Global Humanitarian Overview 2025

Humanitarians’ response: an urgent appeal for access and funding

In 2025, the UN and partner organizations are appealing for over $47 billion to assist nearly 190 million people across 72 countries. With significant increases in funding required to respond to the escalating crises in OPT and Lebanon, the Middle East and North Africa region now requires $15.9 billion, accounting for 34 per cent of the Global Humanitarian Overview (GHO). The escalating crisis in Sudan has increased funding requirements in Eastern and Southern Africa—which now require nearly $12 billion—while in West and Central Africa, $7.6 billion is needed, with Chad’s appeal growing due to the continued arrival of Sudanese refugees. Asia and the Pacific now require $5.1 billion, including an increase in Myanmar’s appeal, while Europe needs $3.3 billion, specifically for Ukraine. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, humanitarian partners are calling for $3.6 billion, including a significant increase in funding required for Haiti, where escalating violence has driven rapidly rising needs.

Humanitarians will aim to target more people in 2025 than at the beginning of 2024, but a significant number of them come under time-limited, disaster-driven appeals. Seven climate shock-related Flash Appeals/plans will continue into the first months of 2025, accounting for 16 per cent of people targeted under GHO 2025. Since these appeals/plans span just three to seven months of the year, their costs are lower than those of full-year plans, reducing the overall cost per person of the GHO 2025.

For the second consecutive year, the GHO reflects intensive work by humanitarian partners to prioritize assistance and protection for the people and places who need it most, guided by a realistic understanding of operational capacity to deliver. Building on the difficult decisions already taken in 2024, Humanitarian Country Teams engaged in robust dialogues to review their delivery and set clear boundaries for their 2025 responses, concentrating humanitarian assistance on crisis-affected areas with the most severe needs. As a result, 16 countries have reduced their requirements for 2025, with Humanitarian Needs and Response Plans tightly focused around responding to the most life-threatening needs in the most effective way possible. Three countries in Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—have instituted notable proportional decreases, as they strive to focus on communities with the greatest intersectoral humanitarian needs and bolster complementary development action.

Work on setting clear boundaries for humanitarian appeals/plans has been accompanied by efforts to enhance cost efficiency and effectiveness. Placing power and funding in the hands of local and national actors (L/NAs) remains a top priority, with research showing that they can deliver programming 32 per cent more cost efficiently than international intermediaries. Humanitarian partners have also made significant progress in designing cost-effective cash interventions, and innovations such as anticipatory action and disaster insurance products. Partners are significantly improving the operational efficiency of humanitarian responses, saving hundreds of millions of dollars while enhancing the ability to meet urgent needs. Innovations in procurement and streamlined processes for assessment, targeting, monitoring, and coordination have maximized resource use and eliminated duplication. The humanitarian sector is also working to boost investment in cost and expenditure analysis, which can help organizations enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of both programmes as well as core and support costs.

Mali

Otogena, Bandiagara Region, Mali

Mariam Guindo, leader of the Kana Women’s Association, empowers both displaced and host community women by providing gardening kits, seeds, organic fertilizer, and training. Together, these women cultivate crops and produce peanut oil, creating sustainable income and promoting self-reliance.

OCHA/Amadou Kane

In 2025, humanitarian partners will continue to improve the way they deliver for people in crisis, including by:

  • Respecting and promoting locally led humanitarian action. L/NAs are at the heart of humanitarian response, leveraging community networks to access affected people, and ensuring more effective, efficient and sustainable action. By the end of 2024, 45 per cent of funding from Country-Based Pooled Funds (CBPF) was channelled to local and national partners, the highest proportion ever, and pooled funds were able to support community-driven approaches, including Emergency Response Rooms in Sudan. L/NAs are also now present in 93 per cent of Humanitarian Country Teams. Despite this, research highlights that many local actors feel excluded from decision-making. More must be done to earn L/NA’s trust and ensure that their voices and views shape the future of humanitarian action.
  • Pursuing people-centred and accountable responses. Enabling people affected by crises to drive humanitarian responses requires major systems shifts. Collective Accountability to Affected People (AAP) plays a critical role in this, establishing a system-wide approach that incorporates community priorities, perceptions and feedback into decision-making processes. In 2024, the Central Emergency Response Fund allocated funds to strengthen collective AAP in 16 humanitarian operations, leading to significant advances. In Afghanistan, for example, community feedback—including women’s voices—is now used to adjust the collective humanitarian response and reallocate funds.
  • Expanding cash assistance wherever feasible and appropriate. Cash assistance empowers individuals—particularly women and marginalized groups—by allowing them to address their unique needs directly. After years of growth, the volume of cash and voucher assistance (CVA) in humanitarian responses decreased in 2023 for the first time since 2015. Despite this, CVA is increasingly being deployed in complex and volatile emergencies. In Gaza, Occupied Palestinian Territory, for example, pre-agreed measures by the Cash Working Group enabled cash to be distributed within days of the October 2023 crisis.
Venezuela

El Arroyo, Zulia state, Venezuela

Two indigenous women share their views on humanitarian work. Dialogue and feedback are crucial pillars of the humanitarian response in the community.

OCHA/Luis Carlos Sánchez.

However, two key changes are required for humanitarians to effectively deliver in 2025—access and safety for civilians and the aid workers who serve them, and a fully funded GHO.

