The relevance of development cooperation is being questioned by the main donors, and this questioning is reflected in a decrease in funding. It was in 2024 that the peak was reached, and as humanitarian assistance is part of Official Development Assistance, this peak is now visible. Each OECD member country, several non-Member countries and many international organizations report their development and humanitarian funding to the OECD for the past year, and a long verification process ensures the quality and comparability of the data. It is thus in January 2026 that the 2024 data are available. This is very late on the scale of humanitarian time, but it nonetheless gives, year after year, a underlying trend that retains a certain value.
Global trends
In 2024, the data show a clear inflection, with an overall decrease in committed volumes of around 13%, from 42.1 to 36.7 billion USD slightly above the 2020 amounts (35.8 billion USD). This expected evolution, already identified as early as 2024, reflects a combined effect of budgetary constraints among the main donors and more marked political trade-offs. (Figure 1)
Within an overall decrease in ODA of 6%, the humanitarian share of bilateral ODA remains broadly stable, moving from 14% in 2023 to 13% in 2024, and from 4% to 12% for DAC countries. Non-DAC countries recorded a much stronger decrease, moving from 48% in 2023 to 42% in 2024 (against 60% in 2020), which reflects an increased willingness to engage more structurally with their partner countries.
The CRS 2024 data thus highlight a structural evolution of humanitarian aid that returns to a more reactive management focused on acute crises, to the detriment of a predictable engagement in chronic situations. This dynamic increases the risk of durable underfunding for less visible crises and raises the question of the articulation between humanitarian aid, development and crisis prevention (the “Nexus”) that the overall increases in budgets allowed more easily.
Evolution by type of humanitarian donor
Despite sometimes significant decreases between 2023 and 2024, bilateral donors that are DAC members remain collectively the leading donors of humanitarian assistance. They are recording overall a contraction or a stagnation of their humanitarian aid, with a concentration on a more limited number of politically prioritized crises. Despite the decreases in funding, the leading providers of humanitarian funding remain the same in 2024 as in previous years: US, Germany, the EU and the United Kingdom, which is seeing a large increase (+64%) mainly in Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, West Bank and Gaza and DRC. The largest humanitarian increase is led by Korea (+351%) due to efforts in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Syria and Myanmar.
France moves from the 10th to the 12th humanitarian donor among DAC member countries with a decrease of 21% between 2023 (444 million USD) and 2024 (352 million USD).
Non-DAC donors show more heterogeneous trajectories, showing an overall decrease of around 15%. Some targeted increases partially offset the withdrawals of traditional donors on specific crises, including in Somalia and in Ukraine, but Gulf donors, the main non-DAC donors, had already begun a withdrawal of humanitarian funding that was confirmed in 2024. A large part of humanitarian funding from non-DAC countries is allocated directly to government systems (central or local) of recipient countries.
Finally, multilateral organizations play a cushioning role, but without the capacity to reverse the general trend with an overall decline of 9%. European Union institutions remain the leading multilateral donor despite a decrease of 13% between 2023 and 2024. The World Bank has become a major multilateral humanitarian donor with many social, resilience or risk-preparedness projects reported as humanitarian assistance. United Nations entities report a 30% decrease in their aid, with UNHCR and ILO already marking in 2024 drastic decreases in their funding.
Beneficiary countries and allocation
In 2024, humanitarian assistance remains heavily concentrated on a limited number of countries affected by major and highly mediatized crises, foremost among which Ukraine, Sudan and the Palestinian Territories. The largest increases between 2023 and 2024 concern contexts that experienced recent acute shocks. Conversely, several protracted crises – notably in Afghanistan, Yemen or Syria – record marked decreases, reflecting a relative deprioritization despite persistent humanitarian needs. Humanitarian assistance to populations in Africa remained very stable, marking some rebalancing towards more acute crises such as Sudan and the countries of the central Sahel. Aid to Ukraine began to decrease significantly despite the continuation of the conflict, a humanitarian decrease twice as large as the general ODA decrease to Ukraine between 2023 and 2024 ( -11%). The decrease in ODA to Syrian refugees in Türkiye began even before the fall of the Syrian regime in December 2024.
Note: The 2024 data relating to private donors are not available and are not taken into account in this table. All data are expressed in US dollars at constant prices (2023). Source: OECD
Cyprien Fabre.
Cyprien Fabre :
Cyprien Fabre is the head of the “crises and fragilities” unit at the OECD. After several years of humanitarian missions with Solidarités, he joined ECHO, the humanitarian department of the European Commission, in 2003, and held several positions in crisis contexts. He joined the OECD in 2016 to analyze the engagement of DAC members in fragile or crisis-affected countries. He has also written a series of guides “policy into action” then ”Lives in crises” in order to help translate donors’ political and financial commitments into effective programming in crises. He graduated from the Faculty of Law of Aix-Marseille.