Humanitarian needs up, Funding down - UN Official

EU development ministers leading international voices in development, humanitarian assistance and global crisis response are meeting at Dublin Castle today as part of Ireland's EU presidency. The meeting comes ahead of tomorrow's first anniversary of a ceasefire in Gaza and days after the three-year anniversary of Hamas' attacks on Israel. More than 1,400 people in Gaza have been killed in Israeli attacks since that ceasefire, according to Gaza's Hamas-run health ministry. The UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Tom Fletcher, is attending the gathering in Dublin and is with us now. Tom Fletcher, good morning. You're very welcome to Morning Ireland. Good morning, Gavin. Great to be with you. Tell us about what's being discussed in Dublin over these two days.

So this is great leadership from Ireland as Presidency. bringing together this group of ministers, because this is a time when the humanitarian needs around the world are going up. Hundreds of millions need help, but also funding globally is going down enormously. And so what the Irish presidency is doing is galvanizing leaders of development across Europe and beyond, actually. Interesting move. Canada and the UK and Iceland as well.

We're having a little bit of difficulty with Tom's line. Is Tom still there? Tom, can you hear me? Yeah, still here. Sorry, Tom, there was a little bit of a dropout on the line there. You were telling us about what's being discussed at this meeting and in the context, particularly of the disbandment of USAID, a study published in The Lancet recently crediting their programmes with preventing 91 million deaths, including 30 million deaths of children under the age of five in the first two decades of this century alone. How is that going to be replaced?

Well, actually, the U.S. has come back in in the last year or so as the largest donor in the international humanitarian assistance globally. Now, it's not as much as it was before. It's way down from where it was. But the funding that we're getting, over $5 billion from the U.S. a year, is saving tens of millions of lives this year. You know, we're setting out as the global humanitarian effort to save 87 million lives this year, and we're over 41 million already globally. And we're determined to strain every sinew to save as many people as we can.

We'll talk about gas in a moment, but can you tell us about where your particular focus is worldwide this year? You said 87 million people across the globe. That's a huge ambition.

It's massive. And of course, that doesn't reach the hundreds of millions of others who need that help. But we want to start with the people in the highest severity areas, the people who will die if we don't reach them. And so during the UN General Assembly a couple of weeks ago, I was looking to get 10 agreements in place that would help us reach 11 million people who are currently across the battle lines, the people that we can't currently get to in Sudan, in Gaza, as you mentioned, in Somalia, in South Sudan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Myanmar. all the places that I visit regularly. And, you know, often people ask me, what will it look like if the