One in 33 people will need aid to meet basic needs like food, water and sanitation in 2021, an increase of 40 percent from this year, the UN said in its Global Humanitarian Overview 2021.
That translates to 235 million people worldwide.
“The picture we’re painting this year is the bleakest and darkest perspective on humanitarian needs we’ve ever set out, and that’s because the pandemic has reaped carnage across the most fragile and vulnerable countries on the planet,” said UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock, who heads the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). He went on to explain, “For the first time since the 1990s, extreme poverty is going to increase, life expectancy will fall, the annual death toll from HIV, tuberculosis and malaria is set to double. We fear a near doubling in the number of people facing starvation.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a statement said. “Humanitarian aid budgets face dire shortfalls as the impact of the global pandemic continues to worsen. The lives of people … already living on a knife’s edge are being hit disproportionately hard by rising food prices, falling incomes, interrupted vaccination programs and school closures.”
Lowcock said that it was not the pandemic, but rather its economic impact that is having the greatest effect on humanitarian needs. “These all hit the poorest people in the poorest countries hardest of all,” he said. “For the poorest, the hangover from the pandemic will be long and hard.”
UN: COVID-19 will increase humanitarian needs in 2021 | Central African Republic | Al Jazeera
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