World govts slow to come up with tsunami aid, says UN

Six weeks after the Indian Ocean tsunami tragedy, the UN has received little more than a third of tsunami aid funding pledged by governments, a senior official said today.

While the UN appeal of €760.8m has been largely met with written commitments, only €276.4m has been donated, said Margareta Wahlstrom, special envoy of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

“It’s a very laborious process to get to 100 % of the appeal,” she said in Geneva.

“This is our key message to government donors: Please convert your pledges into hard cash in the bank. It’s only cash in the bank that makes it possible to do work on the ground.”

Despite the unprecedented outpouring of promises of help in the disaster’s wake, bureaucratic regulations and government earmarking have made it difficult to transform pledges into money readily accessible, she said.

“It has partly to do with how governments take decisions, and then once they have taken the decisions, how to implement the decisions.”

The problem is that while government pledges may be confirmed, there may be still be a significant time lapse before countries can come up with the money, said Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.