Our Global Humanitarian System is Broken

There are just too many crises

The UN Humanitarian Air Service. Image credit: World Food Program via facebook

I wrote this as a guest post last week for Matthew Yglesias’ Slow Boring Substack. This is an updated version for Global Dispatches subscribers.

You could be forgiven for not encountering news about an epic drought under way in Southern Africa.

Over the past several weeks, Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe have declared national disasters. Some 25 million people in the region are facing extreme levels of food and water shortages. The proximate cause is El Nino. The cyclical weather pattern tends to bring dryer and hotter weather to this part of the world. But for Southern Africa this El Nino is unlike prior El Ninos. A recent United Nations report showed the lowest rainfall totals for this region in 40 years. Data from USAID’s Famine Early Warning System revealed that February 2024 was the driest February in Southern Africa in 100 years. To make matters worse, when it does rain, it floods. Because the ground has been so hardened by extended dryspells water can’t soak through. In late March floods wrought devastation on Mozambique’s capital city, Maputo. 

This region is getting some international support. But not enough. If these trends continue, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, will launch what is known as a “Flash Appeal” – essentially, an emergency fundraiser – to support the basic human needs of people impacted by this crisis. This is a rather streamlined process. When a man-made or natural disaster strikes, aid agencies assess what they need to respond to the crisis and report their findings to OCHA which combines various aid groups’ needs into a single “consolidated appeal.” This provides a baseline assessment of how much money is needed to respond to a given crisis. 

Then comes the hard part.

Aid agencies must go to donor governments hat-in-hand and fundraise. UN agencies like the World Food Program and the UN Refugee Agency, and also international NGOs like Oxfam and Save the Children must seek funding from wealthier western governments to support their crisis response plans. More often than not, the response from donors is muted. Aid agencies typically get much less than what they need. (The big exception are conflicts or disasters that directly impact the core interests of major donors. For example, the 2022 Ukraine “flash appeal” was overfunded by about $300 million.) 

Needless to say, Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe are not exactly top tier interests of wealthier donor countries. If past is precedent, we can probably expect a sizable gap between what aid agencies need to support impacted populations in Southern African and what they actually receive. That gap is measured in dollars, what the UN calls “unmet requirements,” but it is felt in profoundly human ways — people don’t receive food, medicine, shelter or basic elements of human wellbeing. For example, when faced with funding shortfalls last year, the World Food Program cut back the rations per-person it provided in Syria.

Unmet requirements have been a fact of life for humanitarian agencies since I started covering the United Nations nearly 20 years ago. But what is different today — very different — is the sheer size and scope of humanitarian crises across the world. The number of people impacted by humanitarian disaster and the amount of money needed to support them has been growing at an incredible rate in recent years. Simply put, crises are vastly larger today than in recent past.

If present trend continue — and there is every reason to believe it will — the system we have to limit human suffering in disasters will buckle.

A good system when it works

International disaster relief can work very, very well. A constellation of UN and independent aid agencies can rapidly and efficiently set up complex humanitarian relief operations nearly anywhere on the planet at the drop of a hat. There are UN warehouses around the world with pre-positioned food and mobile shelters, various “interagency standing committees” to harmonize work across bureaucracies, and even university programs all dedicated to humanitarian relief.

The problem is not in the expertise, but capacity. Our global humanitarian system was designed for a bygone era in which there were fewer conflicts and the impact of climate change was less intense.

Sudan is a good example. When I started covering this issue in 2005, Sudan was the biggest disaster as the genocide in Darfur gave way to a simmering humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and millions required some form of international humanitarian assistance. In all, the United Nations sought $1.9 billion to pay for humanitarian operations in Sudan in 2005. Fast forward 19 years and Sudan is again the largest crisis by-the-numbers, this time on account of a civil war that erupted last year. Aid groups are now seeking over $4 billion to cover the cost of humanitarian relief in Sudan alone. 

