An estimated $40 billion is needed annually to help the rapidly growing number of people needing humanitarian aid as a result of conflicts and natural disasters – and one possibility to help fill the $15 billion funding gap is a small voluntary tax on tickets for soccer games and other sports, concerts and entertainment events, airline travel, and gasoline, a UN-appointed panel said.
The panel’s report on humanitarian financing, to be launched later Sunday by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in Dubai, says the world is spending around $25 billion today to provide life-saving assistance to 125 million people devastated by wars and natural disasters – more than 12 times the $2 billion that was spent in 2000.
“We have an exponentially growing problem,” said panel co-chair Kristalina Georgieva, the European Commission’s vice president for budget and human resources. “The good news is that the world has never been so generous to people in need. The bad news is that never has our generosity been so insufficient.”
The nine-member panel calculated that an additional $15 billion is needed annually to reduce suffering and ensure that no one in need dies or has to live “without dignity” for a lack of money.
“This is a lot of money, but not out of reach for a world producing $78 trillion of annual GDP,” the panel said in the report to the secretary-general released today.
The 31-page report focuses on three inter-linked solutions to address the widening financial gap: mobilizing additional funds, shrinking the need for aid, and improving the efficiency of humanitarian assistance.
The report says that today’s massive instability and its capacity to cross borders, demonstrated by the flight of people from Syria and other conflict areas to Europe, “makes humanitarian aid a global public good that requires an appropriate fundraising model.”
It recommends that at the first UN humanitarian summit, to be held in Istanbul in May, governments voluntarily sign up to “the successful model of a solidarity levy and create a steady flow of revenues for humanitarian action.”
The report points to a small levy on airline tickets, initially proposed by France, which raised 1.6 billion euros between 2006 and 2011 from just 10 participating countries – Georgieva estimated this at $2.3 billion – to help fund diagnosis and treatment for HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in low-income countries.
Georgieva said in a video briefing from Brussels before the report’s release that the panel couldn’t agree on the specifics of a levy because some members are against taxation.
But she said she is “more optimistic on a voluntary levy, especially combined with social responsibility.”
The panel has talked about a small tax on “high-volume transaction businesses” like Uber, concerts, entertainment, movies and sports and has been talking to some “potential players” including FIFA, the governing body of world football, Georgieva said.
She said people probably wouldn’t feel a five-cent or 10-cent addition to a ticket or a ride, but the money generated could have a major humanitarian impact.
The report also calls for governments with greater wealth to provide more aid, for the humanitarian community to “harness the power of business to deliver its key skills and capabilities” including by supporting the delivery of aid and creating jobs, and for Muslim countries, which are most affected by conflict, to use “Islamic social finance” to help meet humanitarian needs.
