Everyone now recognises that Donald Trump’s second presidential term marks a radical transformation of the global arena. His controversial decisions and dramatic announcements are reshaping the balance of geopolitics and impacting, above all, international solidarity and, more specifically, humanitarian action.
The freezing of American aid, including the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), and the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have caused 92% of projects supported by the latter to be brought to a sudden halt – the effect of a cut exceeding $40 billion. This decision is so brutal that it has life-and-death consequences for thousands of people already. It is part of a systemic reappraisal of public aid for development on a global scale. The consequences of these aid cuts from the world’s biggest funder are all the more catastrophic that they add to big cuts already introduced in Canada and several European countries. For example, in 2024 France announced it would be reducing its aid budget by 35% for 2025. Other European states, from the UK and Switzerland to the Netherlands and Belgium, have pursued a similar path to support an agenda focused more on defence. The EU (European Union) could follow suit and start mirroring these national trends too.
Yet beyond a simple reduction of amounts allocated, there is an ideological targeting of certain spheres. These spheres include humanitarian aid, of course, but also gender equality, sexual identities, human rights, ecology and the fight against climate change. In the wake of these retreats, there are also now systematic attacks on public health, multilateralism, science and democracy.
This offensive constitutes a deliberate reappraisal of principles and standards of international humanitarian law (IHL). Despite the limits of IHL, despite contexts of impunity and despite the many attempts to circumvent it, IHL has, up to now, offered a framework for making the work of humanitarian organisations easier and for limiting the influence of violent players or irresponsible regimes. The weakening of IHL has created a vacuum today. This vacuum is opening up a path for criminal groups, extremist movements and populist regimes. These players are taking advantage of the vacuum to turn aid into an opportunistic and discriminatory form of soft power – tinged with cronyism and even malevolence – that serves ideologies running counter to fundamental rights. Against a backdrop of growing tensions, in which migratory crises, armed conflicts and the effects of climate change are intensifying and adding to each other, the debilitation of aid is worsening the situation of the world’s most fragile countries. This trend is going hand in hand with positions that are resolutely hostile to authorities with universal jurisdiction. For example, the US (United States) has threatened the International Criminal Court (ICC) and Viktor Orbán has announced he will withdraw Hungary from the Rome Statute of the ICC.
For non-governmental organisations (NGOs), this trend represents a far‑reaching upheaval of the aid architecture they have relied on for decades. A butterfly effect is now being felt: sudden decisions made in Washington DC or elsewhere are having consequences worldwide, pushing aid organisations to a cliff edge. Such organisations find themselves forced to lay off staff or shut down programmes. Indeed, the brutal freezing of US funding is not only affecting American organisations but is weakening the entire humanitarian ecosystem throughout the world, including French NGOs, which are especially involved in crisis zones.
United Nations (UN) agencies are strongly impacted, whether it is the World Food Programme (WFP), the World Health Organization (WHO), the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) or the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF). Certain fragile states receiving aid are now at a standstill, as are organisations with a business model that makes them heavily dependent on US funds to maintain their humanitarian, social or health programmes.
Local organisations in countries in difficulty are suffering from the full force of this crisis, the extent of which is unprecedented. And as if to rub salt into the wound, the situation is undermining the already faltering dynamic of aid localisation, which sought to strengthen the funding and self-reliance of NGOs in the Global South. Yet this vacuum is an opportunity for other channels of funding, which should be analysed and documented.
Ultimately, the ones who are paying the highest price for these brutal an deadly decisions are, of course, the world’s most vulnerable populations. Human tragedies have already been observed. Others are yet to come and are presented in the articles of this issue: health and living conditions are suddenly deteriorating and lives are being lost due to a lack of access to humanitarian aid, medical care and protection mechanisms – which were already undersized.
This special issue of Humanitarian Alternatives is designed to help us better understand the implications of this unparallelled crisis and, above all, help us document adaptation strategies, new alliances, forms of resistance and solutions applied by aid players, especially partners of low-income countries.
The focus of this issue starts with an analysis from Pierre Micheletti, who looks at the bombshell of the early-2025 announcement that the US would be massively withdrawing its aid funding via USAID. He shows how this decision has not only stifled many programmes led by international NGOs and UN agencies, but has also cast light on certain structural flaws, including a dependence on only a handful of funders, a logic of earmarked funding and timeframes that are ill-suited to protracted crises. Far from being a mere cyclical shock, this situation should, for Pierre Micheletti, prompt us to deeply question a business model that has become ineffective. Even Médecins Sans Frontières, an NGO financially independent from the US, has suddenly realised its independence was only relative and that the current crisis is impacting it in multiple ways. That is what Michiel Hofman explains so well in his article.
