Now that American aid has been suspended, humanitarian organisations in Cameroon are facing a double whammy: an immediate funding crisis on top of a significant and long-standing trend of underfunding for its three ongoing national crises. To adapt, they are implementing Triple Nexus and localisation strategies – with mixed results.
Following the announcement of suspension of United States (US) aid, the humanitarian community has highlighted the urgent need for collective action. On the one hand, this involves creating a new narrative that promotes solidarity over isolationist withdrawal or the systematic pursuit of financial return. On the other hand, it involves building a new operational model that allows the systemic obstacles encountered in aid sector reform to be overcome.[1]Véronique de Geoffroy et Laurent Saillard, « Au-delà du gel des financements américains : une profonde et durable remise en cause de l’Aide Publique au Développement et de la solidarité … Continue reading Yet how does this desired reconfiguration of the humanitarian sector work in practice in a national context? This article is based on the results of a recent field survey carried out in Cameroon on the ongoing reconfigurations within the humanitarian sector. It draws on primary data from interviews conducted at a national level and from involvement in various humanitarian coordination mechanisms, including the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus National Task, the Localisation Working Group, and the Refugee Response Working Group.[2]The study also draws on the database of the Financial Tracking Service (FTS), a public platform managed by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which tracks … Continue reading This article explains how the suspension of US aid is part of a significant trend of underfunding humanitarian action in Cameroon, a trend to which humanitarian organisations have been trying to adapt for several years, by implementing the aid localisation agenda and strengthening collaboration with development actors.
The effects of the suspension of US aid to Cameroon
Cameroon is experiencing three ongoing humanitarian crises: the Anglophone Crisis in the Northwest and Southwest (NOSO) regions since 2016, the Islamist insurgency of Boko Haram in the Lake Chad basin (part of Cameroon’s Far North region) since 2009, and waves of violence in the Central African Republic that have generated a stream of refugees on the country’s eastern border since the early 2000s. Funding for the response to these crises has generally been provided by a handful of donors, mainly from the West. The table below shows, for example, that over the last five years, the humanitarian response in Cameroon has been heavily dependent on US contributions, which accounted for almost half of the funds allocated until 2025, when they fell to less than 8%. The European Union is now the main provider of humanitarian aid, although the volume of its contributions has not increased significantly. Contributions are certainly low, but they are also more variable for bilateral donors, including France, the United Kingdom and Germany – all of which share a colonial history with Cameroon. While UN multilateral funds such as the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) are also involved, it should be noted that some contributions from the World Bank are included under humanitarian response funding even though, in reality, these funds are generally earmarked for the development of public services in refugee-hosting areas.
Table – Fund allocation and percentages as a share of total funding for ten contributors to humanitarian response funding in Cameroon between 2020 and 2025
Source: OCHA, Financial Tracking Service,
https://fts.unocha.org
“The suspension of US aid should lead not only to the halting of almost 50% of planned interventions, but also to a reduction in humanitarian staff and the suspension of certain coordination activities.”
According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the suspension of US aid should lead not only to the halting of almost 50% of planned interventions, but also to a reduction in humanitarian staff and the suspension of certain coordination activities.[3]OCHA, Yaoundé : point sur la suspension de l’aide par les États-Unis, réunion de la Task Force Nationale, 27 mars 2025. In terms of global humanitarian governance, emergency measures have been taken to adapt to the effects of the US decision. In a letter on 10 March 2025, Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher, who chairs the UN’s Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC), invited country-level humanitarian leaders to restructure the sector to address what is portrayed as a “profound crisis of legitimacy, morale and funding”.[4]OCHA, The humanitarian reset (10 March 2025), Message from Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher to the humanitarian community, 10 March 2025, … Continue reading In Cameroon, the strategy is being re-prioritised within the framework of the 2025 Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP), and the humanitarian coordination architecture is being reviewed. The new OCHA-led prioritisation process, however, was primarily a technical exercise consisting of calculating the cross-sectoral severity of needs, based on two sequential criteria: the identification of crisis zones reaching a severity score of level 4 (i.e. the extreme level), and the revision of sectoral response priorities. The result of this exercise is a strategic shift from an approach based on “needs” to one based on “priority targets”, resulting in new categories of people being excluded from those targeted for assistance: instead of the 2.1 million people targeted by the initial HRP of 2025, only 1.3 million are included in its revised version.[5]OCHA, Cameroon : At a glance I Prioritized 2025 HRP, 7 May 2025, https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/cameroon/cameroon-glance-prioritized-2025-hrp This prioritisation has led to the suspension of resilience and empowerment programmes targeting 597,000 people affected by the crisis in 2025.[6]OCHA, Cameroon Humanitarian Response Plan, Février 2025.
