At GNV, particular attention has been paid to the UN’s serious funding shortfall in 2025. In the 2025 edition of “The Top 10 Hidden World News Stories”, this issue was ranked third.

This time, we introduce two articles from the news outlet “The New Humanitarian” that address the challenges facing the UN-led humanitarian aid system. The first is “Five takeaways from the UN’s aid plans for 2026” by Irwin Loy and Will Worley, published on 8 December 2025. The second is “Abrupt transitions: The Global Humanitarian Overview pushes a dangerous trend” by Mike Pearson and Kerrie Holloway, published on 11 December 2025.

Discussion on improving the delivery of humanitarian aid, Somalia (Photo: AMISOM Public Information / Flickr [CC0 1.0] )

Five takeaways from the UN’s aid plans for 2026

“The New Humanitarian” (The New Humanitarian) translated article, written by Irwin Loy and Will Worley (*1)

Humanitarian aid in 2026 faces funding shortages and attacks, while strategies are fine-tuned to counter aid cuts

The UN-led humanitarian funding appeal for 2026 was announced in December 2025, accompanied by stark warnings as crises deepen. At the same time, it also carries a more calculated message. It applies pressure by appealing directly to voters in response to government aid cuts, while also holding out a sliver of hope in the face of the severe reductions carried out by the Trump administration in the United States.

At the press conference unveiling the appeal, UN humanitarian coordinator Tom Fletcher said: “Some people are building self-driving cars and thinking about utopian life on Mars, but for the overwhelming majority, the reality is a world without a driver and an increasingly dystopian existence here on Earth where we actually live.”

The overview is grim. The UN-led humanitarian appeal is based on a “severely prioritised” plan that seeks 23 billion US dollars to reach 87 million people in need.

This is the smallest number of people that UN-coordinated humanitarian responses have attempted to reach in the past decade, even as humanitarian needs are rising due to expanding conflict, climate change, and the erosion of international norms. Tens of millions of people will still be left without targeted assistance (the plans estimate that roughly 239 million people require emergency aid).

Refugee camp, Ethiopia (Photo: Ethiopian Human Rights Commission / Flickr [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0] )

Fletcher framed this approach as realistic as he launched the “Global Humanitarian Overview” (GHO), which consolidates 29 separate response plans and budgets, from Sudan to Gaza.

“Just writing down a bigger number doesn’t mean more money will come in. We’re trying to be realistic about what is a feasible target given today’s funding. We’d like to go much bigger, but we have to start somewhere with a sense of realism,” Fletcher said.

The “severely prioritised” version of the 2026 humanitarian appeal seeks 23 billion US dollars, the lowest figure since 2017. The full plan seeks 33 billion dollars to assist 135 million people.

Over the past two years, UN-led humanitarian appeals have been tiered by priority, based on what each response would like to achieve and what is realistically possible.

This comes in the wake of years of donor cutbacks and a dramatic collapse in aid following the Trump administration’s dismantling of the US aid apparatus and budget in 2025.

The traditional international humanitarian sector has been depicted as a form of charity, relying on voluntary contributions. But as many Western donor governments have turned inward, this model now faces an existential threat. The system itself has also become a target, with large aid agencies and the UN in particular attacked as wasteful.

In presenting the new response plans, Fletcher is trying to reframe this narrative around aid while appealing directly to voters.

“We recognise that budgets are tight right now. Families across the world are under strain.”

“But in 2024, the world spent 2.7 trillion US dollars on defence – on guns and weapons. And what I’m asking for is just a little over 1% of that.”

Below are some of the early takeaways from the 2026 response plans.

The funding gap is widening regardless of the targets

The trend is clear. Even as needs rise, humanitarians are asking for less, and funding is falling regardless of how much they request.

For years, the humanitarian system largely asked for what it said it needed. Humanitarian appeals surged, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, buoyed by donor goodwill. But behind the numbers lurked a hidden financial cliff, masked in particular by US support and European funding linked to Ukraine.

Partly due to donor pressure, aid officials began cutting back requests after 2023’s record-high humanitarian appeal and record funding gap.

In 2023, total GHO requirements exceeded 56 billion US dollars, but the figure has steadily fallen since. The funding gap has grown as multiple donor governments, not just the US, have slashed humanitarian budgets. According to UN data, funding for the 2025 appeal was only 12 billion US dollars – about one quarter of the amount requested, and only roughly 40% of the baseline “emergency priority” tier.

