A hyper-prioritized Global Humanitarian Overview 2025: the cruel math of aid cuts

A hyper-prioritized Global Humanitarian Overview: the cruel math of aid cuts

The magnitude, gravity and suddenness of funding cuts in the first quarter of 2025 have forced the humanitarian community to hyper-prioritize its response efforts. This reprioritization—as called for in the Humanitarian Reset and supported by the IASC Emergency Directors through their ‘global accelerated transition plan’—aims to ensure that humanitarians save as many lives as possible with the resources they have. Starting in March 2025, every country operation and regional response rapidly reviewed their already robustly defined plans and appeals to identify those people in the most urgent need of assistance and the most critical response to be mobilized.

This hyper-prioritization has identified 114.4 million people who are facing the most life-threatening needs to be most urgently targeted with assistance and protection. This represents just 38.3 per cent of people in need of humanitarian assistance globally (298.9 million) and only 64 per cent of the total people targeted for humanitarian assistance in 2025 (178.7 million). This hyper-prioritization required painstaking deliberation and decisions by humanitarian leaders and partners, who had already exerted extensive efforts to tightly define their 2025 humanitarian plans and appeals.

To reach these people, US$29.1 billion—out of the total $44 billion currently required under the Global Humanitarian Overview—urgently needs to be mobilized. Yet, as of 10 June, just $5.5 billion has been received, amounting to 18.5 per cent of the funding immediately required to respond to the most life-threatening needs in the world, and just over 12 per cent of the total humanitarian funding required in 2025 through the Global Humanitarian Overview ($44 billion).

Across all prioritization efforts, humanitarian leaders and partners have kept the centrality of protection and the dignity of the people they serve at the core of their work. Rather than defining ‘life saving’ as a restricted list of activities, humanitarians have focused on delivering the best and most dignified response to the most life-threatening needs faced by communities in crisis. This includes prioritizing unrestricted cash assistance wherever it is feasible and appropriate, given the dignity of choice that it provides to people who receive it. Humanitarians have also ensured that protection is incorporated in every country’s hyper-prioritized response, as an equal priority alongside the delivery of assistance and services.

The hyper-prioritized humanitarian effort builds on the priorities expressed by crisis-affected people and communities. Mindful of the importance of avoiding rushed consultations, the prioritization efforts relied primarily upon the consultations undertaken as part of the initial plans and appeals for 2025. In Yemen, for example, over 1,100 participants engaged in area-based consultations (24 per cent of whom were women), across all governorates in the development of the Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan (HNRP). In Afghanistan, the HNRP involved nearly 1,000 people in community validation exercises and in the Central African Republic, 13 regional workshops undertaken for the HNRP enabled active listening to affected communities, which identified their priority needs in the face of different types of shocks, as well as their humanitarian preferences.

Two boys stand in a clearing.

Chahardara, Afghanistan

In April 2025, respecting local customs, humanitarian partners held focus group discussion with members of the Nawabad community, including host community members impacted by conflict, returnees and internally displaced persons to better understand their needs and tailor humanitarian response.

OCHA/Aashiqullah Mandozai.

Hyper-prioritizing country responses

In March 2025, the Emergency Relief Coordinator called on all Humanitarian Coordinators globally to urgently reprioritize—collectively with the humanitarian community—their planned responses, in light of global funding cuts. The reprioritization of Humanitarian Needs and Response Plans (HNRPs) was based on two main criteria, while discussions were contextualized to each country context, for example, discussing additional activities and/or areas to include. The two baseline criteria were:

  • focusing humanitarian action on the people and places that need it most, using intersectoral severity 4 and 5 as the starting point; and
  • prioritizing life-saving activities, including protection, based on work already undertaken for the Humanitarian Programme Cycle 2025.