  • Advocating respect for international humanitarian law, and accountability for violations, is crucial to protecting civilians and aid workers—who face unprecedented attacks—and to ensuring crisis-affected people can access the assistance, protection and services they require. Flagrant violations of international humanitarian rights law, combined with insecurity and bureaucratic impediments, imperil the lives of people in need of assistance and the aid workers striving to help them. In countries like Afghanistan, Yemen and the Sahel, bureaucratic impediments and counterterrorism and sanctions-related restrictions, further hinder the delivery of critical assistance by exposing humanitarian actors to legal and financial risks. To deliver their mandate, it is imperative that humanitarians engage with all actors to negotiate access and deliver assistance and protection for civilians. This is particularly critical given that 90 per cent of people living in areas controlled by armed groups live in countries with humanitarian response plans.
  • No amount of efficiency measures can replace the need for full and flexible funding of humanitarian responses. Humanitarian action remains a lifeline for millions of people affected by crises, yet chronic underfunding continues to have devastating consequences. Meanwhile, humanitarian organizations are increasingly burdened by the growing complexity and diversity of donor conditionalities, earmarking, and reporting requirements. These demands take critical time and resources, and ultimately result in inefficiencies, higher administrative costs, and potential delays in aid delivery. Exacting donor conditionalities also create disproportionate burdens on resource-constrained local and national NGOs. For humanitarians to respond effectively wherever and whenever needed, global solidarity must be stepped up to fully fund the GHO 2025, and donors must streamline their processes and approaches. While $47 billion is a sizeable amount, it pales in comparison to other global expenditures—it is less than 2 per cent of global military expenditure, around 4 per cent of the global banking industry’s profits and just 12 per cent of the fossil fuel industry’s average annual free cash flow.
Lebanon

Beirut, Lebanon

Destruction following an air strike in Beirut's southern suburbs on Friday 20 September 2024.

UNICEF/Dar al Mussawir/ Ramzi Haidar

Addressing the global food crisis will be a key response priority going into 2025. The global food security crisis is staggering, affecting over 280 million people daily. Acute hunger has spread and intensified alarmingly over the past five years, as evidenced by the Famine Review Committee being activated five times for a single context in one year—an unprecedented event for the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative. Violence and displacement are wreaking havoc, preventing food production and access to vital markets. While Afghanistan has shown some improvement due to sustained funding, this is a rare exception. The outlook is dire, with acute food insecurity projected to worsen across 16 hunger hotspots from November 2024 to May 2025. Worryingly, warnings of deteriorating food security often fail to translate into increased humanitarian support. Financing for food, cash, and emergency agriculture is misaligned with the escalating needs. If urgent resources are not mobilized, the world risks a catastrophic rise in hunger and malnutrition, exposing millions to preventable diseases and potentially reversing hard-earned development gains. The time to act is now.

Ultimately, people in crisis need political action to end wars, climate action to help them prepare for a shock-filled future and development action to lift them out of crisis, as emphasized in the Pact for the Future. With more State-involved wars today than at any other point since 1946, and the horrifying toll on civilians rising each day, immediate political action is required to end conflicts and uphold the laws of war. Climate action is equally urgent, requiring swift, decisive work to reverse the global climate crisis and ensure that climate financing reaches those most at-risk of catastrophe. As this year’s GHO highlights, a growing number of countries are experiencing more frequent and severe disasters—these are countries that should be on a development trajectory, but risk facing repeated crises without global support to help their communities adapt and prepare. And there is an urgent need for Governments, development actors and donors—including international financial institutions—to continue providing development funding and financing in fragile and complex settings, to make funding available for locally led development, and to prioritize development investment in the sectors that humanitarians are so frequently called to address, including education, food security, health, and water, sanitation and hygiene.

Aid in Action

Analyzing costs to maximize humanitarian impact

Kenya
Nairobi, Kenya
A staff member analyzes the cost per output of a program intervention using the Dioptra tool.
International Rescue Committee/Lucian Lee

Amid declining funding, scalable and cost-effective humanitarian action can greatly enhance the reach and effectiveness of each dollar spent. To this end, a coalition of NGOs is using the 'Dioptra’ tool to analyze the cost per output of various programmes. The tool applies a standardized method to assess the cost per person reached with a programme intervention and the unit cost of aid items. By enhancing transparency, Dioptra has improved the understanding of cost-efficiency and effectiveness across humanitarian interventions and contexts.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC), part of the consortium that manages the Dioptra tool, has intensively studied its global programmes to learn how to enhance cost efficiency in humanitarian response. Examples include:

  • Malnutrition: A simplified protocol for treating wasting proved equally effective and less resource-intensive than the traditional protocol. In Mali, it reduced the cost per child treated by 18 per cent.
  • Early childhood development: In Lebanon, the Remote Early Learning Programme achieved effective learning outcomes at a cost of $260 per child for 514 children. With economies of scale, this cost is projected to drop to $150 per child when serving 1,000 children or more.
  • Cash assistance: In Nigeria, anticipatory cash distributions boosted household investment in productive assets and reduced negative coping strategies compared to traditional cash responses. These outcomes were achieved at similar delivery cost per dollar of cash transferred, demonstrating greater impact for every dollar spent.

References

  1. For the full list of countries, please refer to HumanitarianAction.info.
  2. Bangladesh, Malawi, Mozambique, Philippines, Viet Nam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
  3. Afghanistan, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Ukraine and Yemen.
  4. For the definitions on cost efficiency and effectiveness, see Cost-Efficiency Analysis of Basic Needs Programs: Best Practice Guidance for Humanitarian Agencies.
  5. The Food and Agriculture Organization calculates that every dollar invested in anticipatory action could give families seven dollars in benefits and avoided losses. Yet despite research that more than half of humanitarian emergencies are predictable and over 20 per cent are highly foreseeable, in 2023 less than 1 per cent of humanitarian funds were dedicated to such interventions.
  6. Acción contra el Hambre, CARE, Catholic Relief Services, Danish Refugee Council, International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps and Save the Children.