International Red Cross sees less charitable giving

Companies and individuals have cut back charitable giving and donations may fall further next year as a result of the global financial crisis, the world's largest relief network said.

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), a Geneva-based body linking together national groups such as the American Red Cross, said that pre-Christmas fund-raising events had yielded less than normal.

"Unfortunately the signals that we get from our member Red Cross and Red Crescent societies from all over the world are not very encouraging," IFRC delegate Encho Gospodinov told a news briefing about the organisation's 2009 budget.

"There will be less and less money for humanitarian work in 2009," he said.

The UN will also be asking donor governments to set aside money in their increasingly pinched budgets for aid programmes in a multi-billion-dollar "2009 Humanitarian Appeal", which was launched yesterday in Geneva.

Development experts will watch the yields of that annual appeal as a yardstick of how much the financial crisis has affected countries' development aid contributions.