Aid & development, explained.
Minimum standards define exactly how many litres of water each person needs a day (Albert González Farran/UN Photo)
Humanitarian aid is failing more cheaply, not more efficiently.
Subscribe to The Informer for monthly expert analysis, and to Events for advance notice of visiting world leaders and distinguished guests.
You may unsubscribe from Lowy Institute newsletters at any time. For information on our privacy practices and how to unsubscribe, see our Privacy Policy.
The aid system is doing less with less, yet grading itself far too kindlyThe aid system is doing less with less, yet grading itself far too kindly
For eight months, not one minimum humanitarian standard was met for the 600,000 people displaced in Goma, in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Minimum standards define exactly how many litres of water each person needs a day, how many calories of food each person requires, and how many toilets the population needs to survive. That finding does not come from critics of the aid industry; it comes from the international humanitarian system’s own report card.
In September, the Active Learning Network for Accountability and Performance (ALNAP) published the State of the Humanitarian System (Opens in new window), covering 2022–25. It shows a system that reached fewer people and gave each of them less. Yet the system’s response to this collapse has been to rebrand shrinkage as efficiency, and the cost of that rebrand is paid by people in crisis and the local responders who serve them.
The numbers are stark (Opens in new window): funding for each person targeted halved from US$178 in 2021 to US$90 in 2025, while the estimated cost of meeting each person’s needs rose to around US$255. More than 90% of the World Food Program’s in-kind rations in 2023 failed to meet nutritional needs, and around 80% were still inadequate in 2024. With USAID dismantled and other donors cutting deeply, the next reporting cycle will almost certainly look worse.
International actors were still patting each other on the back and preserving a system that is failing by almost every measurable indicator.
Most telling is what the report cannot say. Without strong data on costs and outcomes, its authors concede, there is no way to tell whether lower spending reflected genuine efficiency gains or simply less adequate assistance. Efficiency, in other words, is a claim the system cannot yet verify.
Rather than confront that gap, the system has redefined it. The United Nations’ 2026 appeals were billed as “hyper-prioritised”, built on a narrower definition of humanitarian need that made the shortfall look smaller, while aid workers warned that many people in need were simply no longer being counted.
At this year’s UN General Assembly in New York, which coincided with the release of the ALNAP report, international actors acknowledged they were doing less with less, yet were still patting each other on the back and preserving a system that is failing by almost every measurable indicator.
Meanwhile, the approaches proven to deliver better value went backwards. Cash and flexible multiyear funding work but the share of UN agencies and international NGOs giving multiyear funding to partners fell as organisations looked to efficiency.
Much of the “saving” has simply been shifted onto local organisations, their staff and people they serve. Local and national groups make up 81% of humanitarian organisations, and 94% of humanitarian staff are nationals of the countries where they work. Yet in 2025, local actors received just 4.3% of humanitarian funding directly, and national NGOs held 11% of seats on Humanitarian Country Teams, against 79% of UN agencies, international NGOs and donors.
The system also grades itself more generously than the people it serves. In 2025, 67% of practitioners rated their targeting of those in most urgent need as good or excellent; only 51% of aid recipients agreed, and just 53% said the assistance met their most important needs.
Donors should channel a fixed and rising share of their humanitarian funding directly to local responders, bypassing intermediaries altogether and trusting communities themselves to deliver assistance where it is most needed (Albert González Farran/UN Photo)
Sudan shows both what that imbalance costs and what the alternative looks like. Three years into a war that has produced one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, much of the response has been carried by community-run Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), rooted in the Sudanese tradition of nafeer, or collective mutual aid (Opens in new window), and funded for years largely by diaspora. More than 600 of these ERRs have become the country’s central relief network, reaching people in need where international agencies cannot.
Local and national frontline responders do it at enormous personal risk and on very little: many local leaders receive no salary, and volunteers responding to crisis in their own communities get none of the legal protection that international law affords foreign humanitarian workers. A Deakin University report (Opens in new window) found that funders were more focused on managing perceived risk than on what communities needed, and that the numbers of Sudanese organisations receiving money from major funders has fallen sharply as donor priorities moved elsewhere.
Donors should channel a fixed and rising share of their humanitarian funding directly to local responders, bypassing intermediaries altogether and trusting communities themselves to deliver assistance where it is most needed. Where direct transfers are not possible, donors can utilise pooled funds and trusted intermediaries, while holding them accountable to ensure that the majority of funds reach local organisations rather than being consumed by bloated headquarters and international staff salaries. They should make multiyear funding, ideally through cash-based modalities, the default in protracted crises.
But money alone will not fix this: local responders must hold real decision-making power over priorities, not just a bigger slice of the budget. And they should judge partners by what crisis-affected people say about the aid they receive, not by what agencies report about themselves.
A system that reaches fewer people with less, while those doing the work hold the least power, is not becoming more efficient. It is simply failing more cheaply.
About the authors
Mary Ana McGlasson
Professor Mary Ana McGlasson is the Executive Director of the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership.
Manny Maung
Manny Maung is Manager, Influencing and Engagement at the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership.
The most-pressing world events explained by Lowy Institute experts and global contributors, in your inbox, every Thursday.
You may unsubscribe from The Interpreter at any time. For information on our privacy practices and how to unsubscribe, see our Privacy Policy.
