The global humanitarian aid system needs an urgent rethink in the face of a dramatic drop in support from major donor countries, an Ottawa-based international refugee organization says, as it launches an 18-month initiative to look for workable reforms.
Huge cuts in funding for humanitarian aid, particularly by the United States, mean that the decades-old system for helping refugees and displaced people must be restructured and tailored to make money go further, the World Refugee and Migration Council said in a report published Thursday.
The report said the international humanitarian aid system established after the Second World War is now “facing a profound challenge.”
“U.S. funding, long its backbone, has plummeted by 57 per cent and is increasingly earmarked for select countries aligned with American geopolitical priorities,” the report said.
The Trump administration has dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, and cancelled most of its aid programs, transferring responsibility for foreign assistance to the State Department. U.S. official development assistance in 2025 totalled US$29-billion, down from roughly US$65-billion the year prior, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.
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Development aid by other big donor countries, including Britain, Germany, Japan and France, also dropped dramatically in 2025, the OECD reported. Humanitarian aid is projected to decline further this year.
In the 2025 federal budget, Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government slashed $2.7-billion from Canada’s foreign aid spending. Aid agencies said the move would deepen a global crisis that has left millions struggling for survival in war zones and humanitarian disasters, including refugees fleeing the civil war in Sudan.
The government imposed the cut over four years “while focusing support for countries that need it the most,” the budget said.
The World Refugee and Migration Council launched its 18-month initiative Thursday, attempting to find practical reforms that will allow the international community to adapt to the worsening refugee crisis with significantly reduced funds.
The Ottawa-led project will engage governments, global think tanks, United Nations agencies and development institutions such as the World Bank to frame a blueprint to reform the humanitarian system. One focus will be how to better help long-term displaced people access employment, education and basic services, “thereby reducing dependance on external assistance.”
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The report said the humanitarian sector, including NGOs and international organizations, is “underresourced, shaped by donor geopolitics, and often constrained by policy and access restrictions.”
“By default it has remained engaged in protracted crises beyond the short-term emergency role for which it was originally designed.”
With reduced funding, agencies helping refugees must reduce duplication of their services, the report said.
“Scarce resources must go further. Overlapping mandates, parallel delivery structures and competition for funding impose costs the system can no longer afford,” it said. “Success should be judged by outcomes for affected populations, not by the volume of assistance delivered or the number of people reached.”
Ninette Kelley, the council’s chair, said preserving “life-saving humanitarian assistance” is important.
“But we also need to recognize that emergency assistance alone cannot provide a roadmap for people who remain displaced for years or even decades,” Ms. Kelley wrote in an e-mail. “Without a longer-term strategy, protracted displacement responses will continue to be dominated by short-term interventions, allowing situations to deteriorate and ultimately increasing the human and financial costs.”
Council president Fen Osler Hampson, professor of international affairs at Carleton University, said global conflicts have reached their highest level since 1946 with nearly 118 million people forcibly displaced. He said modelling suggests U.S. aid cuts alone could result in more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, and up to 22 million once other donors’ cuts are included.
Almost 70 per cent of the world’s refugees have been displaced for five years or more, so the system must be reconfigured to be more efficient, more effective and tailored to local conditions, not just trimmed to do the same with less, he added.
The report calls on middle powers to build on the Partners for Multilateralism initiative, which Mr. Carney signed on Canada’s behalf at this year’s UN General Assembly in New York, by forming coalitions that ensure every dollar of humanitarian aid goes further as U.S. support declines.
“Middle-power engagement is particularly relevant in the absence of clear international leadership during this period of rapid change,” the report said.
“With traditional leadership receding, middle powers must step up. They cannot replace lost U.S. dollars, but they can build the coalitions that make every dollar go further.”
With a report from Reuters