The significant underfunding trend in the crises in Cameroon
The suspension of American aid is not in itself a sign of a sudden change in approach, but rather a significant trend towards underfunding the crises in Cameroon. Admittedly, the international attention focused on events in the Central African Republic and on the Boko Haram attacks in the Far North region of Cameroon led to a sharp increase in humanitarian funding between 2014 and 2016,[7]Claire Lefort-Rieu, Un art bien incertain : gouverner les migrations forcées en contextes camerounais, Thèse de doctorat, Université Paris Cité, 2024, p. 151-152. even though Cameroon has not traditionally been regarded as a beneficiary of humanitarian aid.[8]Marie-Thérèse Mengue et Virginie Troit (dir.), Transition humanitaire au Cameroun, Éditions Karthala, 2023. However, the funds allocated in subsequent years rarely allowed the average rate of coverage of humanitarian needs to be met.[9]OCHA, Financial Tracking Service, Cameroon Humanitarian Response Plan 2025, Trends in coordinated plan requirements, https://fts.unocha.org/plans/1266/summary
Like a symbol of the low funding level for Cameroon’s crises, the country was described in 2025 by the Norwegian Refugee Council as the world’s most neglected humanitarian context, ahead of countries such as Ethiopia, Mozambique, Burkina Faso, Mali and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[10]Tina Abu-Hanna, Jessica Wanless, Hélène Michou et al., The world’s most neglected displacement crises 2024. It is time for action, Norwegian Refugee Council, 3 June 2025, … Continue reading This ranking corroborates the prevailing view among aid organisations in Cameroon that humanitarian action is “chronically underfunded”, particularly because of inequalities in diplomatic and media coverage and international funding:
“All the UN agencies here in Cameroon are seeing a decrease in their funding because Cameroon is invisible on the world humanitarian stage – that is, when we say ‘Cameroon’, what comes to mind is football, cooking, culture and dance. But when we say Yemen, Chad or Niger, we think there’s a humanitarian crisis there. Cameroon is a country regarded as stable, and that label always sticks despite its humanitarian needs.”[11]Interview with a UN official, Yaoundé, 7 February 2024.
The reduced visibility of Cameroon’s crises, however, is due not so much to a global lack of interest from international players as to a lack of political resolve, among both institutional donors and the authorities themselves:
“The former allocate funds to countries they consider strategic, but in limited amounts because of the risk of misappropriation, while the latter are satisfied with a reduced volume of funding and international operations in order to prevent such operations from becoming too extensive and forming the core of a possible opposing power or protest movement.”[12]Claire Lefort-Rieu, Un art bien incertain…, op. cit., p. 225 [editor’s translation].
Humanitarian organisations have been working for several years to adapt to this configuration. They seized the opportunities offered by the first World Humanitarian Summit to reform the aid sector in Cameroon.
Adaptation strategies for aid organisations
One of the key solutions put forward at the Istanbul Summit in 2016 was to boost collaboration between humanitarian and development players. This “New Way of Working”, better known as the Humanitarian-Development-Peace Nexus (or Triple Nexus), reflects this attempt to galvanise players and draw funding from the development sector in humanitarian response. As part of this commitment, a national working group on implementing the Triple Nexus was established in Cameroon in 2019, but its governance structure, linked to that of the Humanitarian Country Team (HCT), reveals a strong presence of humanitarian players, in stark contrast to the low participation of development players and funding bodies. The absence of these players in this mechanism was a challenge even before the US decision. Humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) considered that poor coordination with major institutional donors such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the European Union (EU) could lead to major budget cuts in the funds allocated to the humanitarian response in Cameroon, given the international attention focused on the conflicts in Ukraine, Palestine and elsewhere in the world, but also Cameroon government’s rhetoric insisting that the situation was under control tended to downplay the seriousness of the crises.
“Faced with this situation, humanitarian aid agencies have turned their attention to mobilising development players in the humanitarian response.”
Faced with this situation, humanitarian aid agencies have turned their attention to mobilising development players in the humanitarian response. The case of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) illustrates this trend. Thanks to its lobbying of the Cameroonian authorities and the World Bank, Cameroon was selected as a pilot country to test a new approach to collaboration between the World Bank and the UN system in crisis situations. In this way, in 2018 Cameroon became the first country to benefit from a $130 million grant from the International Development Association 18 (IDA18) regional sub-account for Refugees and host communities. This funding is granted to the government on condition that it meets criteria relating to the recognition, support and protection of refugees.[13]Sarah Dalrymple, Sarah Hanssen, Isabelle de Lichtervelde et al., Supporting longer term development in crises at the nexus: Lessons from Cameroon, Development Initiative, November 2020, … Continue reading In particular, IDA-18 financed four projects in the health, education, social safety nets and social infrastructure sectors, based on an integrated approach targeting displaced populations and their hosts. In practice, the implementation of these projects was fraught with governance problems within state structures, as illustrated by the example of the health project:
“As for the health project, it could not be implemented. The Ministry of Health did not accept the terms of the project’s implementation – it wanted to involve an association that had existed for less than a year and that supposedly worked in the health sector in the wider north.”[14]Interview with a government official, Yaoundé, 1 February 2024.
