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The humanitarian word of the year for 2025 must surely be “prioritisation”.
The painful process of choosing what and who to prioritise in interagency response budgets started with 2024’s Global Humanitarian Overview. This year’s drastic donor aid cuts then introduced a new extreme: “hyper-prioritisation”. And the response plans for 2026, released on 8 December, pushes this trend to its limits.
The “hyper-prioritised” version of the 2026 GHO targets 87 million people at a cost of $23 billion – the lowest targets in a decade, despite rising humanitarian need.
A look behind the numbers shows that the international humanitarian system is now being divided into distinct categories of crises. However, this tiering is based on funding cuts, not contextual realities.
Prioritising certain crises and needs means sidelining others. The most consequential trend of the 2026 GHO is the explicit transition away from the international humanitarian system in many contexts: Up to 11 are on the path to transition, and there is potential for a longer-term transition elsewhere.
But what happens to those that are not prioritised? Very recent humanitarian history shows that there are consequences when humanitarian responses are put in the “non-prioritised” bucket without consideration for what happens next – such as in Iraq. Decision-makers must better plan for these transitions, or risk having crises stagnate and spiral out of view.
The four categories of humanitarian response
The 2026 GHO splits humanitarian responses into roughly four categories, when adding up cuts to funding requirements or people targeted for aid.
Firstly, there are the hyper-crises, where the cuts to funding or people targeted are relatively restrained – less than 40% between the original 2025 GHO and the 2026 “prioritised” version. Responses in Palestine, Ukraine, Syria, South Sudan, Haiti, and the Rohingya crisis in Bangladesh fall into this category.
These crises have the attention of donors and aid agencies alike. For the most part, humanitarian instincts – such as focusing on the most vulnerable and providing according to need – lead policymakers to conclude that this is where scarce resources are needed most. For donors, funding to these contexts has, for the most part, historically held up.
Secondly, there are the protracted crises, where cuts fall between 40% and 50%. Responses for the Central African Republic, Mali, Sudan, Yemen, and the Syrian refugee crisis slot in here. Humanitarian needs are high, and while these crises are likely to still be funded to an extent, they don’t enjoy the same amount of prioritisation as the “hyper-crises” – even though 80 million people in need are present in these contexts compared to 43 million in the hyper-crises category. These crises may also suffer cuts to their response plans as areas seen to have a lower severity of humanitarian need, though still acute, are deprioritised. For example, in Sudan, the GHO leaves “at least 14.2 million people – including those on the verge of reaching extreme severity levels – outside the scope of the response” due to prioritising areas of higher severity.
Thirdly, there are the neglected crises: Afghanistan, Chad, Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Somalia, Venezuela, and the Venezuelan Regional Mobility Response Plan fall into this bucket. Funding requirements for these responses have been slashed by more than half, but the international aid architecture still continues. Transition away from the international system isn’t immediately on the horizon, but continued prioritisation is likely to push these contexts in this direction.
Lastly, there are the transitioning crises. The 2026 GHO drops El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, as well as the regional refugee plans for Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, and Ukraine. In addition, responses for Colombia, Cameroon, and Nigeria can be added to this category, as they are slated for a transition away from the international system as part of the so-called humanitarian reset led by UN relief chief Tom Fletcher. These countries are at the extreme end of “prioritisation”, where whole humanitarian operations are being phased out.
At the same time, there are tensions baked into the process of deprioritisation. For example, the number of people targeted in Colombia has increased in the past year despite talk of transition, showing that this categorisation might not be an exact science and changes in context still hold some purchase. Mozambique is also a distinct case: There were only modest cuts to the 2026 response plan, yet, Mozambique was considered a candidate for a so-called “accelerated transition” this year, and its status will continue to be reviewed.
Signal and the noise
International attention will, by default, turn towards the “hyper-crises”. These are contexts where media and donor attention will more easily focus given the scale of needs or geopolitical consequences.
This may have been the case long before “prioritisation” became an essential humanitarian vocabulary word. But the international system is now signalling more clearly that this is where scarce resources should be focused. This signal pierces through the noise of the funding cuts and gives donors something to work with.
But in doing so, the sector risks signalling another narrative: that neglected or transitioning crises no longer matter or need support. Seven contexts have been dropped from the GHO, three more are reported to be on the path to transition, one narrowly avoided it, and a further eight contexts in the neglected category will arguably move in that direction over time due to prioritisation.
While the reality may be a lack of funding, that should not equal a lack of attention – just the opposite.
Humanitarian actors must be intentional about how they manage transitions. Responses in hyper-crises and protracted crises operate with the support of the international humanitarian architecture – think humanitarian country teams, interagency appeals, or coordination clusters. But far less work has been done on what a transition away from international humanitarian response looks like.
Done well, transition could mean that longer-term development processes take hold and dependence on international aid decreases. Done poorly, and transition could mean leaving whole populations behind as they fall between the cracks. Humanitarians have a recent example of what to avoid.
A stalled transition in Iraq
Iraq is a cautionary tale for future humanitarian transitions. Humanitarian funding to Iraq declined from $1.9 billion in 2016 to only $0.5 billion in 2022, and the UN deactivated the cluster system in Iraq in 2022. The assumptions at the time were that the country’s humanitarian situation had improved since the end of the war, humanitarian funding globally was already in decline, and most of Iraq’s needs would be better served by development programming rather than humanitarian.
These assumptions weren’t necessarily wrong. And yet, for all its potential, the humanitarian transition in Iraq has largely stalled – humanitarian organisations continue to work with internally displaced people,development aid has not been forthcoming, the government has not been able to make significant progress, and displaced people remain trapped in the same or even worse situations than they were in prior to the transition.
No one believes that countries and crises should be forever dependent on international assistance and an outdated aid system. But transitions determined by funding instead of an improving humanitarian situation are likely poised to fail.
A successful humanitarian transition requires close collaboration and handover between the international system and local and national counterpoints. In Iraq, humanitarian actors didn't know who their government counterpoints were – even up to the moment of transition – according to interviews conducted with humanitarians.
Today’s transitioning crises are even more abrupt, driven by funding rather than a decline in humanitarian need. It's unlikely that handovers will go smoothly, leaving a leadership and coordination vacuum that could result in either duplication of scant resources or gaps in coverage.
As other countries and responses are transitioned away from the international humanitarian architecture, there are risks that needs will persist and go unmet without investment from governments, international finance institutions, and development agencies. Where the UN’s prioritisation process is going wrong is that none of these commitments have been secured in advance. Without these commitments, future shocks could trigger new humanitarian needs – and send communities backsliding into a new humanitarian crisis.
No one believes that countries and crises should be forever dependent on international assistance and an outdated aid system. But transitions determined by funding instead of an improving humanitarian situation are likely poised to fail.
That’s why the story behind the 2026 Global Humanitarian Overview numbers isn’t simply about unmet needs or underfunding. It’s also about what decision-makers are overlooking.
It’s not the hyper-crises that should raise the red flags, but also those at risk of a rushed, unplanned exit. “Prioritisation” won’t be a buzzword forever. Without careful planning, the new term on everyone’s lips may soon be “failed humanitarian transition”.
Edited by Irwin Loy.
