Total international humanitarian assistance in 2025: a 20% contraction in a single year, the third consecutive annual fall, and the smallest envelope since 2017. Behind it sits a donor system remade faster than at any point in a decade.
ALNAP's Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2026 documents the worst year in the humanitarian system's recent history. Total international humanitarian assistance fell to US $33.3 billion in 2025, down 20% in one year and 30% from the 2022 peak. The system now runs on 2017-level resources while 300 million people are estimated to be in need, more than double the 141 million of 2017.
The report's significance goes beyond the headline cut. It captures a system changing shape: a donor base that is suddenly multipolar, an appeals architecture responding with formal hyper-prioritisation, and a decade-old reform agenda that is no longer stalling but sliding backwards. This deep dive works through the report's three chapters with ALNAP's own published figure data, released alongside the report in its open data repository.
Three consecutive years of decline, and the steepest fall yet
Public funding fell 22% in 2025 as the two anchor donors of the past decade retreated at once: the United States cut from US $13.5 billion to US $6.1 billion, and Germany from US $2.3 billion to US $1.5 billion. Together these two donors account for 88% of the total cuts. Private giving fell too, though far more gently, down 7% to US $6.8 billion, roughly its pre-Ukraine average.
The report reaches for economic-history comparisons to convey the scale: a system shrinking by around a third mirrors the contraction of the US economy during the Great Depression. It also pushes back on rhetorical overstatement, noting that claims of a 50% collapse in global humanitarian funding are not supported by the data.
Where is the floor?
ALNAP constructs two scenarios for public funding in 2026 from donors' published budgets. The optimistic case sees a further 2% decline to US $26.2 billion; the pessimistic case an 11% fall to US $23.8 billion. Either way the cuts decelerate, largely because the US reduction of 2025 was so deep that it cannot mechanically repeat: US FY26 provision stands at around US $5.5 billion, with FY27 proposals between US $4.5 billion and US $5.1 billion.
The report frames the question the whole sector is asking: is this a trough before a V-shaped or U-shaped recovery, an L-shaped flatline at a lower equilibrium, or a fall that has not yet found its floor? The scenarios lean towards stabilisation, but hedge on two unknowns: how US funding materialises across financial years, and whether Gulf allocations, which are pledged ad hoc rather than budgeted, hold up.
A suddenly multipolar donor system
Thirteen of the top 20 donors cut humanitarian funding in 2025. But the deeper story is compositional. The traditional top four DAC donors (the US, EU institutions, the UK and Germany) fell to 47% of public funding, below half for the first time in at least a decade and down from 67% at their 2017 peak. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are now the fourth and fifth largest public donors, displacing Germany to sixth.
Three donor blocs moved in different directions. European donors now contribute nearly twice as much as the US; the 'EU plus' bloc holds 42% of public funding. Gulf donors rose by almost a third to US $4.5 billion, a 17% share, led by Qatar (up 189% to US $980 million) and the UAE (up 54% to US $1.8 billion). And the US, at 23% of public funding, remains the single largest donor with agenda-setting power, but no longer the system's centre of gravity.
Cuts nearly everywhere, and deeper concentration
Funding fell for 18 of the 20 largest recipient countries in 2025. Only Palestine (up 15% to US $4.4 billion, the largest recipient and now four times its 2022 level) and Myanmar (up 11%) rose. Six protracted crises lost more than 40% in a single year: Yemen, Nigeria, Niger, Somalia, DRC and Ethiopia. Measured from the 2023 peak, Somalia is down 61%, Ethiopia 60%, Yemen 53%, Syria 52% and Nigeria 52%.
Scarcity concentrated the remaining money. The top five contexts took 51% of all country-allocable funding in 2025, up from 43% in 2024; the top ten took 70%. The lead donor changed in six of the top 20 contexts, with the US displaced by EU institutions in Lebanon and Somalia, by Saudi Arabia in Syria, by the UAE in Palestine, by Germany in Niger and by Australia in Myanmar. The EU bloc now out-funds the US in 18 of the top 20 recipient countries.
The largest funding gap on record, and a shrinking definition of need
Funding to UN-coordinated appeals dropped 35% in 2025 to US $16.6 billion, a level last seen in 2017–2018. Against requirements of US $47.2 billion, the gap reached US $30.6 billion, the largest in history in both absolute and percentage terms: just 35% of requirements were met.
The system's structural answer has been prioritisation. Requirements were trimmed in 2024 and again in early 2025 before a mid-2025 'hyper-prioritisation' exercise cut the ask to US $29.5 billion, targeting 114 million of 300 million people in need. The 2026 Global Humanitarian Overview carries a prioritised requirement of US $23.6 billion, less than half the 2023 peak ask of US $56.1 billion, with three country plans and four regional plans dropped from the GHO altogether. ALNAP is blunt about the risk: plans that fell out of the GHO covered over 20 million people in need, and a narrower definition of humanitarian scope can erase people from the narrative without meeting their needs elsewhere.