Some crises are prioritised – and some are not

The squeeze is not uniform. The figures show that some responses are clearly prioritised in terms of budgets and people targeted, while others are not.

For example, in the occupied Palestinian territory, Ukraine, Nigeria, Colombia, and the Central African Republic, more than 80% of requested funding falls within the “severely prioritised” tier. The plans for Haiti, Mozambique (where an early 2025 cut process descended into confusion), South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen also appear to treat more than 80% of so-called “people in need” as priority cases.

By contrast, in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Venezuela, less than half of needs are covered in the prioritised funding tiers. In Burkina Faso, Cameroon (where aid cuts have combined with a fraught political environment to harmful effect), Chad, Mali, Myanmar, and in the regional responses to the Horn of Africa and Sudan, which together encompass the world’s largest displacement crisis, less than half of people in need are treated as priorities.

The headline figures don’t reveal the trade-offs and fine-tuned prioritisation happening beneath the surface. They don’t show, for example, how severe the cuts are to education, or how much support to survivors of gender-based violence is being pared back. Nor do they show who is being left behind when humanitarian decision-makers say they must “focus on responding to the latest crises”.

“People in need” no longer captures everyone in need

Who is in need? Who is not? Answering these questions is becoming increasingly difficult.

Year-on-year comparisons of “people in need” are not very meaningful. The methodology used to calculate global figures has changed, and hard-nosed donor pressure and funding realities are simply pushing humanitarians to ask for less.

The 2026 appeal puts the number of people in need at 239 million. The figure for 2024 was 300 million, itself a drop from previous years.

At the same time, the number of “people in need” left out of each year’s response plans has steadily climbed. Since 2023, this gap has exceeded 100 million every year. In 2026, for the first time, fewer than 60% of people in need are expected to be included in the plans (only 36% in the severely prioritised tier).

According to OCHA, the UN’s humanitarian coordination arm that compiles the appeals, one reason the “people in need” figure is shrinking is that there will simply be fewer plans and appeals in the 2026 GHO than in 2025, resulting in a drop in the “people in need” within the GHO. This includes countries that have “transitioned” away from humanitarian responses, as well as the “closure” of several regional responses overseen by the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR.

The document notes: “People covered in GHO 2026 with the most acute and crisis-driven needs represent only the tip of the iceberg of global suffering.”

Humanitarians working in country-level responses worry that the reality is even starker: that changes in how “need” is measured mean that many people simply aren’t being counted.

Another attempt to change the narrative

The annual humanitarian appeal is often an exercise in bowing to donors and asking for money. In 2025, there was a deliberate attempt to shift the image of aid, with messaging directed at voters as well.

“We’re only asking for a little over 1% of what the world currently spends on the military and defence. So we’re not saying you have to choose between a hospital in Brooklyn and a hospital in Kandahar,” Fletcher said. “We’re asking the world to spend less on defence and more on humanitarian aid.”

This strategy also aims to leverage voters when politicians fail to move. Polls show that voters in multiple countries, including the United States, support foreign aid.

Fletcher said that over the coming weeks he would present the appeal to national governments and other donors, and then publicly reveal which governments committed funds.

“Did your government step up for this plan? Or did it not? The answer to that question will determine who lives and who dies.”

This marks a slightly different emphasis for humanitarian leaders, but it is not entirely new.

Aid organisations also frequently highlight massive unmet humanitarian needs and link them directly to funding shortages – effectively placing operational decisions, such as cuts to refugee food rations, at the feet of donor governments. According to analysis, government counterparts to humanitarian actors struggle to respond to this strategy because they are caught between political priorities and voter expectations.

Fletcher’s pitch to Trump

Part of the attempt to change the narrative appears aimed at appealing to Donald Trump’s high-profile self-branding as a peace-broker.

Trump, who has openly campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize (and on 5 December received a dubious new award from FIFA), has in recent weeks boasted of so-called peace deals from Gaza to Thailand-Cambodia and between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Fletcher is trying to position international humanitarian responses as a complement to these efforts.

“I want to tie these plans to the possibility that 2026 can be a year of peacebuilding,” Fletcher said. “I think we’ve heard that clear message from the US president. We’re also seeing a willingness from many key actors in the Middle East and Africa to engage in ending as many conflicts as possible. That gives me greater hope.”

