A System in Crisis
The international humanitarian system entered 2025 facing a crisis of legitimacy, morale, and funding. By mid-2025, global humanitarian aid had collapsed by 43%, from $36.9 billion to $20.8 billion, driven by the dismantling of USAID and compounded by cuts from Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
This analysis documents cascading impacts across health, food security, gender programming, and displacement responses. Critical data infrastructure has collapsed or reduced capacity, undermining needs-based prioritisation. The system's 'hyper-prioritisation' response has compounded inequities rather than correcting them. Situating these patterns within a political economy framework, the analysis demonstrates that funding allocation reflects geopolitical interest, colonial legacies, and path dependency rather than humanitarian need alone.
A Decade of Humanitarian Funding
After decades of growth, humanitarian funding peaked in 2022 at $42.3 billion — driven by the Ukraine response — before declining steadily. The 2025 collapse to $20.8 billion represents the sharpest single-year drop in the history of the coordinated humanitarian system.
Who Is Cutting Humanitarian Funding?
Official Development Assistance fell for the first time in six years. The $212.1 billion in 2024 ODA constituted just 0.33% of DAC members' combined GNI. Only four members — Luxembourg, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark — exceeded the 0.07% voluntary threshold for humanitarian aid.
The dismantling of USAID created a funding vacuum no other donor could fill. Rather than compensating, major Western donors followed suit with cuts of their own.
| Country | 2024 | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🇺🇸 United States | $15.30B | $2.20B | −85% |
| 🇩🇪 Germany | $2.43B | $1.14B | −53% |
| 🇫🇷 France | $0.97B | $0.55B | −44% |
| 🇳🇱 Netherlands | $0.65B | $0.52B | −20% |
| 🇸🇪 Sweden | $0.47B | $0.43B | −8.3% |
| 🇳🇴 Norway | $0.25B | $0.19B | −3% |
| 🇬🇧 UK* | $11.15B | $11.72B | +5% |
| 🇪🇺 EU Commission | $1.80B | $1.90B | +5.5% |
| 🇨🇭 Switzerland | $0.60B | $0.66B | +10% |
| 🇨🇦 Canada | $0.61B | $0.76B | +25% |
What the Cuts Mean on the Ground
A Lancet study evaluating two decades of USAID interventions found that higher funding levels were associated with a 15% reduction in age-standardised all-cause mortality. The study forecasts that current cuts could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, including 4.5 million children under five.
Food Security
295 million people now require urgent assistance to avoid hunger. WFP faces a 34% funding cut, forcing reduced emergency food assistance affecting 16.7 million people. Six critical operations — Afghanistan, DRC, Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan, and Sudan — are at immediate risk.
Gender Programming
34% of 428 women's rights organisations surveyed by UN Women have suspended or shut down programmes to end violence against women and girls. The Global Programme to End Child Marriage will reach 4 million fewer girls. US withdrawal from sexual and reproductive health funding threatens 47.6 million people, potentially contributing to 17 million unintended pregnancies and 34,000 maternal deaths.
Displacement
UNHCR reports cuts of $1.4 billion, putting 11.6 million refugees at risk. Relocations paused in Chad and South Sudan. In Bangladesh, education for 230,000 Rohingya children is at risk of suspension.
Data Infrastructure Collapse
- FEWS NET — credited with averting famines in Somalia (2011, 2017) — went offline January 2025 after a stop-work order
- Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) — the gold standard for global health data across 90 countries — paused, surveys incomplete in 23 countries
- IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix — scaled back across major crises, hundreds of staff laid off
Historical baselines cannot be retrospectively rebuilt — undermining needs-based prioritisation at the very moment it is most needed.
The Cruel Math of Hyper-Prioritisation
Starting March 2025, the humanitarian community was forced to 'hyper-prioritise' — narrowing focus from severity levels 3–5 to only levels 4 (extreme) and 5 (catastrophic) on the JIAF scale. This identified 114 million people facing the greatest threat to life — just 38% of people in need globally.
But the process compounded existing inequities. Historically underfunded crises saw only 49% of their needs prioritised, compared with 64% for moderately underfunded contexts. Those already left behind are falling further behind.
Why Funding Doesn't Follow Need
If the system were truly needs-based, funding would flow to where suffering is most acute. It does not. 2025 GHO data reveal no clear relationship between crisis scale and funding coverage. Donor decisions are shaped by visibility, proximity, strategic interest, and political alignment.
Research on 270 natural disasters found that donors favour smaller, geographically closer, and oil-exporting countries, with significant biases toward former colonies. The study identified 'bandwagon effects' — aid likelihood increases 15–33 percentage points when other major donors participate. The 2025 cascade suggests this operates in reverse: when a dominant donor withdraws, others follow.
Funding also exhibits significant path dependency. In South Sudan, decisions are largely informed by the history of intervention, not current needs. In Syria, Western donors maintained a strict policy of isolation for 14 years, confining all support to short-term humanitarian assistance and precluding investment in long-term recovery.
The Localisation Gap
The Grand Bargain (2016) committed to channelling 25% of funding "as directly as possible" to local responders by 2020. Nearly a decade later, only 20% reached them in 2024. Yet local intermediaries deliver programming 32% more cost-efficiently than international intermediaries.
The system claims to serve affected populations while systematically excluding them from shaping how service is defined, prioritised, and delivered. Grassroots, mutual aid, and local civil society organisations remain excluded from knowledge production and decision-making — reinforcing the injustice humanitarian intervention aims to address.
The Humanitarian Reset: Transformation or Managed Contraction?
The IASC Humanitarian Reset, announced March 2025, aims to make the system more efficient by centring local actors and simplifying structures. However, the reset is reactive — a response to budget cuts rather than a strategic vision. International organisations seek business continuity and survival over quality and effectiveness.
The Global Humanitarian Overview 2026 further reduced targeting to 85 million people out of 239 million in need — just 35%. Donor budgetary decisions were made long before GHO 2026's publication. This represents managed abandonment rather than strategic transformation.
Four Structural Shifts
These are not aspirational goals — they are structural preconditions for a humanitarian system that serves affected populations rather than donor priorities.