The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced on February 15 an additional $42.5 million in humanitarian assistance for the people of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
The sum “will help enable our United Nations (U.N.) and NGO partners to reach an additional 182,000 people across the region with life-saving assistance,” the agency said in a statement.
The new assistance, says USAID, will support programs that reduce food insecurity for the most vulnerable, support survivors and those at risk of gender-based violence and children in need of protection, and help households “restore their livelihoods, and provide safe-drinking water for poor families.”
In addition, the agency says it will continue to expand its initiatives to strengthen preparedness, mitigation, and response to natural disasters.
The new announcement brings USAID’s total humanitarian funding for these three countries to nearly $261 million as of April 2021, and comes, according to the agency, at a time when more than 9.3 million people in the so called Northern Triangle will require humanitarian assistance, according to estimates in the U.N. 2023 Humanitarian Response Plans.
The new USAID funding was announced virtually by USAID’s Assistant to the Administrator for USAID’s Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance Sarah Charles, during the 2023 Northern Central America Humanitarian Roundtable in Geneva.