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The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in an interview with a British newspaper, revealed that the agency – currently overwhelmed with the flood of refugees fleeing the battle zones of Iraq and Syria – is on the verge of going bankrupt.

“The budgets cannot be compared with the growth in need,” António Guterres told The Guardian. “Our income in 2015 will be around 10% less than in 2014. The global humanitarian community is not broken – as a whole they are more effective than ever before. But we are financially broke.”

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Although it has a budget of almost US$20 billion for humanitarian activities, only US$7 billion has been raised from international donors. It has only 35% of the money it needs to deal with Syrian refugees. That’s still better than the budget for Africa, where crises “do not make international headlines,” and where it has only 15% of the needed money.