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In the weeks after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, aid organisations found themselves in an unusual position: overwhelmed by unearmarked public donations and under pressure to move money fast.
For years, the sector had been piloting cash transfers – putting money directly in people's hands rather than distributing food parcels, tarpaulins, or emergency kits. The humanitarian mainstream had either ignored or aggressively challenged these efforts.
The tsunami changed this almost overnight. The most-affected countries ran simultaneous cash transfer pilots in real time. The results were unambiguous: faster, cheaper, and more empowering than almost anything delivered in-kind. Today, from a very low base, around a fifth of all international humanitarian assistance is delivered as cash or vouchers.
The idea of cash transfers didn't come from the disaster. It had been sitting on the margins of the sector’s practices for over a century. The tsunami’s toll was devastating and lasting. But for the humanitarian sector, on cash specifically, it opened the door to experimentation, learning, and change.
This dynamic repeats across time, in everything from transport and energy to public health and agriculture. For the humanitarian sector, understanding it is a matter of urgency.
Humanitarian aid from major donors fell by nearly 36% in 2025, according to recently released figures. This was the largest single-year drop on record. The system was already dangerously over-reliant on a handful of donors. It is now acutely exposed to geopolitical upheavals that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago.
The scale of the cuts is devastating, and nothing in what follows changes that. But we cannot afford to misread what crises actually do to the systems we depend upon.
Carsten Staur, chair of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee, has called for “a new paradigm” in aid, not just in financial terms, but in how we think about responsibility, solidarity, and international cooperation.
The natural human temptation, in a moment like this, is to reach for crisis management: shrink, cope with less, protect the system, and wait for stability to return. The weight of evidence and history suggests this is exactly the wrong response. The scale of the cuts is devastating, and nothing in what follows changes that. But we cannot afford to misread what crises actually do to the systems we depend upon.
From dinosaurs to mobile money
In the Early Cretaceous period, the first tiny flowering plants slipped into a world dominated by giant ferns and ancient conifers. They diversified slowly, remaining leafy underdogs for tens of millions of years. But they didn't do it alone. From predatory wasp-like ancestors, bees evolved, with long tongues, dense pollen-grabbing hairs and buzzing wings to shake nectar loose. Then, the mass extinction event 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs also cleared vast amounts of ecological space.
Flowering plants exploded into dominance. The extinction event hadn't created the flowers, the bees, or the symbiotic relationship between them. It simply cleared the space for the partnership that was already emerging to take root and reshape the entire planetary ecosystem.
This is the same dynamic that underpins some of the most significant transitions of the modern humanitarian era. The tsunami and cash transfers are one example. Another is Kenya's M-PESA mobile money platform, launched as a microfinance repayment tool in early 2007, when conventional financial institutions still dominated.
Then, the violence following Kenya's disputed election turned roads into battlegrounds and put banks out of reach. People turned to mobile money out of sheer necessity. As in prehistory, and post-tsunami, the crisis opened the door and cleared the space. M-PESA now has over 40 million monthly active users in Kenya – out of a population of around 57 million – and has inspired mobile money revolutions across Africa, Asia, and beyond. The Economist concluded that the “story of mobile money is one that turns during crises”.
When diesel-powered fridges began failing in off-grid and conflict zones in the mid-2010s, vaccine delivery organisations turned to solar power. Crises in locations from Syria to northern Nigeria made the adoption of novel technologies urgent and necessary. In South Sudan today, over 90% of vaccine fridges now run on solar power. In Gaza, where infrastructure had been shattered by continuous bombardment, solar fridges were essential to the remarkable polio vaccination programme that delivered over a million doses to children in 2024.
The dynamic is not limited to aid. It underpins many significant industrial transitions, from how the first world war accelerated shipping's shift from coal to oil, to how the second drove the development of modern computing. In more recent memory, digital disruption has reshaped our daily lives, and been intensified by the lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote-working technologies became essential infrastructure, and their crisis-driven adoption has reshaped commercial property markets from London's West End to Lagos's business districts. Educational technology platforms grew during lockdowns as the main way to ensure continuity of learning. Today, entire curricula have migrated online, leaving parents bewildered and more easily hoodwinked by teenagers in exam season.
In every one of these cases, the solutions were already there, at the margins.
Major public policy shifts follow the same pattern. After the second world war, Britain faced a shattered society and collapsed health services. Fixing up the existing patchwork of charitable hospitals and means-tested care would have left a broken system limping on. Instead, the crisis opened the door for something entirely different: the National Health Service, established in 1948, replaced centuries of charity-based provision with a universal, free-at-the-point-of-use system that has since inspired healthcare reforms around the world.
In every one of these cases, the solutions were already there, at the margins. Crises created the conditions for them to break through and transform behaviours, relationships, and entire systems.
Inspired by evolutionary biology, I call this the Bumble Bee Principle – a concept that shows how crises can lead to change.
There are three stages that characterise this dynamic:
- First, crises create both threats and opportunities. Pressure on existing systems intensifies demands and places hard limits on current ways of working, opening space for new ideas that would otherwise remain on the margins.
- Second, previously marginal approaches emerge into the foreground. They evolve through learning and adaptation, and prove their worth in the heat of the moment.
- Third, the new approaches reshape the system. They are reinforced and sustained through networks and coalitions that spread them far and wide, changing behaviours and attitudes.
Reimagining the system: Which ideas break through?
This is where the humanitarian system sits today. The funding crisis and the human cost are devastating, and questions of how the system works and who it works for are unavoidable. This also means the door to deeper change is more open than it has been in decades.
Jagan Chapagain, secretary general of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, frames the challenge well: Any answer “has to be really reimagining how the system and the ecosystem could actually work”, he said in a recent interview.
So what ideas might already be doing this reimagining in the humanitarian sector?
Some are being tested in pilots below the radar. Others are being proven in specific contexts but not scaled. Still more have been advocated by national and local organisations but haven’t gained the airtime and support they need. And some are taking hold in adjacent fields that work on human vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability.
What matters right now is which ideas are ready to be mobilised, and which institutions have the will to carry them forward.
Next week: Part two sets out five systemic shifts already taking root around the humanitarian system, and what it might take to help them grow.
