Maputo and London — “Trust in the process is evaporating among humanitarians and even some donors.”
The humanitarian system has experienced the financial equivalent of the Great Depression.
Since peak aid was reached in 2022, humanitarian funding has fallen 30% to $33 billion last year. The answer to this seismic shock has been the humanitarian reset – UN relief chief Tom Fletcher’s initiative to push the system to adapt. The reset’s centrepiece has been hyper-prioritisation, aimed at focusing UN-coordinated response plans on people facing the most acute needs and risks given the precipitous funding cuts.
The “cruel maths” behind this approach became clear in June 2025, when humanitarian planners slashed the number of people targeted to receive assistance. Humanitarians had planned to reach 189.5 million at the start of 2025. Hyper-prioritisation focused on an even lower number: 114.4 million.
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The same calculus has been adopted this year. Humanitarians are concentrating on saving 87 million lives. Lost in the messaging are the 135 million people response plans are actually targeting and the 239 million people said to need some kind of assistance but now with little chance of receiving it.
The logic is understandable: When faced with fewer resources, use them where you believe you can have the most impact. Indeed, more consistent application of needs assessments frameworks means that humanitarians can now say with greater confidence that they are directing their assistance where it is needed most.
But hyper-prioritisation also comes with serious unintended consequences. There is growing frustration with the approach, and many of the people we spoke to as part of new research examining response planning felt that the UN appeal system needs a more radical overhaul.
Millions of people are now being airbrushed out of humanitarian plans. The mantra of “leave no one behind” could not be further from the truth. Appeals numbers do not solely describe actual humanitarian need, but what is politically and financially feasible for the system to aim for. Trust in the process is evaporating among humanitarians and even some donors.
What’s needed is an evidence-based humanitarian appeal system that provides the data consistently. Targets must be unambiguous and presented objectively without second guessing what humanitarians think donors want to hear.
Vanishing needs, confusing numbers, abrupt exits
The glaring hole in the hyper-prioritisation narrative is that it gives the impression that needs are going down when actually they are going up. By most measures – such as the scale of internal displacement or levels of food insecurity – humanitarian conditions have worsened over recent years. Yet the reported number of total “people in need” in appeals has dropped from 339 million in 2023 to 239 million in 2026.
The fall is partly explained by new methodologies for calculating these figures – but also by an arbitrary redefinition of what constitutes humanitarian needs, resulting from political pressure to keep the figures down.
The scope of who can even be considered in the needs analysis of humanitarian appeals has been reduced by setting tighter geographical limits and adopting a “shock-based” approach to planning to focus on needs resulting from conflict, climate disasters, disease outbreaks, and other risks rather than structural problems.
This means millions of people who were once deemed in need of assistance have vanished from response planning, with no prospects of receiving the support they need.
As the “people in need” number falls, so does the share of the population that humanitarians try to reach. Back in 2015, 75% of people requiring humanitarian aid were targeted for assistance, whereas that figure has dropped to 38% in 2026.
It is understandable that, with less funding, it is impossible to reach everyone. But that doesn’t mean we should not report their needs.
Assistance target numbers are meant to be calculated based on the severity of needs, but in reality they are often set according to an estimation of what funding humanitarians think is likely to be received.
This approach is based on a political calculus that if you present the figures in a certain way, then donors are more likely to provide greater levels of funding. Our research has shown that there is simply no statistical basis for this assumption: From responses in Chad to Somalia, changing the funding requirement from year to year has little bearing on what donors give.
One of the biggest implications of hyper-prioritisation has been the international system’s plans to abruptly transition out of many contexts – up to 11 response plans were dropped or put on the path to operational phaseout in this year’s global appeal. There is a risk that residual humanitarian needs will no longer be reported in these places. Moreover, there are also no assurances that development actors are ready to take over, nor are there comprehensive joint-planning frameworks for the exit of humanitarian actors.
Resilience and longer-term interventions required to reduce the vulnerabilities of crisis-affected populations have fallen out of humanitarian response plans, perpetuating the vicious cycle of protracted crises. One critical risk with hyper-prioritisation is an intense focus on “the 87 million” at the expense of planning with other actors how the other 152 million can access assistance – whether through humanitarian, development, or domestic resourcing.
What would a better humanitarian appeal system look like?
There is an inherent tension in the humanitarian planning process between assessing needs objectively, setting targets realistically, and pitching an appropriate financial ask to donors. Attempting to achieve these three objectives simultaneously is leading to massive inconsistencies.
Hyper-prioritisation presents a narrative of humanitarian needs that is no longer coherent. Trust in the process is disappearing: A recent NGO survey noted widespread perceptions that “targets were manipulated because of either government sensitivities or system interests”. A donor even reported not using “people in need” figures, worried that they “significantly underestimated actual need”.
The UN-led humanitarian appeal system has improved significantly over the years, but it needs to change. This is possible without abandoning the basic premise of prioritisation to ensure that assistance is focused where it is needed most. But the starting point must be accepting that humanitarians’ primary responsibility is to assess and present the entirety of humanitarian needs – regardless of whether a response to them will be funded.
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This means setting “people in need” numbers independently and objectively, without being manipulated. An inter-agency accountability mechanism should be established with experts at the global level to validate these numbers before they are published in appeal documents.
Humanitarians should not guess what funding they think they will get, but rather demand donors to forecast what funding they will provide annually so that they can create realistic plans of what they can achieve. The confusing practice of having both hyper-prioritised and target numbers should be dropped. The system needs a single, clear figure for how many people humanitarian actors estimate they can assist.
At the same time, greater attention should be paid to what happens to those not targeted for assistance, to avoid people falling through the cracks of prioritisation and funding cuts. For protracted and transition contexts, serious consideration should be given to not only aligning planning frameworks between humanitarian and development actors, but actually developing joint plans. The focus on life-saving assistance then becomes one part of a broader crisis response strategy and starts to make sense.
The UN-led humanitarian appeal remains an indispensable tool for assessing, planning, and mobilising resources. But hyper-prioritisation has run its course. We need an appeal system in which people can actually trust the numbers.
Damian Lilly, Independent consultant who worked with the UN and NGOs for more than 20 years and writes on a range of humanitarian topics, including the nexus
Mike Pearson, Policy and funding analyst, and research fellow at ODI Global
