Year in Review 2022: Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean

Needs

Humanitarian needs in Latin America and the Caribbean are sharply increasing. By the end of 2022, there were nearly 37 million people in need, as assessed by annual Humanitarian Programme Cycles (HPC) in Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras and Venezuela, mid-year emergency response plans for cholera in Haiti and Hurricane Ian in Cuba and the R4V Inter-Agency Coordination Platform for Refugees and Migrants from Venezuela’s Regional Response Plan.
This is 33 per cent more than the 27.9 million people in need at the end of 2021 and nearly 4 times as many as the 9.6 million people in need in 2018. This increase can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic’s social and economic effects on food insecurity, violence and displacement, recurring shocks linked to climate change and the impact of natural hazards. The ripple effects of the conflict in Ukraine on global food and fertiliser markets are also a factor.

Financing

With this growth in humanitarian needs, funding requirements increased by nearly US$1 billion dollars between 2021 and 2022, going from $2.97 billion to $3.8 billion, to provide assistance to nearly 6 million more people.

While donors generously disbursed $1.42 billion to support response in 2022, this represented a coverage of 36.9 per cent, below the coverage of 42 per cent during 2021 when donors provided $1.26 billion.

OCHA deployments and presence

To meet these growing demands, OCHA ROLAC carried out 104 missions for more than 1,200 days to 23 countries, including surge support to OCHA operations outside the region such as Mozambique,
Somalia, Türkiye and Ukraine. These numbers are more than double the figures for 2021, reflecting OCHA ROLAC’s commitment to providing immediate and reliable support.

OCHA ROLAC operates out of Panama City, Panama, covering 48 countries and territories and supporting OCHA country operations in Colombia, Haiti and Venezuela. Outside of Panama, OCHA ROLAC has a presence in 8 countries, working through two-person Humanitarian Advisory Teams (HATs) embedded in the UN Resident Coordinator’s Office in Barbados (covering the Caribbean), Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru, as well as staff in Bolivia and Mexico providing regional support. HATs are comprised of a National Disaster Response Advisor (NDRA) and an Information Management Assistant, enabling readiness and response capacity and strategic operational partnerships and coordination structures.