Global Humanitarian Overview 2026

The 2026 Global Humanitarian Overview: a collective push to protect millions of lives

In 2026, millions of people caught in conflict and disaster face their hardest test yet: survival. Funding cuts in 2025 stripped away lifelines, even as crises deepen. Yet, the global humanitarian community is determined to stand with them—from local organizations aiding their own communities, to international partners delivering where it is needed most.

In 2026, humanitarians will aim to collectively assist 135 million people, out of 239 million people in need, with the immediate priority being to save 87 million lives. The Global Humanitarian Overview (GHO) 2026 remains ambitious while simultaneously grounded in the harsh reality facing humanitarian action after a year in which thousands of staff were laid off and tens of offices were closed around the world. In 2026, humanitarian partners aim to assist almost 20 per cent more people (117 million) than were reached in 2025 (nearly 98 million people) through country-specific responses. The GHO includes 29 plans and appeals, covering 50 countries: 20 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plans, 3 Flash Appeals and 6 refugee and migrant response plans that cover an additional 27 countries.

To do this, humanitarians are appealing for $33 billion through the GHO, of which $23 billion is required immediately to respond to the most life-threatening needs. While these amounts may seem daunting, they pale in comparison to other global expenditures—it is around one per cent of global military expenditure. The total global appeal could be fully funded if the global top 10 per cent of earners (those making roughly $100,000 or more annually) gave just 20 cents per day for a year.

The 2026 GHO represents the critical core of the global humanitarian effort. It is laser-focused on the places hit the hardest by crises and the people with the most life-threatening needs. It reflects excruciating decisions—forced by funding cuts—regarding who and where should be prioritized for assistance, grounded in the principle of impartiality, and its call for humanitarians to reach those in most urgent distress first. Building on the hyper-prioritization done in 2025, the GHO reflects even more intense efforts by every country operation and regional response to save as many lives as possible.

In 2026, humanitarian partners will improve the way they deliver for people in crisis through the Humanitarian Reset, including by:

  • Focusing our collective efforts on the areas where crises are most intense and needs are most severe, through the Global Humanitarian Overview (GHO) and country-level planning. In every country, humanitarians will assess whether it is possible to transition from humanitarian action to longer-term development—whether for specific geographic areas, particular sectors, or, where feasible, across the entire country—whether due to decreased needs or increased local and national capacity to respond to them. Wherever possible, transition planning will be implemented in good time to enable ethical exits. To be clear: transitioning to development does not necessarily mean that humanitarian partners will leave. Some may shift their focus toward resilience and development, while others may concentrate on responding to residual needs. However, there may also be circumstances where humanitarians cannot stay due to the magnitude of funding cuts, even where needs remain considerable. In these places, humanitarian needs will have to be met entirely by local and state resources due to a lack of international resources.

  • Promoting, funding and enabling locally led humanitarian action. Local and national actors (L/NAs), including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), private sector, women-led organizations, community-based organizations and mutual aid efforts are at the heart of humanitarian responses globally, leveraging community networks to access affected people, and ensuring more effective and efficient responses. Delivery by local actors is also more cost-effective: in Sudan, for example, local actors can deliver around 12 per cent more efficiently. In all countries, efforts are underway to transfer power to local and national actors, including leadership of coordination structures at both national and sub-national levels. By the end of 2025, 55 per cent of all funding allocated through the Country-Based Pooled Funds (CBPF) had gone to local and national partners, including 17 per cent to local women’s organizations. This is the highest proportion ever, with ambitions to do more in 2026, while recognizing more work is required to remove intermediaries and raise the level of funding going directly to L/NAs. L/NAs are now present in over 93 per cent of Humanitarian Country Teams, although they continue to express concerns regarding whether their views are heard and acted upon.


A large group of women and children gather with metal bowls in hand during a food distribution.

North Darfur, Sudan

Volunteres from the Tawila Emergency Room respond to the influx of forcibly displaced from El Fasher through a community kitchen. El Fasher has become an epicentre of human suffering, and local and national non-governmental organizations organizations and mutual aid efforts continue to be the heart of humanitarian responses globally.

Tawila Emergency Room
  • Planning and adapting responses based on crisis-affected people’s inputs and feedback. Ensuring that people’s preferences and priorities drive humanitarian responses requires major systems’ shifts. Collective Accountability to Affected People (AAP) plays a critical role in this, incorporating the priorities, perceptions and feedback of people in all their diversities—including children, women, older people, people with disabilities, youth and other diverse profiles—into strategic and operational decision-making. In Sudan, with funds from a Central Emergency Response Fund allocation to strengthen AAP, communities' preferences and priorities fed directly into the 2026 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan. In 2026, a top collective priority will be monitoring responses to gauge whether they align with people’s priorities and preferences, within available resources, and course correct when they do not.

