Progress of COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan
We reported on 26 March [1] that the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) launched the COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan (Global HRP) which aims to raise $2 billion to fight the virus in 53 of the world’s poorest countries, and address the needs of the most vulnerable people.
By 19 April the Global HRP had raised $550 million [2].
In an interview on BBC HARDtalk [3] first broadcast on the day the Global HRP was launched, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described it as a “drop in the ocean”, and contrasted it with the $2 trillion (a thousand times as much) which the US Senate has approved just to help the US economy.
He went on to say that the world needs a significantly larger package: “We need to have a double-digit percentage package of the global economy.”
The world economy is about $80 trillion, so 10% of that would be $8 trillion. Guterres continued:
“It’s no longer to rescue the financial system. This is not a financial crisis: it is a human crisis. This package needs to be put in place in order to support salaries of those that are losing their jobs; in order to support companies for them to preserve those jobs and preserve their existence; in order to keep households afloat, keep companies afloat, especially small and medium-size businesses: in order to have the global economy able to survive this crisis. And also to have concerted action in relation to the exit strategy, in relation to the recovery of the economy with an opportunity. This is an opportunity to have a recovery with an ever more sustainable and inclusive economy. We don’t need to rebuild everything as it was; we can do it much better in the future.”
On 19 April, leaders from many global humanitarian agencies published an open letter [2] to the donor community urgently calling for a further $350 million to support the global emergency supply system and enable a rapid scale-up of logistics common services.
References
[1] https://unacov.uk/covid-19-global-humanitarian-response-plan
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csy9fx