On Friday 2 February, the Commission announced that it had allocated more than €56 million in humanitarian aid for 2024 to help people in distress in Asia and the Pacific. These funds will help people affected by the main humanitarian crises underway in the region, and will strengthen disaster preparedness in a region exposed to natural hazards, it stressed in a press release.
Bangladesh will receive €26.5 million and Myanmar €19.2 million to help them deal with the humanitarian consequences of the conflict in Myanmar and the needs of the nearly one million Rohingya refugees living in Bangladesh. An additional €2 million will be used to tackle the refugee crisis throughout the region, mainly as a result of the violence in Myanmar, which is displacing people to neighbouring countries such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
€2.6 million will be allocated to the Philippines to address the protracted crisis in the Mindanao region, where people continue to suffer the effects of armed violence combined with disasters caused by natural hazards.
€4 million will go towards strengthening disaster preparedness in Nepal. These funds will help to strengthen local preparedness and response capacity. A further €1.7 million will support disaster preparedness efforts in other parts of the region. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)