Back in 2005, Sudan was one of only just a handful of major disasters for which aid agencies sought to raise money through this consolidated appeal process. Today, Sudan is one of many major disasters, all of which require the response of more or less the same set of international actors — that is various UN humanitarian agencies and international NGOs. This includes higher profile crises like an incipient famine in Gaza as well as other major crises that don’t get as much attention, like conflict-driven displacement in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a twin conflict and climate crisis in Burkina Faso, the fallout from Myanmar’s civil war, and a dzud in Mongolia.  

In 2005, the total funding requirements for all humanitarian emergencies was $5.98 billion. In 2024, that figure is upwards of $45.98bn — a nine fold increase — spanning 36 separate disasters.

2024 is not some outlier here, but part of a broader trend of skyrocketing humanitarian needs.

Source: OCHA 2024 Global Humanitarian Overview

This enormous increase in humanitarian needs is largely due to two factors: conflicts and climate change. We all know that climate related disasters have been steadily growing and can only be expected to increase in the years ahead. But just as climate change is increasingly baked into our world order, so are an ever-increasing number of conflicts around the world. A rising number of conflicts are becoming a structural feature of international relations for a variety of reasons, including a general global power shift away from a unitary American superpower. But whatever the cause, the fact is that the number of armed conflicts are on an unrelenting upward trajectory, and those conflicts spark humanitarian crises.

The end result is ever-increasing humanitarian needs while the funding to support those needs remains limited.

We can’t innovate ourselves out of this

When I started covering the United Nations and this humanitarian system nearly twenty years ago, there were typically gaps in what aid agencies needed and what they received, but aid agencies were generally able to muddle through. In fact, they got quite efficient at rapidly delivering aid at scale to nearly any corner of the globe. Certain reforms to the international humanitarian system instituted after the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami revamped the provision of humanitarian relief in which specific aid agencies were given discrete tasks in disasters. Oxfam would build the latrines, the World Food Program would be in charge of food and setting up telecoms, the UN Refugee Agency would build shelters, and so on. The so-called “cluster system” eliminated the sometimes duplicative work that had undermined prior relief efforts. Aid agencies have also embraced certain technical innovations, like direct mobile payments to refugees, that has made the provision of aid cheaper and more efficient. In recent years, aid agencies have coalesced around the need to partner with local NGOs in disaster zones, adding further efficiencies to this system.

But the sheer size and scope of humanitarian crises today means that aid agencies can’t innovate their way to closing the multi-billion dollar gap of unmet requirements. Rather, change has to come from donors, namely the wealthier governments of the world. This includes a change of mindset. This system operates essentially as a charity, but the implications of failure are more than just humanitarian disaster for people affected. In 2024, an estimated 363 million people across 72 countries are somehow impacted by a disaster and in need of assistance. That is about 4% of the world’s population — and four times larger than the same figure just five years ago. If present trends continue, over a billion people will be in need of humanitarian assistance by the end of the decade.

As of last month, aid agencies required $46.1 billion to assist 184.1 million people. Thus far, they’ve received only about $4.4 billion toward that total, leaving over $40 billion in unmet requirements. To be sure, this is a lot of money, but it is not an insurmountable sum, particularly when the burden is shared across the world’s major economies. The solution here is straightforward: donors need to pay up! But the fact is, key donor governments are tolerant of these massive gaps in humanitarian funding. In the foreign policy community, humanitarian issues tend to be an afterthought.

That lackadaisical attitude may come back to haunt. Humanitarian relief agencies tend not to regard themselves as political actors. They deliver aid based on needs and needs alone. But in fact, they exist as a kind of bulwark against chaos and disorder that results from mass amounts of people lacking basic necessities for survival. A world in which aid agencies struggle to meet the basic humanitarian needs of 1 billion people is inherently a more chaotic and unstable one — even by today’s standards. 

Since this published last week, there have been two major events that demonstrate the extent to which this humanitarian system is broken.