You will then find several articles that look at the concrete, measurable, observed consequences that the decisions have had on the budgetary balance of local and international NGOs, on their structural and managerial organisation, and, above all, on the populations they assist in economies that are already weakened and underfunded. Ines Alaoui, Marion Di Ciaccio and Nicolas Lorente show the effects of the global crisis on the fight against HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and on community players (including job losses, the shutdown of screening and treatment services, and a lasting loss of trust), as well as the reconfigurations of civic space that the crisis has brought about. Marie Lussier and Roxane Grisard, who both work for Médecins du Monde, explain how the global attack on sexual and reproductive rights hide a political agenda that goes against gender equality and humanitarian principles – with devastating consequences for millions of women, girls and vulnerable minorities. In Africa, the consequences are, indeed, catastrophic. Axel Pueugue Simo emphasises the interconnectedness of crises in Cameroon, one of the world’s most-forgotten humanitarian zones. The aid funding crisis is striking Cameroon at a time marked by Boko Haram’s ongoing insurgency and an inflow of refugees from the Central African Republic. Swingeing budget cuts are causing international solidarity with refugees to fall apart. Rémy Kalombo explains how, in Niger, a Sahelian country that hosts around 400,000 refugees, the US and European decisions are jeopardising commitments made several years ago and endangering the fragile balance between emergency aid and lasting empowerment.
Focusing on standards, Caroline Brandao alerts us to the collapse of the global humanitarian order, marked by a weakening of international humanitarian law, growing impunity and the powerlessness of multilateral bodies. She calls for a collective overhaul founded on the principles of peace, justice and dignity.
Several authors then document the innovations and adaptation strategies that both local and global humanitarian organisations have applied to cope with the widespread drop in funding and with today’s reappraisal of the founding principles of international aid. These include concrete responses, alternative funding models, innovative resilience mechanisms and organisational adaptations.
In this regard, Jean-Baptiste Lamarche presents mutualisation as a driver for “doing more with less” in a backdrop of financial restriction. He illustrates this with concrete examples of group purchases, of shared air transport like that of the EU Humanitarian Air Bridge supported by the logistics cooperative hulo, and of logistics and human resources shared between aid players. In a rousing article that takes us back to Africa – Chad, to be precise – Julien Ramadji Begoto analyses the experience of “villagisation” as an alternative to hosting refugees. Once again, these refugees come from the Central African Republic. Unlike camps, which are often isolated and create dependence, this model of settlement is based on direct integration of refugees into host villages or on gradual transformation of camps into ordinary villages. This approach aims to help refugees integrate socially and economically, while reducing their dependence on international aid. Yet the author shows that its success depends on fair management of land, on investment in local development and on host communities being closely involved.
And because the current funding crisis raises the question of substitute funding mechanisms that could be used instead, Maryam Z. Deloffre explores the potential of pooled funds to redistribute power in humanitarian governance and to foster localisation. Her article shows that these financial instruments can be more than just funding mechanisms: they can help rebalance relations between players through a method that is fairer, more flexible and closer to the reality on the ground. Furthermore, in the online extension of this issue, on our website, Hélène Juillard looks at the wane in monetary transfers, which have nonetheless long been presented as an efficient, effective method that respects the dignity of the recipients. She explains that these monetary transfers remain concentrated on a handful of major crises (Ukraine, Syria, etc.) and that they are still widely underused elsewhere, even in propitious contexts, whereas they could represent a form of resilience in the face of protracted crises and the funding drop. This article, alongside others that could not get a place in the naturally limited scope of this printed edition, can be found in our website’s “Aid in danger” section, which we created in the first weeks of the crisis.
Lastly, to conclude this issue’s focus by giving it historical and political depth, Joël Glasman offers a fascinating analysis of the way in which we can interpret today’s ideological attack on the very foundations of humanitarianism – an attack that relies on intellectual confusion, a technique long used by movements in the New Right. By analysing the distinction between progressive criticism (which calls for greater coherence and equality in aid) and reactionary criticism (which rejects the principles of universality and human rights), the author shows how political lines get muddled, how terms get hijacked and turned against their initiators, and how reactionary thought asserts itself – sometimes even beneath a veneer of false radicalism. So, the article by this author is very much part of this issue’s underlying purpose: to document the political conditions of the onset of today’s trend, including the rise of populism against fundamental rights. The focus of this issue opens up possible reflections, which still need to be developed, on global mechanisms introduced by anti-rights governments to attack players in solidarity and on how such players can respond – bound as they are, in theory, by their neutrality and vocation to help the most vulnerable.
This issue of Humanitarian Alternatives is truly exceptional as it focuses exclusively on this bombshell and its aftershocks still being felt today. Indeed, this issue of our review marks a historic watershed in humanitarianism. It sheds light on a deep-seated crisis, of course, yet also on the power of clear, pluralistic reflections on ways to rebuild an international aid system that could be fairer, more even-handed and more sustainable.
Translated from the French by Thomas Young
Picture credit : ©CICR – Alessandro Iovino
