DEC Pakistan Floods Appeal reaches £60 million
Howard Lake | 5 October 2010 | News
The DEC Pakistan Floods Appeal has raised £60,800,000, making it one of the three most generously supported appeals the charity has run in its 45 year history. Only the 2004 South Asian tsunami (£390 million) and this year’s Haiti earthquake appeals (£103 million) have raised more.
The total is likely to increase because fundraising will continue until the end of January 2011.
The Pakistan Floods Appeal has just exceeded the total raised by the DEC in response to the 2005 Pakistan Earthquake. This totaled £60,668,000.
The current appeal differed from previous ones because of the relatively slow response from the parts of the international community, and the ongoing nature of the disaster as the flood waters affected more and more of the country. Normally appeals start to tail off after an initial high, but in this case the surge in donations came later than other appeals.
Chief Executive of the Disasters Emergency Committee Brendan Gormley said: “The response of the UK public to the flooding in Pakistan has been extraordinary. We are hugely grateful to everyone who has shown their support. Donors to the DEC can be proud of the work they are helping to fund”.
Comparing disaster appeal totals might seem a little ghoulish. The DEC says that it “usually seeks to avoid making direct comparisons between disasters and appeals. The circumstances of each disaster are unique and the consequences devastating for those affected”.
However, it accepts that the totals raised by each DEC appeal are a “matter of public record and the Pakistan appeal has today reached a significant milestone”.
www.dec.org.uk
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.