Source: United Nations (Video News)
Briefing by Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, on the situation in Yemen.
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In his briefing to the Council, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher said, “severe funding cuts have been a body blow to our work to save lives.”
Fletcher said, “individual countries to decide how to spend their money. But it is the pace at which so much vital work has been shut down that adds to the perfect storm that we face.”
He told the Council that in Yemen and elsewhere, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) will need to cut expenses “dramatically,” and evaluate “the implications of the tough choices we are making on which lives not to save.”
Fletcher pointed out that “the crisis has a disproportionate and devastating impact on women and girls” who have suffered “from systematic discrimination and exclusion for decades.”
He said, “I am not here to defend programmes, spreadsheets and institutions, but people.”