The system remains structurally locked into long crises: 95% of appeal funding goes to protracted contexts, and the median protracted crisis has now had an interagency plan for 15 consecutive years, up from 10 in 2016.
Where a humanitarian dollar goes first, and where it disappears
Multilateral organisations absorbed almost half of direct donor funding in 2025 (47%, US $12.5 billion), followed by international NGOs at 19%. Local and national actors received 5% as first-tier recipients. The most striking number is what cannot be seen: two thirds of first-tier funding, US $17.7 billion, is untracked beyond its first recipient. The system cannot show where most of its money ultimately lands.
Ten years after the Grand Bargain, the scorecard reads backwards
2026 marks a decade since the World Humanitarian Summit. The report's verdict on the reform agenda is its hardest yet: what looked like a temporary stall in 2025 now reads as a longer-term slide backwards. Localised funding fell 29% in volume, outstripping the system-wide cut of 20%. Cash held its share but lost volume for a third straight year. Anticipatory action grew, yet crossed 1% of total assistance only because the denominator collapsed.
Trackable funding to local and national actors fell to 8.7% of the total in 2025 (from 9.5%), with direct funding at 4.3%. The modest direct-share rise is a mirage of the Gulf donors' preference for national governments: Saudi Arabia alone provided US $658 million to the governments of Yemen, Syria and Palestine. A decade on, the 25% commitment has never been within reach. PRISM tracks the underlying ODI dataset live on its localisation dashboard.
Cash and voucher assistance fell 11% to US $7.3 billion in 2025, its third consecutive annual decline and 31% below the 2022 peak. As a share of humanitarian assistance it held at 21%, a ceiling it has bumped against since 2020. In a funding crisis, cash's efficiency case would suggest growth; that it merely held share is, in the report's words, a missed opportunity.
Funding available for anticipatory action grew 10% to US $334 million, reaching 1% of total humanitarian assistance for the first time, against a Grand Bargain caucus target of 5% by 2026. Frameworks expanded sharply (154 to 262, across 76 countries) but the money per activation halved in two years, from US $2 million to US $821,000: more events, thinner cover.
One donor's pooled-fund system
The strangest reversal of 2026 sits in the OCHA-managed pooled funds. After contributing nothing to pooled funds in 2025, the US announced US $2 billion in late 2025 and a further US $1.8 billion in March 2026, channelled through CBPFs and CERF for US-selected countries. Total pooled-fund contributions jumped to US $4.45 billion, from US $1.32 billion in 2025; the US share is 20 times the previous record single-donor volume.
The consequences are already visible in allocation data. UN agencies have drawn US $1.2 billion from pooled funds by May 2026, a 19-fold increase on the whole of 2025. The share of UN-coordinated pooled funding reaching national NGOs collapsed from 46% in 2025 to 7% so far in 2026, reversing what had been the localisation agenda's most reliable delivery channel: CBPFs met the 25% Grand Bargain target back in 2018. Crisis contexts with US funding have received on average ten times more pooled funding than those without; Afghanistan, Palestine, Somalia and Yemen are among the contexts that have received no US pooled funding this year.
| CBPF project profile, 2026 | US-funded projects | Other donors' projects |
|---|---|---|
| Food security share | 36% | 6% |
| Protection share | 9% | 26% |
| Multipurpose cash share | 15% | 19% |
| Local & national partners reached | 20 | 56 |
ALNAP describes the result as two systems within one: US-funded projects favour large UN agencies, short implementation windows and material assistance, while other donors' allocations prioritise NGO delivery, protection and local actors. OCHA's role, the report notes, has shifted from system coordinator towards donor-resourced fund manager and gatekeeper.
- ALNAP, Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2026, the full report and data downloads.
- ALNAP GHA 2026 open data repository, per-figure datasets and processing scripts.
- Pearson & Rieger (ODI Global), The State of International Humanitarian Funding to Local and National Actors, the localisation dataset behind Figure 3.2.
- CALP Network, State of the World's Cash 2026 (forthcoming, November 2026).
- The New Humanitarian, on US funding and the pooled-fund system.
Humanitarian funding is tracked live on PRISM: donor and recipient flows from OCHA FTS, appeal coverage, and the localisation dataset behind this report's Figure 3.2, updated from source.
What the numbers ask of the system
"Without the political will and collaboration to strengthen the quality, delivery and impact of humanitarian financing, the reform process appears to be at an impasse." — Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2026, ALNAP