According to the summit website, “Effective global cooperation is increasingly critical to our survival but difficult to achieve in an atmosphere of mistrust, using outdated structures that no longer reflect today’s political and economic realities.”
The summit was charged with producing an action plan, the Pact for the Future, intended to propose bold, transformational change in sustainable development and financing for development, as well as international peace and security and global governance. All of these are relevant to the urgent changes needed in the United Nations’ management of the global humanitarian finance system, and yet humanitarian finance was not meaningfully included in its agenda or outcome. Humanitarian issues, despite the loss of life and property, regional spillover, and cost burden on affected and donor countries, were name-checked but not meaningfully integrated into the final document. Notably, a related commonsense proposal for an Emergency Platform that appeared in the zero draft, which would have established an automatic coordination platform for emergency shocks affecting multiple states, broadly defined, to include anything from a future pandemic or biological threat to a “black swan” event, was stripped out of the final document.
Q1: How is humanitarian finance broken?
A1: Since its establishment in the early 1990s, the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) has played a central role both in issuing global appeals for humanitarian funding and in coordinating the delivery of humanitarian assistance on the ground. Over the past decade, however, the rapid rise in the need for assistance has overwhelmed this system. According to UNOCHA’s Financial Tracking Service (FTS), humanitarian funding requirements increased by nearly 90 percent between 2019 and 2023, rising from $29.8 billion to $56.1 billion. Alarmingly, the gap between requirements and actual funding also rose. While donors provided 59 percent of the required resources annually between 2014 and 2018, that figure fell to 54 percent between 2019 and 2023, and in 2023, actual aid was just 43 percent of requirements, although funding in dollar terms increased that year by nearly 9 percent to $56.09 billion.
Breaking down the aggregate humanitarian funding shortfall by sector and country reveals even larger gaps. In 2023, donors only provided 40 percent of the requirements for food security and health, 41 percent for water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH), and 42 percent for protection. The early recovery sector, which seeks to make the crucial links between humanitarian and development aid, received a mere 19 percent.
It is also evident that not all crises are equal. In 2023, coverage of requirements in some crises dipped well below the global average of 43 percent: 41 percent in Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 40 percent in Burkina Faso, 38 percent in Syria, 37 percent in Ethiopia, and just 35 percent in Haiti, where almost half of the population faced crisis-level acute food insecurity. Appeals for those six countries targeted a combined population of nearly 65 million people in need of assistance, many of whom received far less aid than needed or had to go without protection, food, water, and medicine.
Coverage in some other crises exceeded the global figure: 100 percent in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT; most of the aid was provided before October 7), 72 percent in Ukraine, 62 percent in South Sudan, and 51 percent in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, in all but OPT, the assistance provided still fell short of the requirements. In these cases as well, not all sectors received the resources required: In Ukraine, for example, despite its elevated status as a foreign policy priority for the United States and NATO countries, donors provided just 39 percent of the needed aid for food security, and just over half for WASH. In OPT, although food security received more than 100 percent of the appeal, the figure for WASH was only 23 percent.
