“We lost everything we depended on—our home, our livelihood, our stability. Life is very difficult now, especially for our children who have lost their chance at education.”
— Displaced father in the Northwest.
Severe underfunding in 2025 drastically affected the capacity of humanitarian organizations to deliver life-saving aid to people who had been prioritized for urgent assistance. With only 26 per cent of the 2025 HNRP funding requirements received as of 1 December 2025, partners were unable to provide the depth, frequency and quality of assistance that was planned, leaving millions of people without aid. By the end of 2025 it is estimated that humanitarian organizations will have reached 5.7 million people—85 per cent of the 2025 target.
Out of the prioritized target, 4.1 million people (83 per cent of the total target) had been reached at least once throughout the year. This means that 1.4 million people who had been prioritized for critical assistance received no aid at all.
The 2026 HNRP is the result of heavy prioritization to meet the most urgent needs, and includes both people targeted and prioritized figures, which represent the most critically in need of life-saving and protection assistance. Without the required funds in 2026, humanitarian organizations will have to prioritize further, favouring lower-cost life-saving and critical protection activities that do not offer the required depth of relief or contribute to people’s overall well-being, offer dignified living conditions, meet global standards, or provide a chance of finding durable solutions. Persistent unmet needs will continue having residual implications for subsequent years, with needs worsening over time and requiring more expensive and elaborate interventions in future. With prior coping capacities all but exhausted, more and more lives will be at risk.
This section outlines the consequences of underfunding and how each cluster will triage its planned response activities if there is severe underfunding—50 per cent or less of requirements (either for the targeted or the prioritized target) to provide guidance on the most urgent cluster priorities and illustrate the consequences of underfunding for affected people. Donors are urged to carefully consider the programming realities and unaddressed suffering that result from funding gaps of the magnitude seen in 2025.
Early Recovery
If the Early Recovery Cluster is unable to secure sufficient funding and access, more than 1.2 million earthquake-affected people across Magway, Mandalay, and Sagaing will face prolonged exposure to unsafe conditions. Debris and waste management—critical to restoring access to life-saving health, protection, and WASH services—would be severely curtailed. Without timely clearance, roads, clinics and schools will remain obstructed, delaying humanitarian assistance, heightening protection risks, particularly for women and children, and increasing health hazards from accumulated waste and structurally unsafe buildings.
In case of severe underfunding (50 per cent or less), cash-for-work for debris removal and community rehabilitation would be among the first activities reduced or cancelled, directly affecting livelihoods and slowing recovery, especially in densely affected urban and peri-urban areas. Over time, continued service disruptions would drive deteriorating living conditions, displacement and erosion of community resilience, deepening vulnerability ahead of the monsoon season. Priority funding is therefore required for debris and waste clearance around critical infrastructure, temporary repairs to key community facilities and restoration of safe access routes—pre-conditions for other sectors to deliver assistance effectively.
Education
If the Education Cluster is significantly underfunded (50 per cent or less), up to 600,000 children would be left with no support to access any form of learning and development or continue in school for those fortunate enough to be already enrolled. In the prevailing circumstances, this means that out of frustration and hopelessness, most of these children fall victim to the multiple protection risks such as recruitment, child and early marriages, SEA, human trafficking—essentially a lost generation. Considering the nature of the education package, no activities would be dropped, but instead some geographical locations would be deprioritized and/or receive a lighter package of interventions. Response focus would concentrate on geographical locations with the highest severity of needs (severity 4 and 5); the highest conflict and displacement, marginalized and the at-risk population groups, such as non-displaced stateless people in Rakhine region, among others.
Food Security
If the Food Security Cluster cannot secure sufficient funding and access, provided assistance will not meet the 2,100 kcal/person/day standard, and the minimum three-month assistance for displaced populations will be shortened. Vulnerable households will be pushed into higher levels of emergency coping, including selling productive assets and reducing food consumption. With a 50 per cent funding reduction, food assistance would fall to around 650,000 people and food production support to about 231,000 people, undermining efforts to rebuild food production capacity and resilience. Priority would be given to households in phase 4, particularly IDPs, and to a limited number of phase 3 communities to reduce inter-community tensions, meaning non-IDP and stateless populations and non-food assistance activities would be deprioritized. Chin, Kachin, Kayah, Rakhine, and northern Shan—already identified as the most food-insecure areas—would remain top priorities, especially during the lean season (June–August), when needs spike. Continued underfunding will entrench harmful coping strategies, increase protection risks and lead to higher rates of severe and acute malnutrition.
