‘We’re playing Whac-A-Mole’: why the aid system is broken

The queue for water at Metche, a camp of 40,000 refugees on the Sudan-Chad border, starts at dawn and lasts until sunset. The aid agencies helping the people there, who fled fighting in Sudan earlier this year, do not have enough money to drill boreholes, so there is a chronic water shortage.

Latrines have also yet to be dug and the desert around the camp serves as an open-air toilet. There are no blankets or mosquito nets, even though nights are cold and the area is plagued by malaria. There are similar shortages at all the hastily built camps for the 500,000 refugees who have crossed into Chad since Sudan’s war erupted in April.

“I’ve never seen an operation at such a scale that is so poorly funded,” says Pierre Honnorat, the local head of the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP), which warned in November that it was running out of money to feed 1.4 million in Chad affected by the crisis.

The problem is not confined to central Africa. Across the world, aid agencies are grappling with a funding shortage at a time when humanitarian needs are soaring. In 2023, the UN appealed for a record $51.5bn (£40.6bn) to help 339 million people, the most ever. So far it has received just 38.6% of that total.

This is the worst funding gap the humanitarian system has faced: between 2016 and 2022 the UN’s appeals were 58% funded on average. During that time, the funds given to the UN for relief work rose steadily, but last year the total amount dropped for the first time – falling from $30bn in 2022 to just over $21bn in 2023.

“The needs are simply rising faster than the money coming in,” says Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN’s humanitarian coordination office.

The human cost of the funding gap is laid out in a recent UN report. The number of people receiving food in Afghanistan dropped from 13 million to 3 million between May and November, while in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 600,000 malnourished children are not receiving proper treatment.

Last year, unpredictable funding brought conflict-ridden Somalia to the brink of famine. Even though aid agencies had been sounding the alarm for more than a year, they only got the funds they needed to prevent a disaster at the last minute. By then, more than 43,000 people had already starved to death.

The WFP, meanwhile, has slashed rations for millions of crisis-stricken people in Yemen, South Sudan, Syria, the DRC, Haiti and elsewhere.

“Across every country we work in, we’re making more and more difficult choices about the programmes we stop or don’t start, about the people we do or don’t serve,” says Ciarán Donnelly, the senior vice-president of crisis response and recovery at the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an agency that helps refugees.

Conflict is by far the biggest driver of the explosion in humanitarian need. Not only has there been a wave of fresh conflicts, such as those in Ethiopia, Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza, wars are lasting longer. This causes greater economic disruption, inflicts more damage to infrastructure and requires lengthier, more expensive aid responses.

On top of this instability are the effects of the climate crisis. In recent years, there have been droughts in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel, while floods have ravaged Pakistan, South Sudan and Libya. In addition to creating new emergencies, extreme weather helps deepen existing ones: 70% of wars are in countries hit hard by the climate emergency, according to the IRC.

The lingering economic aftershocks of Covid are also still being felt. Many poor countries such as Zambia, Laos and Sri Lanka took on extra debt to deal with the pandemic and are now struggling to pay for health, education and welfare. Then there is the spike in global fuel and food prices caused by the war in Ukraine, which has stretched government budgets even further.

“When you add all of this up, it’s just exploding,” says Bill O’Keefe from Catholic Relief Services, a distributor of grain donated by the US. “We’re just playing Whac-A-Mole with all of these crises, and we can’t keep up.”

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Global humanitarian needs will only increase. In 1999, the humanitarian aid system needed funding worth $1.7bn. By 2027 it is expected to require more than $100bn. As a result, experts are asking whether the global humanitarian system is not just financially broke, but also fundamentally broken.

“It’s completely unsustainable,” says a senior UN humanitarian official. “We can’t get enough money for what we’re doing right now. How are we going to cope in a few years’ time when climate change really begins to hit?”

The aid community is split on how to respond to the new nature of humanitarian crises. Some argue the sector needs to go “back to basics” and focus on what it is good at: short-term lifesaving support in emergencies. As the climate crisis makes itself felt, others say the humanitarian sector needs to do more long-term “resilience” work to help people deal with extreme weather.

