The cost of neglect
Each year and in every country where the UN works, OCHA convenes all the major aid organizations to conduct a needs assessment and draw up a Humanitarian Response Plan, which outlines humanitarian assistance needed for the coming year, explained Jens Laerke, a UN OCHA spokesperson. The UN calculates the cost of that aid and then appeals to donors around the world to raise those funds.
One challenge with the current system is that donors can earmark their funds, meaning they can specify that their money must go toward certain countries or certain types of aid, such as providing food assistance. Thus, huge inequities in aid funding arise as donors decide which conflicts or crises are more important than others. The UN is at the mercy of donor priorities.
The ever-widening gap between humanitarian needs and funds leads to dire consequences for millions of people. Last year, the UN's World Food Programme (WFP) had its worst funding shortfall in 60 years and was forced to cut food rations in Syria, Yemen, Haiti, and the DRC. In Sudan, where a power struggle between two military groups has caused the world's single largest displacement crisis, mothers have resorted to feeding their children dirt and leaves. And lacking intervention, conflicts drag on and become more complex.
In Burkina Faso, the US and French governments primarily intervened by providing military and counterterrorism assistance, even though the conflict there has developed into a political and economic crisis. As such, there's a mismatch between need and what help is being offered.
However, after two military coups took place in 2022, US agencies halted millions in badly needed aid.
As the security situation dwindled from bad to worse, the WFP had to increasingly rely on transporting food by helicopter rather than by truck, explained Elvira Pruscini, WFP's country director in Burkina Faso. According to Pruscini, it costs $3,000 to $6,000 to move one ton of food by helicopter, compared to between $150 and $250 to move one ton of food by truck. The added expense means there is less budget to purchase food.
In protracted crises, the needs of refugees and displaced people also become more complex, explained Helene Michou, NRC's global advocacy adviser. Providing aid to refugees for a few weeks or months means trucking in food, water, and temporary shelter until they can return home. But when conflicts go on for years, refugees can end up living in camps for decades.
At that point, aid groups have to provide longer-term aid — building sewage systems and water pipelines, providing education, helping refugees find jobs, and creating a legal framework in the host country to do that. That all comes with a hefty price tag.
"WFP is forced to make these very difficult choices about where to allocate limited resources," Pruscini said. "We'll have to take those decisions and decide who will eat and who will not."
Urgent solutions for funding shortfalls
Funding for the coming year looks no better for countries like Burkina Faso. As of June 11, UN OCHA has requested $934.6 million for aid for the country, and only 15.1 percent of that has been funded. What that means is that of the 2.7 million people currently in need of food aid, WFP will only be able to reach about 700,000 to 800,000 people, Pruscini said.
To close the gap, the NRC and the UN have called for countries, such as the Gulf states like Saudi Arabia that typically don't fund much humanitarian aid, to up their giving. Michou also advocates for all donor countries to "increase humanitarian budgets with a focus on equitable financing to neglected crises or to humanitarian blind spots."
Aid groups also need more timely and flexible funding allocations, Michou said, including funds that stretch over a few years, rather than annual allotments, and funds that are not earmarked for specific countries or activities. Laerke says that the UN has a pooled fund of non-earmarked money, and while it has grown in the past 20 years, it still falls short of the $1 billion target. The UN has started replicating this fund at the country level to have a stash of funds that can be used more flexibly as humanitarian needs change.
Finally, the UN has implemented a practice called boundary setting, which calls for aid groups to reduce their stated funding needs, focusing only on providing more immediate humanitarian needs and not stepping over the line of providing development assistance as they often must do in protracted crises. This has been controversial among aid workers; some say this causes a general underestimation of needs particularly for crises where aid cannot be easily separated from development.
When there's only so much money to go around, it matters that global leaders consider places most in need of aid and not just the most geopolitically important countries. Lives hang in the balance.
—Jess Craig, Future Perfect fellow
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