A pragmatic approach seems to dominate the work of the UNHCR in the context of the new way of working with the World Bank in Cameroon. As the World Bank does not fund humanitarian agencies but governments, the UNHCR has placed the emphasis on government ownership of humanitarian action. While this strategy may seem necessary to attract funds from the development sector, it also entails risks. Claire Lefort-Rieu has shown, for example, how the projects funded by IDA-18 have been politically exploited by the Cameroonian government, given its ability to control the players and mobilise aid resources to serve its political agenda.[15]Claire Lefort-Rieu, « Aide internationale, production de services publics et souveraineté étatique : l’exemple des réfugiés centrafricains dans l’Est-Cameroun », Politique africaine, vol. … Continue reading Humanitarian NGOs are concerned about the Cameroonian government’s willingness to manage all funds from the Nexus approach and durable solutions, as the focus on ownership by Paul Biya’s regime – in power since 1982 – could, on the face of it, reduce the effectiveness of the humanitarian response by becoming entangled in problems of national governance. It could also undermine the independence and neutrality of humanitarian players, particularly in a situation in the NOSO where the government is one of the parties to the conflict.
Another pillar of the humanitarian reform, the localisation agenda, is being applied in Cameroon at a time when the players involved in the national humanitarian space are being restructured. The Coordination of Humanitarian International NGOs in Cameroon (CHINGO) was founded in 2019 with the aim of facilitating coordination and cooperation between the international NGOs themselves, on the one hand, and between them and other actors involved in the humanitarian response, on the other hand. A year earlier (in 2018), there had been a similar development between national and local NGOs (N/L NGOs) with the founding of a national platform of humanitarian NGOs (Cameroonian Humanitarian Organizations Initiative, or CHOI), then composed of around 200 N/L NGOs.[16] Philip Wade’s interview with Damien Noma, « Les ONG camerounaises et la coordination de l’aide au défi de la “localisation” », in Marie-Thérèse Mengue et Virginie Troit (dir.), … Continue reading While the HCT, the main national body for negotiating aid outcomes, used to consist solely of UN agencies, humanitarian donors and international NGOs, the incorporation of CHOI in 2018 improved the representativeness of this body. National representativeness was boosted in 2024 when three new N/L NGOs were elected to the HCT: ALDEPA (Action Locale pour un Développement Participatif et Autogéré – “Local Action for Participatory and Self-Managed Development”), covering the Far North region, LUKMEF (Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Foundation), covering the NOSO regions, and Help the Children, covering the East region.
Although the changes in the HCT help correct power imbalances in humanitarian aid structures, the process has not been truly transformative as some structural constraints persist. Local organisations’ access to funding to implement the HRP remains limited by the demanding procedures of the funding bodies. For example, while the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO) is now the main donor of humanitarian aid in 2025, it is known to fund only international NGOs. Furthermore, local capacity building is still dependent on the intervention strategy of international partners, which focus more on mastering their management procedures than on strengthening organisations and gradually empowering local organisations.[17]Boukar Khari, État des lieux de la mise en oeuvre de la localisation de l’aide humanitaire au Cameroun, OCHA, novembre 2021.
In addition to simple adaptation strategies being promoted, the functioning of the international solidarity system in Cameroon therefore requires profound changes that will involve a review of the relationship of dependence on a handful of Western donors. While the diversification of funding sources is becoming almost a matter of organisational survival, this strategic redeployment remains little explored in Cameroon for the time being. Recent attention from certain aid agencies has focused, for example, on access to funding from the German Nexus Fund, for which Cameroon, alongside Chad, is eligible for the first batch of initial funding of USD 5.5 million.[18]Minutes of the Nexus National Task Force meeting of 24 July 2025, https://response.reliefweb.int/cameroon/humanitarian-development-peace-hdp-nexus-cameroon/hdp-nexus-national-task-force However, it is incumbent on national and international humanitarian response actors in Cameroon to develop a national fundraising strategy that includes the private sector, the diaspora and other alternative sources, as this seems to be the practical way to reduce dependency and create a more sustainable funding base.
Translated from the French by Derek Scoins
Picture credit : © Christophe Da Silva pour Action contre la Faim
