UNRWA: donors dally, finally rally.

• Position: UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East - Includes related article on role of the UNRWA and its education program

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) was established by the General Assembly in 1949 to help the 750,000 Palestine refugees who lost their homes and livelihood as a result of the conflict in Palestine in 1948. UNRWA is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions from the international community. major donors include members of the European Union, collectively as well as individually, the United States, the Nordic countries, Japan, Canada, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

In the last five years, the Agency has had a chronic situation of budget deficit at the end of each year, thus there had been four rounds of austerity measures. This year, UNRWA was facing a gap of $70 million between the Agency's budget as approved by the General Assembly and its estimated income. A saving of some $50 million had been achieved by these measures, but $20 million remained unfunded by mid-August. Because of this deficit, UNRWA had to announce, for the first time in its history, severe cuts on the actual programmes. There was talk about charging fees for schools, for example, and to cancel hospitalization for the last two months of this year.

During the second week of September 1997, the Commissioner-General of UNRWA, Peter Hansen, announced that, after obtaining over $19 million in new pledges from donor countries, he was able to revoke some of the cuts in the UNRWA services which he had been forced to introduce earlier this year. The UN Chronicle went to see William Lee, Chief of the New York Liaison Office of UNRWA, to talk about the Agency's activities.

About the activities in 1997, Mr. Lee observed: "UNRWA provides education, health and relief services and social programmes to refugees living in camps - accounting for about 40 per cent of the total refugees - as well as to those who live outside the camps. Today, those refugees number more than 3.5 million people. Of these, 1.4 million are staying in Jordan, 1.3 million in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and about 350,000 each in Lebanon and Syria."

"Most of the refugees come in contact with UNRWA through pregnancy", Mr. Lee stated. "The pregnant refugee will visit one of the UNRWA clinics, deliver her baby there or give birth with the help of one of the UNRWA midwives, and from then on the baby will be taken cared of by the Agency in many ways. The babies will be weighed, measured, immunized and, when they are six years old, they will go to one of the...