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Humanitarian aid has an exit problem. Funding cuts have left communities feeling abandoned, but today’s financial crisis is not the first time humanitarian doors have been shuttered overnight.
Humanitarian support moves from one emergency to the next. Aid workers leave, clinics close, and food relief stops. What remains after aid disappears is less visible to humanitarians: communities navigating service gaps, national staff left without pathways forward, and local systems destabilised by sudden withdrawal. In an era marked by polycrisis, shrinking aid budgets, and increasingly abrupt exits, these are predictable outcomes of choices made upstream. “Hyper-prioritised” budgets have marked numerous humanitarian responses for transitions or phaseouts. Yet the aid sector struggles to think about how to “exit well”.
Humanitarian aid is, by design, temporary. The question humanitarians should ask themselves is not whether they will leave, but how they leave. When aid interventions reshape local systems, expectations, and capacities, their closure becomes an operational decision with ethical implications and lasting impacts. Although frameworks for exit and accountability in humanitarian projects do exist, if ethical closure is not intentionally integrated into how interventions are designed and implemented, humanitarian aid risks perpetuating, rather than alleviating, overlapping crises. To avoid further harming already at-risk populations and to safeguard the legacy and trust built with affected communities and staff, exit must be treated as a core component of aid rather than an optional add-on contingent upon available funding.
We’ve seen both harm and good practice in our work across Afghanistan, Lebanon, Peru, the Philippines, and Nepal. Humanitarians can and must do better. Here are five actions organisations can incorporate to plan for exit and a longer-term horizon.
1. Exit strategies should be integrated in all aspects of project design
Exit is inherent to humanitarian action. It must be formally embedded in project planning, with midway checkpoints and monitoring and evaluation, when possible.
Examples from Afghanistan in 2021 highlighted how this integration requires a mindset shift. The abrupt departure of multiple organisations meant that exit planning and transparent communication were postponed until the final stages. Security updates and departure plans were delivered in separate meetings to different staff categories, with instructions not to discuss departures – creating an atmosphere of self-censorship and distrust rather than care. Meanwhile, staff and communities were left uncertain about how to respond to the closure, how to manage expectations of future assistance, and how to navigate the transition. This lack of preparedness generated avoidable fear, heightened job insecurity for national staff, and strained relationships with affected communities.
Earlier integration of exit planning could have better anticipated risks, prepared for abrupt scenarios, and planned closure in ways that minimised harm and protected staff and communities. As one organisation’s staff member told us, “People are tense because they have no information, and they don’t feel it is fair.”
2. Exit plans should protect the future and well-being of national and local staff
As organisations withdraw, national and local staff may continue to face expectations, risks, or repercussions linked to the project’s presence.
The protracted closure of a Médecins Sans Frontières-run paediatric thalassemia programme illustrated the consequences of inadequate transition planning alongside local staff. Most of the child patients were Syrian refugees, though some came from vulnerable low-income Lebanese families. When MSF ended the programme in 2023, the decision was justified within its short-term emergency mandate. But the closure ended long-term, life-sustaining care for children with chronic diseases – care on which many families had come to depend. National staff were given six months’ notice after months of uncertainty about the programme's closure. Having built trust with patients and shared linguistic and cultural ties, staff were left to implement a decision they neither shaped nor necessarily supported. They were tasked with the emotional burden of explaining the closure to families, often without viable alternatives to offer, while simultaneously conveying patients’ distress to managers more removed from daily realities.
Protecting staff demands their meaningful involvement in project design and exit decisions, as well as formal recognition of their contributions and practical and psychosocial support during professional and personal transitions. Tangible support might include help with CVs and job referrals to other organisations, psychosocial support, management training in how to have difficult closure conversations, and ensuring that national staff are compensated fairly and in line with their international counterparts.
3. Humanitarian projects should clearly define and communicate what they can – and cannot – sustain
Transparency about a project's scope, duration, and long-term intentions is crucial. Clear, consistent communication about what support will end, what may continue, and what is realistically achievable is central to avoid creating false expectations and perpetuating harm.
Evidence from a randomised controlled trial conducted by Save the Children in Peru between 2021 and 2024 emphasised the value of designing cash assistance programmes with a clear view towards long‑term integration. By linking emergency cash assistance to tailored livelihoods and entrepreneurship support from the outset, the programme helped Venezuelan migrants to move beyond short‑term coping to building sustainable income.
The project's clear long-term goals strengthened social cohesion in host communities by improving economic self‑reliance and reducing the pressures that often accompany prolonged displacement. While not all humanitarian projects are intended to be sustained, organisations have a responsibility to be explicit from the beginning about what their interventions can sustain beyond exit – and to embed these plans into their exit strategies, when feasible.
4. Relationships should be preserved beyond exit
Just because a project ends doesn’t mean the link with communities has to vanish overnight. Maintaining relationships should be recognised as a core component of project closure and a key means of preserving organisational legacy.
Evidence from six communities in the Philippines that experienced project closures following disasters (such as 2013’s Typhoon Yolanda or Haiyan) and conflict showed that strong, trust-based relationships facilitated a smooth handover of responsibilities to local actors – preventing support from ending abruptly. In one example, a project was handed over to a local organisation, which continued to update the original project implementer and the affected community. Where organisations maintained contact or follow-up, communities described projects as “not yet closed”.
By contrast, when organisations exited without further engagement, especially after promising monitoring that never materialised, this was seen as undermining otherwise successful interventions. In cases where organisations simply “disappeared”, people reported feeling abandoned and reduced to passive recipients of aid. Sustaining relationships beyond formal closure through communication, follow-up, and monitoring can preserve trust, strengthen future preparedness, and reinforce the positive impact of humanitarian organisations.
5. Humanitarians should continue learning from affected communities
It is essential for humanitarian actors to recognise communities as knowledge-holders whose strategies, networks, and adaptive practices provide critical guidance for sustainable exit planning.
Evidence from Nepal following the 2015 earthquake showed that households who rebuilt without external assistance were often able to construct seismically resistant homes by drawing on professional skills within the community, social networks, and locally available materials. These findings challenge the assumption that resilience depends primarily on external technical expertise. Instead, they demonstrate that “building back better” can emerge from the bottom up when humanitarian actors engage with existing community pathways, resources, and key actors.
This insight has direct implications for exit planning. Humanitarian assistance should be designed to complement rather than supplant local systems through genuinely localised approaches. Integrating local expertise into project design is particularly crucial in anticipation of withdrawal: Once organisations leave, communities must rely on their own capacities and resources. Exit strategies should therefore explicitly identify, support, and strengthen existing local strengths, ensuring that withdrawal does not create new vulnerabilities but instead builds on foundations that can endure beyond the life of the project.
Humanitarianism is as much about the future as it is about responding to today’s urgent needs. This does not mean expanding the humanitarian mandate or turning emergency aid into development. It means recognising an ethical responsibility for foreseeable longer-term consequences.
To honour this responsibility, organisations must actively plan for and rehearse project closure – anticipating risks, clarifying expectations, and supporting staff through the emotional and ethical challenges of withdrawal. By doing so, organisations can reshape how project exit is understood, minimise avoidable harm, and ensure that accountability to people is central to humanitarian responses – now and in the future.