This hyper-prioritization identified 88.2 million people to be most urgently targeted for assistance and protection, with $21.5 billion immediately required to reach them in 2025. In Southern and Eastern Africa, $4.5 billion is urgently called for to assist the 22.5 million prioritized targeted people. The war in Sudan—which has generated the largest humanitarian crisis in the world—continues to account for the highest urgently prioritized target (18 million people) and requirements ($3 billion), while several Flash Appeals responding to climate emergencies in the region have recently ended in Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe. As the United Nations and the Government of Ethiopia continue to discuss humanitarian needs and response, no figures for Ethiopia (People in Need, People Targeted or Requirements) are reflected in this GHO update. In the Middle East and North Africa, $7.5 billion is required for the most urgent response to 19.8 million prioritized targeted people, driven in particular by the crisis in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), where the entirety of the Flash Appeal has been included in the hyper-prioritization due to the gravity of the situation and urgently needed scale-up of the response. In West and Central Africa, $4.4 billion is urgently needed, with the highest critical requirements and prioritized target for the response in the Democratic Republic of the Congo ($1.7 billion for priority response to 6.8 million people), where the escalation of conflict in the east has had devastating consequences for communities. Asia and the Pacific require $2.3 billion for urgent needs to provide assistance and protection to 16.1 million prioritized people targeted, including an increase in Myanmar’s appeal following the tragic earthquakes which struck in March 2025, accompanied by a decrease due to the conclusion of Flash Appeals for climate emergencies in Bangladesh, the Philippines and Viet Nam. Europe’s most urgent requirements are $1.8 billion, to respond to the most urgent needs in Ukraine. Across Latin America and the Caribbean, humanitarian partners are calling for $1.1 billion, including for the escalating crises in Colombia and Haiti. Three countries in Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—are not reflected in the reprioritization, as they had already instituted notable proportional decreases for 2025, striving to focus on communities with the greatest humanitarian needs and bolstering complementary development action while preparing the transition out of the HPC for 2026.

As part of the hyper-prioritization, humanitarian clusters have identified their most urgent targets and financial requirements, based on the most urgent needs in the most severely affected areas. Food Security has the largest prioritized caseload and financial requirements, urgently targeting 55 million people with requirements of $5.5 billion. The Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), Health, Emergency Shelter and Non-Food Items (NFIs) and Protection clusters have each urgently prioritized about 60 per cent of their targets. Education, Camp Coordination and Camp Management and Nutrition clusters as well as multipurpose cash interventions reprioritized around half of the people targeted, while Early Recovery is significantly refocused. Service clusters and functions—including Coordination, Logistics, and Emergency Telecommunications—adjusted their requirements proportionally.

Reprioritizing across regional plans

Regional response plans have also reprioritized to ensure limited resources are first directed to where they are most urgently required, putting a spotlight on “what must be done first”, noting that the overall needs and figures of 2025 remain valid. Refugee and migrant planning is undertaken on the basis of status (i.e., being a refugee, a migrant or a migrant/refugee-hosting community), as well as needs, guided by a globally consistent set of budget and activity selection criteria and tailored to local responses based on contextual realities and the feedback of partners and refugees, migrants, host communities and others. A standard tiered framework was adopted to guide reprioritization efforts. The three tiers of this model are:

  1. Lifesaving and protection interventions (e.g., food, water, shelter, emergency health, registration and documentation).
  2. Time-sensitive activities that stabilize and protect communities (e.g., access to education, livelihoods, outreach, area-based coordination and site management and localization).
  3. Medium- to long-term efforts, such as advocacy and integration support (mostly not included in the reprioritized activities).

To ensure contextual relevance, re-prioritization acknowledged that what is urgent will differ depending on the time period since the emergency onset, host area development index and national policy frameworks.

This approach reflects the need to address immediate life-saving needs as a priority, without entirely sacrificing medium- to long-term investments that reduce future costs. Partners can be assured that funding through Regional Plans in 2025 will continue to be underpinned by a thoughtful, data-informed process that maximizes impact, minimizes duplication and maintains operational agility.

As a result of this exercise, 27.8 million people—out of the 35 million identified in the regional response plans—have been prioritized for assistance and protection, with corresponding prioritized requirements amounting to $8.7 billion.

Hyper-prioritizing country plans: an interactive dashboard

The gravity of funding cuts in the first quarter of 2025 has required the humanitarian community to urgently hyper-prioritize its response efforts. This interactive dashboard presents the results of the hyper-prioritization of Humanitarian Needs and Response Plans (HNRPs) undertaken by each operation. It does not include the regional plans. Analysis can be performed by operation, cluster (when available) and severity level.

References

  1. Intersectoral severity, as defined in the Joint and Intersectoral Analysis Framework (JIAF) represents the degree of humanitarian needs and protection risks that populations face, ranked on five tiers. Intersectoral severity 5 is the highest level of concern denoting catastrophic humanitarian conditions and severity 4 denotes extreme humanitarian conditions.
  2. For Syria, the full amount of the existing prioritized $2 billion plan is included in the hyper-prioritized figures, given that this is a six-month plan. The plan is currently being reviewed and will be extended until the end of 2025, with a strong prioritization undertaken as part of this process. In Middle East and North Africa, the Lebanon Flash Appeal concluded earlier in 2025.
  3. Regional plans that have experienced a significant change in their operational context, affecting initially planned for needs and population numbers, are undergoing a more significant review of their 2025 plans.
  4. The dashboard also includes the Flash Appeals for the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Syria.