What do you prioritise when everything is urgent, and with donor funding under threat?
For a second straight year, humanitarian response plans in 2025 have been tightened and trimmed in a process of “prioritisation” and “boundary-setting”.
UN-led humanitarian appeals will cost $47 billion this year – less than the $56 billion figure reached at the end of 2023, despite constant reminders that needs are worsening.
Prioritisation is a response to funding shortfalls and an attempt to stem mission creep in the humanitarian sector, which for years has been taking on work better left to governments, communities, or development actors. It’s also a calculated pitch to government donors in view of their shrinking humanitarian budgets: We’ve lowered what we’re asking for; will you fund us?
But what does setting boundaries mean for crisis-affected populations and the world’s chronically underfunded humanitarian responses? Where is the money shifting? Who’s missing out? And can humanitarians really ask for less to get more?
In other words, is prioritisation achieving its goals?
Humanitarians must find a consistent way of presenting needs and response costs that is both credible and fundable.
A closer look at the numbers suggest this year’s funding appeal, known as the Global Humanitarian Overview or GHO, has produced more focused plans that prioritise acute needs in quick-onset emergencies over longer-lasting crises. But there are also unintended consequences: Millions of people who need aid are left out, the per-person cost of aid is rising, and the practice of shifting the goalposts calls into question the true scale of humanitarian need.
There must be trust in humanitarian numbers: They’re the basis for response planning, raising funds, measuring progress, and most importantly making sure aid reaches those most in need.
This trust is even more urgent as US President Donald Trump takes control of the world’s largest humanitarian donor government, freezing US funding and promising cuts and more disruption.
Humanitarians must find a consistent way of presenting needs and response costs that is both credible and fundable.
Prioritising means far fewer people have a chance of receiving assistance
The most striking impact of prioritisation is that a smaller proportion of people who need aid are now targeted for humanitarian assistance.
Humanitarian planners estimate the number of “people in need” of assistance, then base response costs around the number they plan to reach given their own capacities: “people targeted”.
Since prioritisation was introduced for the 2024 appeal process, a smaller proportion of people in need have been targeted – 61% in the last two years compared to about 70% over the nine previous years.
This means only six in 10 people who need humanitarian assistance are now targeted. The chance of actually receiving aid is reduced further, given that most appeals are perennially underfunded; in 2024, response plans received less than half of what they asked for. NGOs are understandably concerned that prioritisation means providing aid to some while denying it to others.
Fast-breaking emergencies over long-lasting crises
Another way of looking at prioritisation is comparing where funding requirements have risen versus where they have dropped. In 2025, quick-onset emergencies are prioritised over protracted crises.
Sudden-onset or rapidly deteriorating crises – such as responses in Sudan, Haiti, Chad, Palestine, and Myanmar – have seen their appeals grow in 2025.
Protracted crisis responses that have had appeals for five years or longer – such as in Yemen, Ethiopia, Somalia, and some regional refugee responses – appear to be deprioritised, based on lower funding levels.
However, the majority (91%) of appeals are for protracted crises – an indication of the world’s inability to address the root causes of conflict and emergencies.
How the system spends its money is a good indicator of how it sees its role. With prioritisation, the humanitarian system appears to have decided that it is no longer its job to address structural challenges and long-term needs – which are better-suited to what development actors can do.
Who’s not left behind
One common concern about prioritisation is that it could emphasise some types of aid deemed more life-saving at the expense of others – immediate food assistance over education or support for survivors of gender-based violence, for example.
But the topline numbers do not show a significant shift in the financial requirements for different sectors.
Sectors traditionally considered the most life-saving – food, health, shelter, and water and sanitation, for example – actually saw their share of the overall funding ask decline marginally between 2023 and 2024, from 68% to 65%.
Another concern about prioritisation is that it could reinforce the neglect of some crises over others that enjoy more global attention and funding. However, there appears to be no correlation between historically underfunded crises – responses in Latin America, for example – and those that have lower funding asks in 2025.
In other words, underfunded crises may still be shortchanged, but they’re no worse off than other emergencies due to the prioritisation process.
Unintended consequences: Fuzzy numbers and more expensive aid
On the face of it, the numbers suggest prioritisation is pushing the humanitarian sector to focus on crises experiencing the most acute needs. However, there are also unintended consequences.
Prioritisation has been accompanied by a new methodology for calculating the number of people in need. There are some 305 million people said to need assistance in 2025. While staggeringly high, this number is actually 5% less than in 2023.
The reported reduction in humanitarian need in the last two years is hard to reconcile with the narrative of a world on fire, presented at the launch of this year’s global humanitarian overview, or GHO – a tally of the UN-led response plans.
By most measures, humanitarian needs are on the rise. In the last two years, the number of conflict incidents is up 48%, the number of people forcibly displaced has risen by 13%, and the number of countries measured as high severity on the INFORM Severity Index, one of the sector’s go-to tools to compare crises, rose by 43%. The only metrics that moderately align with the GHO are the number of people who were acutely food insecure (which dropped by 2% during the period), and the number affected by climate incidents (down by 21%).
In other words, there are more conflicts, more people are displaced, political violence seems to be rising, and crises are growing more severe. But according to humanitarian response plans in 2025, the number of people who need aid has fallen.
Simply put, this doesn’t add up.
Similarly, the cost of humanitarian assistance per person is higher this year, even though fewer people are targeted. The “unit cost” of humanitarian aid in 2025 is $250 per person targeted, up from $224 per person in 2023 and $202 in 2021.
So while the sector is targeting a smaller proportion of people in need, it’s becoming more expensive to reach each individual. Cost efficiency and value for money are an inexact science with multiple factors at play in the humanitarian sector – from rising costs to inflation. But if prioritisation is in part a bid to make the sector more efficient, then the topline numbers suggest it may be off the mark.
What next for prioritisation?
Prioritisation will continue to be a dominant policy concern in 2025, as pressure on donor funding escalates.
Emergency responses are rarely fully funded, and it’s natural for aid planners to set priorities and realistic limits. But they must also present an accurate picture of the state of humanitarian needs.
A look behind the numbers suggests this year’s prioritised response planning targets the most severe needs in quick-onset crises. But in doing so, the sector’s metrics for humanitarian needs are becoming more blurry.
What do “people in need”, “people targeted”, or even funding requirements mean when the approach to calculating them is constantly changing?
Prioritisation risks misrepresenting reality and creating a false metric of success. If response plans are 100% funded but only six in 10 people in need are targeted, is the job truly done? This risks airbrushing out genuine needs, and letting donors off the hook for their unwillingness to fund humanitarian appeals properly.
Asking for less money in the hope that donors will put in more is counter-productive and risks undermining credibility in the process. There are also concerns that affected communities are not the ones calling the shots on aid allocation and are not being consulted on prioritisation.
Constantly moving the goalposts erodes trust in the system.
Gross Domestic Product numbers are not adjusted because governments don’t like them, and the same principle should apply to humanitarian appeals. The sector needs consistent, reliable metrics.
A solution could be two sets of numbers: one showing total people in need with a hypothetical cost of reaching everyone, and another reflecting targets based on operational capacity and realistic funding forecasts.
This approach could help restore faith in the numbers that we all need to trust.
Edited by Irwin Loy.