AID AFTER 2025: WHY THE PRIVATE SECTOR MUST BECOME CORE TO HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE |
This week, the United Nations sent out its annual appeal for funds for 2026, but sought only $33 billion – half of what it needs to help billions of people facing war, poverty and climate disasters globally.
The message could not have been more telling.
But the warning signs were already there. In 2025, the global humanitarian system was forced to confront a brutal reality: money is running out. Major institutional donors across Europe and North America slashed aid budgets and diverted funding to domestic priorities and security spending.
Flagship UN projects were left chronically underfunded, and NGOs like Save the Children were forced to discontinue programmes just as conflict, displacement, and climate disasters pushed needs to historic highs.
With an immediate 25 percent drop in revenue, our staff all over the world had to give children in our schools, clinics and child protection programmes the heartbreaking news that we would not be able to continue. With great effort and risk to our own solvency, we were able to keep the most acute life-saving programmes running, barely.
We’ve been talking about the role of the private sector in humanitarian response for decades, but now, after a severe 2025, we can’t keep pretending that public and philanthropic funding alone can sustain the world’s humanitarian response.
The scale of need has outgrown the architecture on which it was built. At the end of a year when many UN Agencies and NGOs have faced