Mind the gap

In 2023, funding for humanitarian assistance and protection declined by 20 percent, despite new major crises and the continuation of long-standing conflicts. And there are expectations that cuts will only continue into 2025. Many in the humanitarian sector are referring to this as a catastrophic ‘financial cliff’ that will have major implications for agencies and the communities that they serve.

In this podcast episode, we delve into this ‘financial cliff’, asking experts how we measure and understand resource gaps in the humanitarian sector. We also ask whether this really is an unprecedented moment, looking into the data.

Guests:
Ed Schenkenberg van Mierop, Co-founder and Executive Director, HERE-GENEVA
Niklas Rieger, Independent Consultant
Elizabeth Vilkman, Humanitarian Program Specialist, SIDA
Simon Levine, Research Fellow, Global Risks and Resilience ODI

Co-hosts:
Alice Obrecht, Head of Research & Impact, ALNAP
Emmeline Kerkvliet, former Research Officer, ALNAP

Resources
https://reliefweb.int/report/world/global-humanitarian-overview-2025-enarfres


Audio used: BBC audio 

ALNAP’s A Matter of Priorities: a podcast on tough choices in humanitarian funding 

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Transcript

Alice Obrecht: For people who don't work in the humanitarian aid sector, the most common way that you might hear about humanitarian action is through the media. Perhaps you might hear or read a story about crises that are going on around the world. which require humanitarian assistance.  

News footage: Somalia is facing its worst drought in four decades. The United Nations is warning more than half of its people are at risk of severe hunger. 

We're in an area northwest of Kiev where there's been intense fighting over the past few days between the Russians and the Ukrainian military. There is intense bombardment. It's a race against time for rescue. in Morocco, trying to reach villages in the Atlas Mountains, which have been hardest hit that humanitarian aid workers face in supporting people who are caught up in war and conflict. 

 Alice Obrecht: As well as the significant sacrifices they make themselves, including losing their own lives.  

News footage: There were no survivors. Cars in the aid convoy were hit directly. Even with the world's central kitchen logos clearly displayed, and the U. S. charity says, prior coordination with the Israeli military. And you might have also heard from time to time about humanitarian agencies needing more money to do their work and to assist people in need. She is arguably the symbol of health in times of war. The International Committee of the Red Cross has, for the past 160 years, aided tens of millions. But what happens when the needs are too great and the means too few? The ICRC is facing a massive funding gap.  

Alice Obrecht: But what you might not know right now, in 2024, is that the humanitarian sector, a sector that was set up to respond to crisis, is facing a major crisis of its own. Last year, there was a nearly 20 percent reduction in humanitarian funding, to the tune of 8 billion. And there are expectations that cuts will only continue into 2025. Many in the humanitarian sector are referring to this as a catastrophic financial cliff that will have major implications for agencies and the communities that they serve. 

This will pose important practical and ethical questions about what and who humanitarian action is really for and how the world can maintain a sense of solidarity with people in crises in the context of more crises and tighter resources. This is a matter of priorities, a podcast series by ALNAP, the Network for Humanitarian Learning. 

In this podcast series, we will be looking at the prioritization challenge facing the humanitarian sector today and exploring answers and solutions to help navigate it. I'm Alice Obrecht, head of research at ALNAP.  

Emmeline Kerkvliet: And I'm Emmeline Kerkvliet, researcher at ALNAP. And this is episode one, Mind the Gap. 

Alice Obrecht: In this episode, we look at what is the financial cliff facing the humanitarian sector? How do we measure and understand resource gaps in the humanitarian sector? And is this really an unprecedented moment based on the data? Let's start with a concrete example of this financial cliff being addressed in the media. 

In this example, Cindy McCain is talking about the impacts of funding cuts at WFP on national public radio in the U. S. 'I've had to reduce pretty much around the world, quite frankly. To put it succinctly, for every 1 percent cut at WFP, this means 400, 000 people are pushed further into hunger. That's a sizable amount and we are, we are down quite a bit of money right now.' 

so, so our ability to deliver not just emergency food, but sustaining food has gravely diminished. And consequently, people are not only starving, but they are dying as a result of this. So this seems to be having an impact already on agencies and forcing them to make really difficult choices about who and what to prioritize. 

But I mean, I'm wondering about the big picture here. What are the actual numbers that make up this financial cliff? What are people referring to when they talk about it? Do you have a good sense of that?  

Emmeline Kerkvliet: Yeah, that's a great question. Individual agencies are clearly feeling the bite. There's a lot to unpack here. 

So to start digging into these thorny questions, I went to the experts at development initiatives who've been analyzing humanitarian funding over many years. to try to understand the global picture and what's changed. 

Niklas Rieger: I'm Niklas Rieger and over the last seven years, I've analysed funding to address needs from humanitarian crises. 

