Hot take: Maybe the humanitarian reset is going exactly according to plan.
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Today: Sudan’s fundraising crossfire, what new development assistance data shows, and yet another humanitarian reset.
On the radar |
Fundraising in Sudan: Sudan marked two years of civil war and a spiralling humanitarian crisis on 15 April. Many big agencies marked the anniversary by asking for money. You could forgive a donor for getting a bit flummoxed with all the different appeals. Here’s a sampling:
WFP: The World Food Programme “urgently needs $650 million to continue operations in Sudan”, the agency said.
WHO: “Funding cuts have severely affected our operations. We call on our partners to continue their support for WHO,” the health agency said, just ahead of a plea for “peace and health for Sudan’s people”.
UNICEF: The agency said it “is appealing for $1 billion for its response in Sudan in 2025”.
IOM: The migration agency said its response plan is only 10% percent funded.
UNHCR: The refugee agency also highlighted its own “severe funding shortfalls”.
International NGOs seem slightly more coordinated. Five organisations issued a joint statement referencing the overall $4.1 billion Sudan response plan, rather than individual fundraising pots.
Aid costs money, and money is short in 2025. But for all the promises of collective action and a united voice, humanitarian groups haven’t figured out how to ask for funding in a coherent way.
Mutual aid: Some humanitarians like to name-drop Sudan’s emergency response rooms at every opportunity. But mentions of mutual aid are much harder to find in agency response plans. Here’s a handy reading list of eight stories covering mutual aid, from women-led groups and communal kitchens, to the impacts of aid cuts and the growing dangers facing volunteers. One analysis makes this observation: “As international organisations fight for their survival, they may end up competing with local responders for dwindling resources.”
Thank your donors: Aid surge + questionable access = press releases about trucks crossing and planes landing. Here’s another one from Myanmar: “A plane carrying critical relief supplies from the UN Refugee Agency’s global stockpiles in Dubai has landed today in Yangon, Myanmar,” UNHCR says. It even offers the exact time of touchdown (5:32 pm local). It doesn’t matter that Myanmar’s commercial capital, Yangon, is far from the epicentre of the late-March earthquakes: There are tents to unpack, logos to show, and donors to thank under contractually mandated guidelines.
Data points |
Official development assistance from the world’s biggest donors dropped for the first time in five years, according to new data from the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee – a club of wealthy (and mainly Global North) donor countries.
Development assistance added up to $212.1 billion in 2024, according to preliminary estimates released 16 April – a roughly 7.1% drop over the previous year. Total humanitarian aid fell by a larger proportion: 9.6%.
Development aid could drop by up to 17% in 2025, according to OECD projections.
Donors continued the controversial practice of counting refugee support costs spent at home as foreign aid. And these in-country refugee costs ($27.8 billion) still outpace what’s spent on humanitarian aid ($24.2 billion). In other words: Donors spent more “foreign aid” money at home than they did on humanitarian aid abroad.
Coming soon: Key takeaways from the new funding data.
End note |
How many times can humanitarians push reset before the button breaks?
The UN’s humanitarian aid coordination arm, OCHA, is one of the latest agencies to plan staff cuts amid the sector’s funding crisis. Relief chief and OCHA boss Tom Fletcher delivered the news in a somber town hall last week. The subject line of his follow-up email: “OCHA Reset”.
Fletcher appears to be sticking to the branding of his proposed “humanitarian reset”. His all-staff letter even said that the OCHA reset will “align” with the broader one – never mind that planning and discussions have been kept to a small circle behind closed doors.
But others, particularly local humanitarian organisations and civil society groups, are increasingly questioning the reset process.
Maybe “reset” is a precisely chosen word – exactly what a system incentivised to self-preserve, not reinvent, is capable of delivering.
Fletcher’s proposal, some two dozen civil society groups said, is more of a starting point: “A true reset must lead to more fundamental changes to longstanding humanitarian power structures that have contributed to exclusion, inefficiency, and a lack of accountability to crisis-affected people.”
“Aid must now serve as reparative justice, not a tool of charity,” said another network including local humanitarian responders, the Alliance for Empowering Partnership.
The broader message: Think bigger. But is that what the reset was intended to do?
The “reset” was floated in late February, after a month of mostly silence from the humanitarian sector’s most public figures. The sector was missing a narrative and a gameplan – and many humanitarians were desperate for basic info and a collective strategy. Fletcher’s “reset” stood in as a first reply to Trump’s dismantling of aid.
It has now been about three months since Trump 2.0 began. Details of the reset are mostly found in a pair of short statements (public letters to attendees of private meetings), and tidbits from Fletcher’s tweet threads and newsletter.
Core elements of the reset seem mainly focused on streamlining processes, cutting fat and duplication, coordinating better, and the tough task of reprioritising already squeezed budgets.
What about localising aid? UN-controlled pooled funds will “prioritise” local humanitarians – not exactly a new promise. What about addressing the incentives that block change? There’s a pledge to give up power and act collectively – “where possible”. What about laying the groundwork for discussions on wider systemic reform? Out of scope, perhaps, when the relief chief’s core mandate is to coordinate today’s emergencies, not imagine tomorrow’s system.
Maybe “reset” is a precisely chosen word – exactly what a system incentivised to self-preserve, not reinvent, is capable of delivering.
After all, a reset is not reform, but a push of the restart button. It’s trying your luck again with the same players, the same tools and storylines, and the rules of the game pretty much unchanged.
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