The drastic cuts in Western aid budgets in 2025 have exposed the chronic fragility of the humanitarian sector. The author explains how, between financial subordination and geopolitical exploitation, this model must take advantage of this crisis to strengthen itself.
In early 2025, the announcement of the sudden withdrawal of a substantial portion of Western funding for international aid – whether for emergency humanitarian action or official development assistance (ODA) – was both an indicator and a catalyst of a latent crisis.
Early signs of a looming crisis
It was not just the scale of the withdrawal in terms of funding that caused such a shock, but the fact that it highlighted four long-standing structural weaknesses:[1]Pierre Micheletti, 0,03 % ! Pour une transformation du mouvement humanitaire international, Éditions Parole, 2020, p. 247. Book translated into English as 0.03%!: Let’s transform the international … Continue reading dependence on a small core of public funders; exposure to national political cycles; suspicions that aid was being exploited for soft-power purposes; and the widespread application of a security-based approach to funding and implementation procedures. The financial difficulties of the International Committee of the Red Cross,[2]Le Monde avec AFP, « Le Comité international de la Croix-Rouge annonce la suppression de 270 postes supplémentaires à son siège à Genève », 11 septembre 2023, … Continue reading the repeated warnings from international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and United Nations (UN) agencies, and the debates at the Paris Summit for a New Global Financing Pact[3]Le Monde, « Il faut un nouveau pacte mondial pour financer l’aide humanitaire internationale », 17 juillet 2023. had already signalled the need to overhaul the system.
The 2025 event, however, was a tipping point: whilst demonstrating hostility towards the international solidarity sector, it also revealed the obsolescence of a model designed for short-term and well-defined crises, while the reality today is one of long-term emergencies, global interdependency and increasing competition between national priorities and humanitarian needs. The current crisis is therefore part of a wider trend rather than an isolated breakdown, meaning that we have to consider adapting the system beyond a simple search for alternative sources of funding. It also questions the role of civil society organisations in the international emergency aid sector.
A fragile economic model – a giant with feet of clay
Until the end of 2024, the humanitarian ecosystem was based on a hybrid model combining majority public contributions and significant private donations. The United States (US), the European Union (EU) and a few other members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) accounted for the bulk of the flow, with allocation mechanisms largely driven by the priorities of these funders. The suspension of US funding – directly, through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and indirectly, through UN agencies such as the World Food Programme (WFP), the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) – had a knock-on effect: programme cuts, cash-flow problems, redundancy plans in some organisations and a sudden revision of geographical cover. This shock also highlights the chronic dependence of international NGOs on upstream funding, whose predictability and priorities they cannot control. Yet nearly 90% of ongoing crises are situations that have existed for more than five years and affect tens of millions of people.
Fig.1 – The increasing proportion of protracted crises over the past ten years
The combination of long-running crises that are becoming entrenched and new shocks – geopolitical, climatic, health-related – is creating a shearing effect: every year, the number of coordinated appeals increases faster than the capacity to activate resources. In 2023–2024, global fundraising declined for the first time in ten years due to a slowdown in private donations and a cap on public contributions, causing the cover rate of UN plans to fall below half the identified needs.
Fig.2 – The increasing proportion of protracted crises over the past ten years
In addition to the quantitative deficit, there has also been a qualitative limit: over 80% of public funding granted to UN agencies remained “earmarked” for crises deemed to be priorities by the funder countries.[4]Fran Girling, Angus Urquhart, Sofia Martinez Fernandez et al., Global Humanitarian Assistance Report 2021, Development Initiatives, p. 75, … Continue reading This “flexible compassion” has produced major disparities between different places of intervention and weakened the promise of universality and impartiality. All told, the model appeared to be underfunded, politically oriented and technocratic, especially since, given the resurgence of protracted crises, the funding remained essentially annual. Everything combined to make the system vulnerable to choices that were beyond the control of operational actors. This is what happened in early 2025, with the shock of the US decision being preceded by significant declines in official development assistance (ODA) in many countries throughout the world, particularly in Europe.
