June 20, 2018•Update: June 20, 2018
By Gokhan Ergocun
ANKARA
Turkey was declared the most charitable nation in 2017 with nearly $8.1 billion spent in humanitarian aid, an independent international development organization said.
Nearly 30 percent of all international humanitarian aid -- $27.3 billion -- came from Turkey, according to the Development Initiative's (DI) Global Humanitarian Assistance Report on late Tuesday.
The U.S., Germany and the U.K. followed Turkey with $6.68 billion, $2.98 billion and $2.52 billion.
The country's humanitarian aid expenditures were nearly 1 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) in 2017.
Turkey's gross domestic product (GDP) was around $850 billion in 2017, the U.S. stood over $19 trillion, Germany at $3.8 trillion and the U.K. at $2.6 trillion.
Turkey had been ranked third in the DI report for the years 2013, 2014 and 2015, and second in the list after the U.S. in 2016 with $6.3 billion spent in aid.
It also hosts the highest number of refugees -- 3.9 million -- in the world, according to official figures. The number of Syrian refugees living in the country was 3.6 million as of May.
2B people poor worldwide
The report also stressed that 2 billion people were poor worldwide, and 753 million of them face extreme poverty.
"Poor people are defined as those living on less than $3.20 a day, extreme poverty is defined as living on less than $1.90 a day," the report read.
The report stressed, in 2017, humanitarian aid totaled $27.3 billion, while it was $26.4 billion in 2016, $25.8 billion in 2015, $22.1 billion in 2014 and $18.4 billion in 2013.
Most of the humanitarian aid went to Syria ($2.58 billion), Yemen ($1.55 billion), Iraq ($1.42 billion), Palestine ($1.15 billion) and South Sudan ($1.1 billion), the report noted.
The report said: "An estimated 201 million people in 134 countries needed international humanitarian assistance in 2017."
"A small number of complex crises continue to absorb the majority of humanitarian assistance – 60 percent of all assistance was channeled to 10 countries only, with 14 percent going to Syria, the largest recipient, and 8 percent to Yemen, the second-largest," the report added.
The report also highlighted that Syria was the single largest recipient of humanitarian assistance for the fifth consecutive year.
DI is an independent international development organization that focuses on the role of data in driving poverty eradication and sustainable development.
Several international institutions contributed to the report such as the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