Emmeline Kerkvliet: So when people talk about the financial cliff that's facing the sector right now, what does this really mean?  

Niklas Rieger: It helps to put this financial cliff into historical context and take a slightly longer view. Throughout the early 2000s, humanitarian funding fluctuated year on year, but was broadly stable, and around about a third of the funding to the system today. 

In the early 2010s, international humanitarian funding then doubled within five years. Partly driven by large scale and regional responses to crises in Syria or South Sudan. It then remained at around 33 billion US dollars up until 2020 including. Funding increased again in 2021 in response to the COVID 19 pandemic and continued to increase even further in 2022. 

largely due to the Ukraine war and intensifying food crisis globally. And these recent increases are important contexts for this financial cliff facing the sector today. The timing of this cliff depends on whether you look at funding commitments or disbursements. But either way, it's a drop of around 5 billion U.S. dollars. So that is total funding shrinking by an eighth in 2023 or 2024. This is about as much funding as was requested this year to meet humanitarian needs in Sudan and Yemen combined. And finally, from what we can see in government donors budgets for 2025, this decline in international humanitarian funding is not a one off and it seems unlikely to be reversed anytime soon. 

Emmeline Kerkvliet: So , how significant is this decline and is it really unprecedented as it's been described by others?  

Niklas Rieger: I tend to be careful with the use of unprecedented. Given comparable data sources on international humanitarian funding only go back about 25 years. 

But within those 25 years, this decrease in humanitarian funding is the largest on the record by far, in terms of the reduction in absolute funding amounts, even adjusted for inflation. In terms of the significance of this decline, The level of funding today is still higher than it was only a couple of years ago, given this decline follows a brief period of sector growth. 

But arguably humanitarian needs are greater now than they were then, with an increasing number of protracted crises continuing to exist on top of recently intensifying crises, for instance, due to the war in Gaza.  

Emmeline Kerkvliet: So from talking to Nick, it's clear that funding this year has dropped significantly more than at any other time in the past 25 years. 

And since the cost of responding to crises has also increased over the past decade, this means that the gap between what's available and what's needed is expected to be enormous.  

Alice Obrecht: Right. But there's some who might question that last point, right, that this funding gap is really unusual or new, or that, um, costs of responding to crises has really increased. 

At a significant ratio or rate away from what's available compared to. Previous years. So for example, I spoke to Simon Levine Who's the senior research fellow at the humanitarian policy group at ODI and here's what he had to say on this point  

Simone Levine: Yeah, i'm hearing an awful lot about this gap, um, which is humanitarian funding Interesting that you actually coupled it with a huge increase In the volume of humanitarian funding. 

I mean if you look back at when I started In the sector, the amount of emergency aid, even in real terms, is something like a tenth of what it is now. So in real terms, spending has gone up by over 10 times, and I don't think that we can say that there's been an increase in need, that's rather difficult to say. 

Um, if I think back to the first time when I was working, which was in Mozambique during the civil war, I have never seen A crisis like it since, and I've seen many crises and many conflicts in many parts of the world. At that time, you had countries like Angola, like Mozambique, like Mali, which had under 5 mortality rates of somewhere around 30%. 

About 300 per thousand children didn't make it to the age of 5. I just looked at the figures today. Um, Mali is still one of the worst countries in the world, but it's around 100. So, in the worst cases in the world today, Things are, if you like, three times better than they were, and we're spending far more money. 

So then the question is, so why is there a gap? How, how is it possible that we talk about the fact that the gap's increasing? And I think we have to be really, really careful about this, this word gap. In order to measure a gap, you have to be able to fix two points, and to measure the distance between them. 

One point is easy to fix, it's how much money have I got. But the other point is, but how much money would I need in order to solve the problems? And that, of course, is a number which doesn't exist.  

Alice Obrecht: The way I understand this is we, we're talking to Nick, right? And Nick has told us that the volume certainly is decreasing or declining in a very significant way, more significantly than it has in the past. 

But as Simon is pointing out, the volume is just one part of the equation, right? The other side of it is what does it actually cost? To deliver a humanitarian action, what does it cost to address the needs of people who are caught up in crises on an annual basis? And that's where it seems we've had a really fuzzy picture and a fuzzy understanding over the years. 

Here's Ed Schenkenberg, executive director of HERE Geneva, talking about this very same issue, which he felt was the key driver for the current prioritization challenge facing the sector.  

Ed Schenkenberg: The gap between needs and resources has always been there. There are two issues there, of course. First To what degree do the needs as recorded in what is called now the Global Needs Overview and particularly and also the humanitarian response plans, to what degree do they really reflect needs on the ground? 

You know, how is it by extrapolation, for instance, you know, I mean, particularly in countries where areas are labeled as hard to reach, where they may be hard to reach, in fact, because of security or other impediments. Um, how well do we know in terms of, you know, the numbers of people in need and what needs they have, because there's little access to those areas. 