  • Adopting a cash first approach, when contextually able. Cash assistance—especially multi-purpose cash (MPC)—empowers crisis-affected people, particularly women and marginalized groups, by allowing them to address their unique needs directly. It also gives back to local economies. However, after years of growth, the volume of cash and voucher assistance (CVA) in humanitarian responses decreased in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Yet, CVA has proven to be efficient and effective in even the most complex and volatile emergencies. In Yemen, as the crisis deepened, cash programming expanded: by August 2025, more than 320,000 people had received MPC assistance, while in Gaza, OPT, 305,000 households received at least one MPC installment. In Afghanistan, returnees were provided with cash as a critical injection to support their dignified return. Giving people cash ahead of a disaster (anticipatory cash) is one of the most effective ways to help them mitigate the disaster’s impact. They can act quickly, buy food or medicine, secure valuables, fix shelter or evacuate. CVA was used in every activated OCHA-coordinated anticipatory action framework in 2024, financed through the Central Emergency Response Fund. In Myanmar, following the March 2025 earthquake, humanitarian partners immediately scaled up cash assistance, reaching over 270,000 people with multi-purpose cash within days and helping families meet their urgent needs like food, medicine and shelter repairs based on their own priorities. CVA is also a key driver of localization, enabling local NGOs, governments, community groups, and local financial service providers to play a larger role in programme design and delivery. This builds national capacity, increases ownership, and ensures more resources circulate within local markets.

  • Working collectively, based on comparative advantage, to deliver efficiently and effectively to people in need. Coordination will be simplified—including through the merger of clusters and increased use of area-based coordination—to ensure humanitarian partners’ focus on cohesive and multi-sectoral responses. Humanitarians will uphold values and principles, defending the humanitarian movement’s collaborative work on protection from gender-based violence and sexual exploitation and abuse. Supply chains will be streamlined, with as much local procurement as possible. A data collaborative will work to unlock siloed information. Anticipatory approaches will be scaled up. And the UN, international NGOs and local and national NGOs will, in every response, identify which partner is best placed to play which role, maximizing impact and minimizing inefficiency. This will be enabled by the use of truly collective instruments, such as pooled funds, designed to support best placed actors in responding to life-threatening needs.
A man and a woman crouch on their field, posing to show their crop

Sofala, Mozambique

Through a project funded by the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is supporting communities to apply the Farmer Field School approach: working together, sharing knowledge and using agricultural inputs and drought-resistant seeds to strengthen their farming practices and build long-term resilience.

FAO/María Legaristi Royo

Saving the lives of and protecting people facing the most severe needs will be the overarching priority for humanitarians in 2026.

  • Without urgent and sustained funding, millions more people could be pushed into deeper food insecurity. This will simultaneously increase their protection risks, including the adoption of harmful coping strategies. The time to act is now. There is space to hope. With political will and the right investment, humanitarians can work with communities and countries to prevent the worst outcomes, build resilience and end the vicious cycle of hunger.

  • Health, nutrition, WASH and shelter will be vital to averting loss of life. Reduced access to healthcare—including maternal and child health—due to the shutdown and suspension of services as a result of funding cuts, rising malnutrition amid diminished monitoring and response capacity, disease outbreaks that are harder to control with less resources and families without shelter due to destruction and damage are all imminent threats to crisis-affected communities that require urgent, concerted and fully-funded responses. Even small amounts of funding can literally save lives, whether by supporting community health workers and outreach programmes or re-establishing access to clean water, by rebuilding people’s homes or repairing hospitals.

  • Education is critical to keeping children safe and building their future, while protection is more essential than ever as communities face atrocities, conflict and violence. From Haiti to Myanmar and OPT to Sudan, the scale and magnitude of violations against civilians requires immediate investment in protection, including the delivery of vital services and interventions to prevent and reduce violence, as well as education to keep children in school during tumult, reunite families separated by harrowing conflict, provide psychosocial care and support to traumatized people, and ensure survivors of gender-based violence receive the support and protection they require.

  • Refugees and asylum-seekers, fleeing violence and persecution must continue to be able to access safety, legal identity and rights. Refugees in the most vulnerable situations, including women and girls at risk of GBV, children requiring care and protection, older refugees and refugee with disabilities, should be prioritized in protection activities to uphold their dignity and prevent exploitation, while in parallel, national systems should be supported to systematically to include refugees in their services.
Three women in white medical uniforms and face masks stand at a counter writing in notebooks inside a clinical workspace.

Port-au-Prince, Haiti

University Hospital La Paix (HUP) is the only public hospital in the capital that still provides advanced case management. It remains a lifeline for more than two million people across the metropolitan area of the capital.

OCHA/Marvens Compère

Humanitarians are calling on Member States, global citizens, the private sector and all other partners to enable them to deliver effectively in 2026. This will require global mobilization to:

  • Demand respect for international humanitarian and human rights law, require compliance with the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide and ensure accountability for violations. Global trends of rising atrocities and impunity for violations, including attacks on health care and educational facilities, imperil the lives of people in need of assistance and the aid workers striving to help them. Member States, non-State armed groups and all others with influence must demand that this be reversed and take action to restore respect for international law, both in the global arena and on the battle field. Respect for IHL can have a positive effect on processes leading towards peace and solutions to crises by fostering a culture of respect.

  • 2026 must be a year of renewed global solidarity following the decimation wrought by funding cuts in 2025. Humanitarian action remains the most effective lifeline for millions of people in crisis and costs just a fraction of global expenditure. The GHO 2026 is the most tightly defined global appeal—focused on saving as many lives as possible—and it must be fully funded. Donors must streamline their processes and approaches to free-up humanitarian partners’ increasingly strained capacity to focus on operations, not bureaucracy and to create conditions that effectively advance localization.

References

  1. For the full list of countries, please refer to HumanitarianAction.info.
  2. Internal analysis based on the 2024 annual survey on coordination (The Pulse of Humanitarian Coordination).
  3. Contextually appropriate means that cash should be used when it is the best suited mechanism for aid delivery. For certain sectors, such as health, cash is used cautiously as it may nor contribute the best to service delivery, disease prevention and control measures.