Yet everyone agrees the system needs to change. In January 2016, a UN panel concluded that the aid sector lacked transparency, was financially inefficient and was bad at measuring the impact of its work. It also identified a lack of joined-up thinking between humanitarian and development agencies as a key issue.

“Almost everyone with whom we spoke said that finding more money will not solve all the problems, and may even entrench some of the current dysfunctions,” the panel said.

Little has been done to fix it, however. In May 2016, a landmark UN conference of 9,000 delegates pledged to increase the proportion of aid given to local humanitarian organisations from 0.4% to 25% by 2020. Today just 3.3% goes to national NGOs, even though they are cheaper, nimbler and more effective than international agencies.

Despite facing multidimensional protracted crises, we still have aid agencies that were designed to provide short-term support during droughts, floods and wars, says Edouard Rodier, from the Norwegian Refugee Council.

These groups are increasingly shouldering work normally done by governments, such as running hospitals, making welfare payments and fixing water systems.

“We come in to save lives and at the moment you would expect us to leave, we cannot, because no one else is operating and we cannot abandon people,” says Rodier. “So we remain, sometimes for decades, doing things way beyond our scope. This is because other aspects of the system are failing.”

This point is echoed by Sorcha O’Callaghan, from the Overseas Development Institute, who says aid agencies are victims of “mission creep”. She points out that the WFP is supporting 800,000 citizens of Lebanon, where the banks and currency have collapsed.

“This is not a humanitarian crisis by any stretch of the imagination,” she says. “It’s a political crisis that is resulting in people going hungry. Why are humanitarians having to step into the breach to deliver services?”

In places such as Lebanon, O’Callaghan says, donor countries and multilateral institutions such as the World Bank need to do more development work that strengthens national systems and deals with the root causes, so humanitarian agencies are not forced to treat the symptoms.

She also calls for “super-local actors” to be integrated into the global aid system and an increase in cash-based assistance, which is cheaper and usually more effective than giving food.

“This is where the future lies,” says O’Callaghan. “Having big, expensive international aid agencies running things for year after year until the money dries up won’t work.”

Mark Lowcock, the UN’s humanitarian chief from 2017 to 2021, says the sector’s funding formula needs an overhaul. Currently, it relies on a small number of western countries giving voluntarily: in 2022, the US, Germany and the EU provided 64% of humanitarian aid.

Instead, Lowcock recommends a compulsory system of contributions for all UN member states, similar to the model used to fund peacekeeping operations. “Unless there is sustainable financing, this cycle of crisis will continue,” says Lowcock.

Related: Sudan’s cycle of violence: ‘There is a genocide going on in West Darfur’

Yet there is a sense that introducing sorely needed changes to the humanitarian aid system will only go so far. If needs are to come down, there must be a radical rethink of the global governance architecture and finance, says Paul Spiegel, director of the Center for Humanitarian Health at Johns Hopkins University.

“The humanitarian system is just a Band-Aid,” says Speigel. In the end, these problems are political in nature.”

António Guterres, the UN secretary general, has been particularly vocal on this front. This year he has called for an overhaul of the “morally bankrupt global financial system” that channels money to rich countries and makes it difficult for poor ones to access credit.

He also added his voice to growing calls for reforms to the UN security council, which is led by its five permanent members: the US, UK, France, Russia and China.

The body was set up after the second world war to maintain global peace and security, but it has been paralysed by disagreement in recent years, with its permanent members using their vetoes to shield allies.

“The world has changed. Our institutions have not,” Guterres told September’s UN general assembly. “We cannot effectively address problems as they are if institutions do not reflect the world as it is. Instead of solving problems, they risk becoming part of the problem.”

There are signs that things are shifting. Somalia recently secured $4.5bn of debt relief under an IMF scheme for poor countries, cutting its debt as a proportion of GDP from 65% to 6%. This will free up money that went on repayments for spending on health, education and social security, said a Somali official.

Yet security council reform remains elusive. “The world is too fractured to make these tough choices,” says Spiegel. “I’m not sure when there will be enough openness to change.”