The unabashed triumph of “who pays decides”
The sequence of events we have seen in 2025 confirms the explicit link between aid and national interests. The presentation of aid as an instrument of public policy is nothing new, but it is now openly acknowledged, in line with the classic idea that a budget reflects political priorities. France now makes this clear in its statement of decision from the Presidential Council for International Partnerships in April 2025.[5]French Presidency, Statement of decisions of the Presidential Council for International Partnerships, 6 April 2025, … Continue reading In the introduction to his 1922 work Cours de science des finances et de législation financière française, Gaston Jèze wrote: “The budget is, above all, the implementation of a programme of political action.”[…]“It is obviously the instrument by which the state [will] hierarchise [its] political priorities and translate them into means of action.”[6]Quoted in: « Quelle est la fonction politique et économique d’un budget ? », vie-publique.fr, 16 avril 2018. … Continue reading This is the stance fully embraced by the US president: international aid must serve the economic and strategic interests of the country he governs.
The consequences are direct and simply confirm trends that are already significant: major powers – both state powers and financial powers – can, through their decisions, redraw the map of interventions, dictate access to resources and impose procedural standards that direct the operational chain all the way to the field. These trends, however, are not unique to the US. Even before the US announced its drastic cuts, other major funder countries, including France,[7]Philippe Ricard et Julien Bouissou, « En France, la chute des aides au développement consterne les ONG et complique encore la diplomatie présidentielle », Le Monde, 14 novembre 2024, … Continue reading had already begun to scale back their international aid and development budgets.
Yet the sheer scale of US funding, as shown in the table below (which is based on 2023 data, consolidated in 2024), gives its decisions considerable leverage over multilateral agencies and NGOs. Over 40% of global aid for humanitarian crises has been abruptly cut by this presidential decree.
Fig.3 – The 20 leading country funders of humanitarian aid in 2023. Comparison between the contributions of high-income countries to global gross national income (GNI) and humanitarian funding
PFurthermore, these figures show us that long before the US decision, six of the twenty countries with the world’s highest GNI were not significant contributors to the humanitarian envelope. In other words, some of the world’s economic heavyweights were already standing back from the funding mechanism.
Another way of analysing the economic power of countries is to look at their share of global GNI, rather than calculating GNI per capita. For example, China, classified by the World Bank as a high-middle income country, is the world’s second largest economy, after the United States, according to this global GNI criterion, if we exclude the EU, which is an aggregate of countries. This is shown in the table below.
Fig.4 – Six countries with high GNI that do not provide funding for humanitarian aid (in the calculation and rendering model as it exists today)
The “flexible compassion” we have been discussing is prominent here. In some contexts, the perceived political manipulation of aid fuels mistrust among populations and decision-makers alike and also heightens security risks for aid actors. The principle of “who pays decides” thereby translates into increased constraints on the governance of the system, where the local actors and beneficiaries continue to have a minority voice in the decision-making processes. In fact, the local level often sees itself – and justifiably so – as the weak link in the approaches developed. Once again, and well before the shock of 2025, this development was already casting doubt on the ability of the humanitarian system to claim to be universal while depending on a small number of decision-making centres, themselves part of state strategies.
If we have taken the time to present data prior to this shock – which, given how sudden the shock is, should not be downplayed – this is because all the factors described above must be borne in mind when thinking about the future of the system, its stakeholders and therefore the populations concerned around the world.
Resisting, surviving and bouncing back with a new model
The US government’s sudden withdrawal of funding for humanitarian organisations stunned all those implementing this form of international solidarity. Once the confusion of the US administration’s contradictory and ambiguous decisions had subsided, the Red Cross movement, UN organisations and international NGOs were quick to realise how the announced restrictions would affect the activities they carried out for populations in the field, as well as the operating costs of their teams – not least the payment of salaries – that help conduct these essential actions for millions of people.
These three large groups of humanitarian actors quickly swung into action to protect their programmes and the future of their staff at the various organisations’ headquarters and in the countries where they operate. NGOs are particularly vulnerable insofar as they are affected by the restrictions in two ways:
– directly, by the suspension of funding from USAID, at least for those organisations that were funded by it;
– indirectly, by a reduction in the amounts they receive from the main UN agencies involved in crisis zones (WFP, UNHCR, UNICEF, etc.) as these agencies are also severely affected by the US withdrawal.
Fig.5 – The major effects the USAID withdrawal is having on UN agencies and
the sectors they cover
The current situation requires emergency management, but also the structural transformation of a system on which over 300 million people worldwide needing aid depend.[9]ALNAP, Global Humanitarian Assistance 2025, p. 32, https://alnap.hacdn.io/media/documents/GHA_Report_1408v1.pdf In our opinion, there are five complementary areas for reform.