Launch of the Global Humanitarian Overview 2025 (Photo: United States Mission Geneva / Flickr [CC BY-ND 2.0] )

Abrupt transitions: The Global Humanitarian Overview pushes a dangerous trend

“The New Humanitarian” (The New Humanitarian) translated article, written by Mike Pearson and Kerrie Holloway (*2)

What should be sounding the alarm are not the “severely prioritised” crises, but those crises exposed to the risk of hasty withdrawal.

The word that best captures the humanitarian sector in 2025 is undoubtedly “prioritisation”

The painful process of choosing what and whom to prioritise within multi-agency humanitarian budgets began with the 2024 Global Humanitarian Overview (GHO). Sweeping donor cuts in 2025 then pushed prioritisation into a new extreme stage – “severe prioritisation”. The 2026 response plans, released on 8 December, take this logic to its limits.

The “severely prioritised” 2026 GHO sets a target of 87 million people and 23 billion US dollars in requirements. Despite growing humanitarian needs, these are the lowest levels in the past decade.

Looking behind the numbers, it becomes clear that the international humanitarian aid system is now carving crises into distinct categories. Crucially, however, this hierarchy is not based on conditions on the ground, but on the scale of funding cuts.

To prioritise some crises and needs means to push others to the margins. The most consequential trend in the 2026 GHO is the clear signalling of exit (transition) paths for the international humanitarian system in many contexts. As many as 11 countries and regions are placed on a transition trajectory, with longer-term transitions likely elsewhere.

What, then, happens to the people and crises that are not prioritised? Recent humanitarian history shows that shunting responses into a “non-priority” box without considering what comes next can have grave consequences. Iraq is one such example. Decision-makers must plan these transitions far more carefully; if they fail to do so, crises can stagnate and, over time, slip from view.

Medical check for malnutrition, Yemen (Photo: EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid / Flickr [CC BY-NC-ND 4.0] )

Four categories of humanitarian response

The 2026 GHO roughly divides humanitarian responses into four categories, based on the extent of cuts to funding requirements and numbers of people targeted.

The first category is “hyper-crises”. In these contexts, reductions in funding and targeted populations are relatively limited – less than 40% when comparing the 2025 GHO and the “prioritised” 2026 version. This category includes Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, South Sudan, Haiti, and the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh.

These crises attract donor and humanitarian attention, and humanitarian instincts – to support the most vulnerable and respond where needs are most acute – lead to a decision to concentrate limited resources here first. Historically, funding for these contexts has been relatively protected.

The second category is “protracted crises”. Here, cuts range from 40% to 50%. Responses in the Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan, Yemen, and the Syria refugee crisis fall into this group. Humanitarian needs are high, but these are not prioritised to the same degree as the hyper-crises. Notably, while nearly 80 million people are in need across these contexts, the hyper-crises cover only about 43 million people. Yet, even where severity is similar, funding is more constrained. There is also a tendency to scale back response plans where the severity of humanitarian needs is assessed as relatively lower, even if still grave. For example, in Sudan, “at least 14.2 million people, including those just short of extreme severity, are left out of the response” in order to prioritise areas of highest severity.

The third category is “neglected crises”. Afghanistan, Chad, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Somalia, Venezuela, and the regional Venezuela Refugee and Migrant Response Plan fall here. Funding requests for these responses are being cut by more than half, but the international humanitarian architecture itself remains in place. These contexts are not yet transitioning out of the international system, but persistently low prioritisation could push them towards transition in the future.

Finally, there are “crises in transition”. In the 2026 GHO, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the regional refugee plans for Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and Ukraine have been removed. In addition, the responses in Colombia, Cameroon, and Nigeria may also be placed in this category. These countries are slated for transition out of the international humanitarian system as part of the so-called “humanitarian reset” led by UN humanitarian coordinator Tom Fletcher. They represent the extreme edge of “prioritisation”, where entire humanitarian operations are being phased down.

At the same time, the de-prioritisation process is not without contradictions. In Colombia, for example, the number of people targeted has increased compared to the previous year, despite talk of transition – a reminder that this categorisation is not an exact science and that evolving realities on the ground still matter. Mozambique is also a special case. While cuts in the 2026 response plan are relatively small, Mozambique was identified as a candidate for “accelerated transition” in 2025 policy debates, and its status is set to remain under review.