So somehow. The data must have been collected, but the question is then exactly what is that somehow in terms of, you know, what exactly that number is and what needs they have. So, first of all, there's a, there's a question, if you like, on, on, on the quality of the data, um, in terms of, you know, the numbers of people in need, um, as, as such, um, I think there are generally, and there have been questions around that for many, many years. 

Uh, we may have become better, more precise, but certainly I know of quite a number of situations where, you know, we don't have precise numbers. So, you know, where it's perhaps more a guesstimate than, than a precise number. And obviously the other point there is. That, especially since the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016, the humanitarian agenda in terms of, you know, the types of needs or the list of needs that we want to address hasn't become any shorter, has only become longer. 

So what perhaps used to be seen as work of other actors in the development sphere or in the peace building sphere, somehow has. Okay.  

Alice Obrecht: So let's stop at there and let's just put aside the second point he was making there for now, which is about the stretch of the humanitarian job. That's a really important point and we'll be coming back to that later in another episode. 

If we just stick to Ed's first point there about how hard it is to really understand what are the humanitarian needs in a crisis and therefore how much it's going to cost to meet them. It seems to me, I mean, what Ed and Simon are arguing or saying is that, you know, we know the funding figures very well, Nick was able to explain those, uh, very specifically, very clearly, but we're not always clear exactly on how much it costs to support people affected by crises. 

And it's also really hard to compare that kind of number or that kind of cost. Over several decades. So while the drop in funding may be unprecedented, the gap between what's available in terms of resources and money and what's needed, it's a bit harder for us to judge how unprecedented that gap is. 

Emmeline Kerkvliet: Yeah, absolutely. It is a difficult thing to know, but I think the impression we're getting from a lot of agencies is that this will be really serious. It's already having a significant impact on people who would otherwise be getting some form of life saving assistance. And it's not just the agencies who are making this point, it's also the people who are in charge of dispersing a lot of the humanitarian funding, and by that I mean the donors. 

Elisabeth Vikman: So my name is Elisabeth Vikman and I am a Programme Specialist in Needs Analysis at For those who don't know, Sida is the Swedish international development cooperation agency, which oversees all of Sweden's foreign aid, including its humanitarian assistance and protection.  

Emmeline Kerkvliet: And when we talked to Elizabeth, she definitely felt that there was good data to support the idea that we're seeing a pretty unprecedented gap in funding. 

Elisabeth Vikman: It's pretty clear humanitarian needs are far outpacing available resources today. It's, um, it's, uh, it's, uh, they're growing and growing and growing. Um, and there are several reasons for this. Of course, the state of the world today being one of them, uh, with conflicts and, um, climate change, um, impacts of, of, uh, the socioeconomic situation in many places. 

Thinking about this, this question, I also think that we, we might have better visibility. of needs today, perhaps, than we had earlier. Very difficult to estimate how much that contributes to the growing needs, but I'm, um, it seems clear that it does contribute. I think it's important, though, to Remember that this gap that we have and the, and the sort of, um, the need to prioritize that comes with that is not new in the system. 

Uh, it's been talked about a lot recently, but it was acknowledged very early on in the humanitarian sector. I think it's, it's even mentioned in the Geneva Conventions from 1949 that we will need to prioritize our resources. What's perhaps unique today in particular is the size of it and, and the absolute enormity. 

Alice Obrecht: What Elizabeth is saying here is that yes, to a certain degree, what Simon and Ed were talking about is true. We've always had prioritization challenges in the humanitarian sector. There's always been some kind of gap between humanitarian needs and the resources available to address them. And she's also acknowledged that, you know, our understanding of needs has evolved over time, but she's also saying this is a rather historic moment here in terms of really seeing a significant gap between the severity, the quantity of needs worldwide and the amount of money that's available to address those. 

 Emmeline Kerkvliet: Yeah, so it sounds like as a sector we've raised the bar in the sense that the way we measure needs and understand severity has changed, and in fact it's improved. Um, we've seen further progress on this recently with a new method of counting needs that's been piloted this year called the JIAF, which aims to analyze needs in a more consistent and robust way. 

Alice Obrecht: So this kind of approach would really address the problem that Ed and Simon are talking about, right? On getting a better picture on what are the needs that require funding.  

Emmeline Kerkvliet: Exactly. And so the thinking is that if we can get a better idea of what those needs are, where they are, and how severe they are, then agencies and donors can use this, not just to prioritize, but also hopefully to make the case against cutting humanitarian budgets.

Alice Obrecht: So let's take a look at that in our next episode. Thank you for listening to a matter of priorities, a podcast by LNAP for resources and links related to what we've talked about in today's episode. Please check out the description for more information on LNAP. Please visit our website, www. alnap. org and if you enjoyed this episode, please hit subscribe to our series, wherever you get your podcasts and, and the absolute enormity.