Health
If the Health Cluster is unable to secure sufficient funding and access, 500,000 people in the hardest-hit areas will have no access to essential health services or emergency referrals, resulting in preventable illness and deaths, increased maternal and neonatal complications, and worsening psychological distress. Efforts to expand access for 800,000 highly vulnerable people—including older persons, people with disabilities, GBV and PSEA survivors, people affected by explosive ordnance and those with mental health needs—would be among the first to be cut. Health services for the 2 million people targeted would be significantly reduced, with growing shortages of life-saving supplies and trained health workers leading to late or poor diagnosis, delayed or inadequate treatment and avoidable mortality. Limited resources would be redirected from prevention to outbreak response, increasing the risk of preventable illness, disability, and death due to infectious diseases.
Nutrition
If the Nutrition Cluster receives 50 per cent or less of the required funding, approximately 338,500 people—including children under five and pregnant and breastfeeding women—would lose access to life-saving nutrition services, leading to a projected rise in preventable child deaths and irreversible developmental damage with long-term impacts on human capital. The most immediate consequence would be interruptions to therapeutic feeding for MAM and SAM, blanket supplementary feeding, micronutrient supplementation and IYCF counselling, triggering increased incidence of acute malnutrition, illness and mortality. Areas already facing severe access constraints, such as Chin, Kachin, Kayin, Rakhine, and Sagaing would be hardest hit as limited-service coverage contracts further. Underfunding would force the Cluster to focus only on the most critical life-saving interventions, suspending many preventive and community-based activities such as regular screening, community nutrition awareness, IYCF support and CVA. This would weaken early detection systems, increase treatment caseloads, and heighten the long-term risks of chronic malnutrition and stunting among the most vulnerable children.
Protection
If the Protection Cluster cannot secure sufficient funding and access, operations would be significantly scaled back, with assistance concentrated in a smaller number of locations and population groups. Around 700,000 other shock-affected people who currently fall within the target would no longer receive urgent, life-saving protection support. Individualized protection assistance, case management, legal aid, psychosocial support and victim assistance services would be sharply reduced, while some specialized GBV services – including case management, clinical management of rape referrals and safe spaces – could be forced to close, exposing survivors to heightened risks of violence, long-term physical and psychological harm and death.
Under this scenario, the Cluster would be obliged to rely more heavily on lower-cost, community-based protection initiatives, awareness-raising, EORE, support for family tracing and reunification and basic self-protection measures, which, while valuable, cannot substitute for specialized services. Evidence from recent funding shortfalls already shows that reduced protection coverage is associated with increased GBV, trafficking, unsafe migration, family separation and child labour, further deepening vulnerabilities among displaced, stateless and earthquake-affected communities.
Shelter/NFI/CCCM
In case of severe underfunding (50 per cent or less), the response will face drastic cuts, deprioritizing half the intended population. Aid will be narrowed exclusively to life-saving interventions for the most vulnerable, focusing on approximately 1.6 million newly displaced persons and areas with the most dire conditions. Consequently, shelter reconstruction and replenishment of NFIs will be halted. This leaves protracted IDPs, including those in Rakhine camps and long-term settlements, without safe shelter or site management, resulting in people having to increasingly resort to negative coping mechanisms. Support for returnees will also cease, leading to unsafe returns. The prioritized response will then concentrate on emergency NFI and shelter kits to secure life-saving shelter for people during the monsoon season.
WASH
At 50 per cent funding and with restricted access, the WASH Cluster response would contract to life-saving actions in severity level 5 and selected severity level 4 hotspots, reducing coverage to around 1.2 million people (half of the 2026 target of 2.4 million) across roughly 115 out of 227 townships. Lower-severity host communities, low-density rural areas and non-critical rehabilitations would be deprioritized. First cuts would include capital-intensive network extensions, medium-term rehabilitation and restoration, school services beyond minimum standards, major faecal-sludge works not tied to imminent disease risk, routine operations subsidies and broad behaviour-change campaigns not linked to outbreaks.
Consequences would include higher waterborne disease and avoidable mortality, greater protection risks at crowded facilities, faster asset deterioration, rising per-capita costs from repeated emergency water supply, learning loss among girls where menstrual health support is inadequate, and more communities sliding into protracted need.
Donor priorities should be: 1) time-bound pre-monsoon repairs, pre-positioning and AWD/cholera surge packages deployable within 48–72 hours; 2) emergency safe water and temporary or communal sanitation in dense displacement sites, plus market-enabling cash or vouchers where markets function, and; 3) severity level 5 townships in Chin, Kayah, Kayin, and Rakhine, high-risk river basins in Ayeyarwady and Mon, and displacement corridors in Magway and Sagaing, with targeted pockets in Kachin and Shan.