Signals and noise

International attention defaults to the “hyper-crises”. These are the contexts that, by virtue of the scale of needs and geopolitical weight, are more likely to draw media coverage and donor focus.

This trend predates the rise of “prioritisation” as a core term in the humanitarian lexicon. But the international system is now sending a much clearer signal that these are the places where limited resources should be concentrated first. This signal cuts through the noise of funding cuts and gives donors a reference point for action.

At the same time, however, the sector risks sending a different message: that neglected crises and crises in transition are no longer important, and that they no longer require aid. Seven contexts have been removed from the GHO, three more are reported to be in transition, one narrowly avoided this fate, and the eight contexts in the neglected category may gradually be nudged in the same direction by the logic of prioritisation.

Funding may be short, but this must not be mistaken for a lack of concern. In fact, it demands the opposite.

Humanitarians need to think deliberately about how to manage transitions. Hyper-crises and protracted crises are supported by the international humanitarian system through mechanisms we know well: Humanitarian Country Teams, inter-agency appeals, and coordination clusters. Much less attention has been paid to what transition away from international humanitarian response should look like.

Done well, transition can mean the consolidation of long-term development processes and reduced dependence on international aid. Mishandled, it can leave whole populations behind and create large groups of people who fall through the cracks. There are recent examples that humanitarians should look to as cautionary tales.

Launch of the Global Humanitarian Overview 2025 (Photo: United States Mission Geneva / Flickr [CC BY-ND 2.0] )

A stalled transition in Iraq

Iraq is a warning case for future humanitarian transitions. Humanitarian funding to Iraq fell from 1.9 billion US dollars in 2016 to just 500 million in 2022, and the UN shut down its cluster system there in 2022. The underlying assumption was that the humanitarian situation had improved since the end of the war, that global humanitarian funding was already shrinking, and that many of Iraq’s needs should now be addressed through development programming rather than humanitarian aid.

These assumptions were not necessarily wrong. Even so, Iraq’s humanitarian transition has largely stalled. Humanitarian organisations continue to support internally displaced people; development aid has not been sufficient; the government has not made major headway; and displaced people remain in the same or worse conditions as before the transition.

Successful humanitarian transitions require close collaboration and handover between the international system and national and local response actors. In Iraq, interviews with humanitarians found that they did not even know who the responsible government counterparts were at the moment of transition.

The crises now in transition are moving even faster, and they are driven by funding trends rather than by reductions in humanitarian need. As a result, smooth handovers are unlikely. There is a real risk of leadership and coordination vacuums, duplication of limited resources, and emerging gaps in support.

As other countries and responses transition out of the international humanitarian system, needs will persist and go unmet unless governments, international financial institutions, and development actors invest. The UN’s prioritisation process fails where these commitments are not secured in advance. Without them, future shocks could trigger new humanitarian needs and push communities back into fresh crises.

No one is arguing that countries or crises should depend indefinitely on international support or on outdated aid systems. But transitions that are decided on the basis of funding, rather than improvements in humanitarian conditions, are likely to fail.

This is why the story behind the numbers in the 2026 Global Humanitarian Overview is not just about unmet needs and funding gaps. It is also about what decision-makers are overlooking.

We must be alert not only to hyper-crises, but also to crises being rushed through poorly planned transitions. “Prioritisation” will not remain a buzzword forever. Without careful planning, the next catchphrase may well be “failed humanitarian transition”.

(This is a translated article, and The New Humanitarian bears no responsibility for the accuracy of the translation. The New Humanitarian provides high-quality, independent journalism for the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises worldwide. For more details, see http://www.thenewhumanitarian.org.)

*1 This article is a translation of “Five takeaways from the UN’s aid plans for 2026” by Irwin Loy and Will Worley, originally published by The New Humanitarian (The New Humanitarian). We would like to take this opportunity to thank The New Humanitarian and the authors for allowing us to reproduce their work.

*2 This article is a translation of “Abrupt transitions: The Global Humanitarian Overview pushes a dangerous trend” by Mike Pearson and Kerrie Holloway, originally published by The New Humanitarian (The New Humanitarian). We would like to take this opportunity to thank The New Humanitarian and the authors for allowing us to reproduce their work.