Pooling and optimising the operating and structural costs of humanitarian organisations
The quality of the criteria and costs used to evaluate international aid has been the subject of critical analysis, which will need to be investigated in the context of a general decline in revenue.[10]Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, « L’aide humanitaire dans les pays en développement : qui évalue qui ? », Mondes en développement, vol. 1, n° 153, 2011, p. 111-120, … Continue reading Simplifying procedures (in consultation with funders), vigilance over production, purchasing and transport costs, depending on the country concerned by the international aid, will also have to be reconsidered. The levels of remuneration and accommodation paid to expatriate staff working for certain international organisations are legitimately the subject of criticism which, from a strictly financial point of view, reinforces the argument for giving local organisations a greater role in the implementation of projects. In the same way, identical considerations have contributed to a considerable increase in recent years in programmes based on direct financial transfers to families, leaving them free to choose their priorities, since they would then be attentive to optimising purchases. The reaffirmation of this strategy is all the more crucial given that this type of programme has been in decline since 2022. While these measures alone will not offset the shortfall, they will generate the confidence required for any increase in new contributions.
Strengthening the status and role of local actors
Despite the commitments made at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul in 2016, the target of allocating 25% of funding to national or local organisations has not been met. At the time, we were at around 2.5% of the total funding allocated to this strategy. Administrative obstacles and compliance constraints, the wide variety of political systems – particularly where the concept of “civil society” means something different – have certainly complicated the translation of commitments into actions. Similarly, there is a legitimate fear that the principles of neutrality and independence of certain local players in areas of armed conflict will not be respected. Nevertheless, there are a large number of contexts in which the cultural proximity, the ability to gain a foothold in the community and the continuity of action offered by local actors are major assets for the effectiveness, acceptability and sustainability of interventions. Since Istanbul, however, no significant progress has been made, with funding still levelling off at around 3.5% of the annual financial resources committed.[11]ALNAP, Global Humanitarian Assistance 2025, p. 19, https://alnap.hacdn.io/media/documents/GHA_Report_1408v1.pdf
Broadening and diversifying the group of contributing countries
The most recent update of the global map of countries based on GNI per capita gives a visual idea of the potential place that countries in the Global South could have in a revamped aid system.
Fig.6 – World Bank Group country classification by income level
The revamped multilateralism we are calling for – see below – requires greater integration of emerging economies in return for a real share of governance: equal representation within governing bodies, allocation criteria based on the scale of needs and a reduction in selective earmarking imposed by the system’s current funders. This demand was clearly reaffirmed by President Xi Jinping of China at the recent Tianjin conference when he expressed his willingness – emphatically and pompously – “to promote the improvement of global governance” and “to unite the forces of the Global South”.[12]Harold Thibault, « Au sommet de Tianjin, Xi Jinping place la Chine au centre d’un nouvel ordre antioccidental », Le Monde, 1er septembre 2025.
In the field of humanitarian action, the financial involvement of other, non-Western powers is nothing new, as the response to the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia and neighbouring countries showed – once again illustrating that aid actors were never immune to geostrategic concerns.[13]William Guéraiche, « Un tsunami d’incompréhension », Outre-Terre, n° 11, 2005, p. 591-604. https://shs.cairn.info/revue-outre-terre1-2005-2-page-591?lang=fr The complexity of this development is linked to the history of the development of ODA since the end of the Second World War and the political and strategic rationale of the Cold War. In fact, humanitarian aid, which is one of the components of ODA, has not escaped this initial divide. Today, a multipolar world prevails, with its multi-alignment of countries structuring and reinforcing the global South. This is the major challenge of the reform of the system that is now essential.[14]For further analysis of the history and challenges of ODA: Philippe Orliange et Alisée Pornet, Géopolitique du développement – Les enjeux de la solidarité internationale,, PUF, 2025.
The tensions generated between China and the United States by the desire of these two countries to steer the governance of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank show the extent to which the international context, in the wake of the election of President Trump, is adding the revival of power relations, and a denial of the recognition of “global public goods”, to the strictly financial equation for imagining the multilateralism of tomorrow.[15]Julien Bouissou, « Le FMI et la Banque mondiale sur la voie de la “trumpisation” avec l’abandon des questions climatiques et sociétales », Le Monde, 15 octobre 2025.
