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United Arab Emirates Joins U.N. Humanitarian Donor Group

U.S. seeking more partnerships for Donor Support Group

The United States is seeking more countries to join a U.N. humanitarian donor partnership group - thereby playing a greater role in international cooperation during emergencies - and the United Arab Emirates announced its membership May 10.

The United Arab Emirates announcement means there are now 18 countries, plus the European Union, in the Donor Support Group, which is the governing body for the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

Membership in the Donor Support Group means joining a close-knit group of the most active humanitarian donors in the world, said Bill Garvelink, a senior official with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Trading e-mails and phone calls among a small, often informal circle of administrators, these donors help manage the distribution of more than $2 billion of OCHA relief funds annually, as well as coordinate their own countries' emergency efforts to avoid overlap and duplication of effort at critical times when lives are at stake.

The United States is nearing the end of its yearlong rotating chairmanship of the group, and Garvelink actively is seeking more nations to join, he said in a Washington File interview following a Support Group conference in Istanbul, Turkey, at the end of April.

Membership in the Donor Support Group costs $300,000 a year to help run U.N. administrative offices, said Garvelink, who is deputy assistant administrator for the USAID's Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance.

EMERGENCY RESPONSES INCREASINGLY REGIONAL

Response to humanitarian emergencies is increasingly regional and even global in scale, he said. Membership in the U.N. mechanism allows better coordination with myriad relief efforts and also improves international recognition of each country's contributions to emergencies, as well as coordination with contributions by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Countries such as the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, China, South Korea and many others already together are contributing hundreds of millions of dollars to world emergencies, Garvelink said. By joining the support group, these countries are not just donors but also emerging partners in the international community, with more say on how that money best would be spent.

For example, Turkey provided $150 million in assistance to Pakistan following the October 2005 South Asia earthquake, Garvelink said. Other Middle Eastern countries donated hundreds of millions of dollars, primarily though the Red Crescent societies. "It would be useful if everybody knew about that," he said.

By integrating such efforts into the humanitarian networks of the United Nations, the donations "get reported very quickly" and international relief administrators can reduce overlapping efforts. (See U.S. Response to the Earthquake in South Asia.)

Also, regional partnerships are forming to contend with the increasingly multinational scale of disasters. Middle Eastern nations may want to pool their resources to form a regional group, with pre-stocked warehouses. "The U.A.E. could become a regional hub for humanitarian assistance," Garvelink said. "$300,000 is not that much for the U.A.E. to join the system."

The United Arab Emirates announced its membership during an OCHA meeting May 10 in Abu Dhabi, according to the OCHA news and information service.

"The current humanitarian scene calls for leveraging cooperation among U.N. agencies and NGOs to enhance dialogue, exchange information, and develop ideas for effective humanitarian work," said Sheikh Hamden bin Zayed Al Nahyan, United Arab Emirates deputy prime minister and head of the its Red Crescent.

The United Arab Emirates membership was expected to lead to its greater involvement with multinational organizations delivering aid throughout the Middle East, OCHA said.

Many nations view the United Nations as "kind of a closed group" where emerging nationss have little clout, Garvelink said. But the Donor Support Group is a small, informal group of like-minded members. "We've got each other's phone numbers and e-mails," he said.

CENTRAL EMERGENCY RESPONSE FUND

When the Asian Tsunami showed a need for a system that can very rapidly respond to a sudden and complex catastrophe, the Donor Support Group helped lay the groundwork for the new $500 million Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), Garvelink said. The United States in April announced it will contribute $10 million to the new CERF reserve. (See related article.)

Jan Egeland, the U.N. under secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, announced May 10 that $32 million of CERF money will be made available for what the United Nations considers the "10 most underfunded emergencies in the world," according to a United Nations press release. CERF was approved by the General Assembly in December 2005 and officially launched in March.

The Donor Support Group meets several times each year, including an annual field meeting to view firsthand the results of the group's work. The most recent field meeting took place in Pakistan to survey relief efforts following the October 2005 earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people in the nearly inaccessible mountains north of Islamabad.

Members of the Donor Support Group include: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the European Union, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States and now the United Arab Emirates.

Source: U.S. Department of State

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