Is The Global Aid System Beyond Repair?

As conflict and the climate crisis fuel humanitarian emergencies, agencies warn ofanalarming funding gap

- Fred Harter

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 yet to be dug and the desert 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 last April.

"I've never seen an operation at such a scale that is so poorly funded," said 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.

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 to help 339 million people. So far it has received just 37.5% 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 this 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," said Jens Laerke, a spokesperson for the UN's humanitarian coordination office.

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.