THE UN’s high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, has said that his agency has less than half the money it needs to look after hundreds of thousands of Africans driven from their homes by conflict and forgotten by the international community, and might have to start cutting its spending on education and repatriation.

As the Syrian civil war has increasingly dominated the headlines, world attention has drifted away from intractable conflicts in Africa and the refugee populations they have created, Guterres said.

“All our African operations are substantially underfunded,” he told the Guardian. “In Chad, we have about 280,000 Darfurian refugees, not to mention the 60,000 refugees from the Central African Republic who are in the south of Chad. Four or five years ago, Darfur was very much under the attention of the international community. It was one of the best funded operations we had.”

By contrast, the UNHCR currently has only a quarter of the $177m needed to provide for the refugees in Chad. Funds needed for emergencies in Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Sahel are also severely undersubscribed. Of the $1.9bn required for refugees across the whole continent, only a third has been forthcoming from donors, a reflection of how the continent’s refugees had slipped from the global agenda. To make up the shortfall, the UNHCR has been using funds freed by efficiency savings, but it is not a permanent solution.

“We have dramatically reduced our overheads. In Geneva we had a staff of 1,000 and now we have less than 700. That has allowed us to use un-earmarked money that might otherwise have been used in headquarters to be used in these forgotten emergencies,” Guterres said. He added that still left budgets far short of actual needs and that “now we have exhausted all our reserves”, and that the only alternative was to start cutting support to the refugee populations.

“Of course, we will always maintain the life-saving activities but people ... do not only need water and food and shelter,” Guterres said. “They also need education, and self-reliance in their life, and these are the sort of investments that are totally impossible, forcing us to restrain our activities to core life-saving and protection action, which is not what we want.”

The cuts will also mean an end to investment in the refugees’ devastated hometowns and villages that would have encouraged voluntary returns and thus a long-term decline in refugee numbers. Earlier in the year, there were reports of the return of about 100,000 internally displaced people, who had been in camps inside Darfur, to their home villages, but Guterres said there had been very little drop in the number of Darfur refugees over the border in Chad. — The Guardian, London