Despite all the difficulties that such a political opening will undoubtedly raise, there are no alternatives to a radical change in how the system is managed. It is also something that Brazil’s President Lula invites us to consider: “The solution to the crisis of multilateralism is to rebuild it on fairer foundations.”[16]Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, « Lula, président du Brésil : “La solution à la crise du multilatéralisme est de le refonder sur des bases plus justes” », Tribune dans le journal Le Monde, 10 … Continue reading
Activating extra non-governmental resources
An alternative approach, as recommended by economists such as Thomas Piketty, would be to make share holders of large corporations contribute through taxation.[17]Bertrand Badie, Pierre Micheletti et Thomas Piketty, « Une contribution obligatoire des États les plus riches permettrait de faire face aux crises humanitaires », Le Monde, 18 décembre 2021. In the EU alone, these shareholders will receive dividends estimated at €459 billion in 2025 – ten times more than the amount currently required to meet the needs of over 300 million people requiring life-saving humanitarian assistance.[18]Marc Angrand, « Versement de dividendes : pas de ralentissement en vue pour les entreprises en Europe », Le Monde, 14 janvier 2025.
A combination of the various strategies outlined above would help quantify the breakdown of efforts in a renewed, diversified funding model. Various scenarios are set out in the table below. They take account of the US withdrawal and show that contributions from the richest countries would remain very reasonable.
Table – Seven volumetric scenarios for funding international humanitarian aid without US contributions
Establishing a new governance model as part of revamped multilateralism
The findings and analyses shared in this article describe the challenges facing the international humanitarian system. We have placed particular emphasis on the close interdependencies between the quantitative and political issues that jeopardise the survival of the model as it currently stands. As the future takes shape, significant trends are emerging, particularly in the outbreak of high-intensity military and economic conflicts: they offer the prospect of a radical overhaul of the system.
The question of how to govern a substantially larger system of contributors will therefore be the major challenge for multilateralism, which will have to bounce back from the blows it has suffered in 2025. Yet this future system will not necessarily give civil society organisations the same role when it comes to managing humanitarian crises and deploying their expatriate teams in all places of intervention.
Less operational, more political: the inevitable repositioning of international humanitarian NGOs
The 2025 crisis cannot be reduced to a cyclical decline in budgets; it marks a hardening in the relationship between humanitarian action, public policies and societal expectations. A number of factors are converging and leading to a rethink of the role that civil society organisations will play in a future humanitarian aid system rebuilt on new foundations. This is because those who embody it today are no longer necessarily supported, neither by local populations and actors in crisis areas, nor by political decision-makers in countries where operations are carried out and who see them as tools of soft power, nor by governments that have supported them up to now. Funders now seem keen to reaffirm the primacy of state policy and support for aid operators other than NGOs,[19]Sarah Bush and Jennifer Hadden, “The end of the age of NGOs? How civil society lost its post-cold war power”, Foreign Affairs, 3 July 2025. in particular those in the commercial sector under the political control of those who give orders (and budgets).
Multilateralism, which is essential for regulating global affairs and managing conflicts, is being undermined by developments that reveal crucial issues for the future of emergency international aid: the conflict in the Gaza Strip has exposed the failure of the humanitarian model and the multilateralism that purported to protect it. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation has become the central and disturbing protagonist in this dystopia.
Gaza is the story of a people who have suffered the systematic destruction of their territory, one of the most densely populated in the world, and of their habitat. It is the story of more than 57,000 deaths, a large proportion of them women and children. It is the story of international humanitarian law being paralysed in its application and its protective virtues. More than 400 humanitarian workers have been killed since the start of the conflict, the highest death toll in contemporary crises.[20]Pierre Micheletti, « Le déploiement de la “Fondation humanitaire de Gaza” est une étape supplémentaire dans l’effondrement du système international de secours », Institut Rousseau, 10 … Continue reading It is the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, whose opinions, like the rules of procedure and prosecution, remain ineffective to this day.
The humanitarian movement’s “Great Depression” could prove to be a period of beneficial restructuring, during which the ambition of universality regains a financial and political foundation consistent with the realities of the times.
Despite denials from some figures of the humanitarian movement, which is falling apart before our eyes, it is the issue of the role claimed by Western countries that is being raised once again.[21]Rony Brauman, « Il ne s’agit pas de désoccidentaliser l’humanitaire mais de considérer que des formes d’entraide se développent ailleurs et qu’elles n’ont pas moins ni plus de … Continue reading
Translated from the French by Derek Scoins
Pictures credit : Bayu Prayuda
