way through this year, humanitarian funding for Nepal is just not adequate,” said Robert Piper, UN Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator in Nepal.
“While the UN and its partners have been able to help hundreds of thousands of Nepalis in need of humanitarian aid, we have not been able to do enough because less than 50 per cent of the Nepal Appeal has been funded,” Piper added. Three and a half million people in Nepal are food insecure, and hunger and malnutrition are high. In addition, since August, monsoon rains have resulted in flooding and landslides in all five regions of the country.
The CERF provided a grant of $353,343 to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), as well as a further grant of $146,760 for UN Habitat. These grants will be used to provide lifesaving water, sanitation and hygiene interventions for 900,000 people in 11 flood and diarrhea prone districts. It will help to promote improved hygiene, to protect water sources with elevated hand pumps and undertake minor repair work to ensure communities have potable water. In addition, UNICEF received $415,327 to be used to continue community based management of acute malnutrition for over 26,000 children in five districts'
The United Nations Population Fund will use $235,871 in CERF grants to provide life saving reproductive health services through mobile outreach camps in four of the most remote districts of Nepal. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) will put $106,196 from the CERF towards maintaining health services in seven camps in eastern Nepal hosting 79,220 refugees from Bhutan. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO) grant of $221,556 will help provide essential medicine, response equipment, emergency health kits, diarrhoeal disease kits and other essential supplies in 10 districts and will equip rapid response teams so they can to respond and provide basic health care.
Finally, the World Food Programme will apply the CERF grant of $520,978 to provide food aid through food-for-work that will benefit 12,000 people. CERF was established in 2006 to make funding for humanitarian emergencies faster and more equitable. Since then, more than 100 Member States and private sector donors have contributed some $1.5 billion to the Fund, which is managed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Nepal has received 21.6 million in allocations over the last four years.