Each year, the UN and its partners publish Humanitarian Response Plans (HRPs) — detailed funding appeals setting out exactly what is needed to respond to each crisis. The amounts are not estimates; they represent the minimum required to meet the basic needs of affected populations.

When appeals go underfunded, aid organisations are forced to make painful choices: cutting food ration sizes, reducing the number of people they can reach, suspending medical programmes, or withdrawing from the most dangerous areas entirely.

The 40% threshold matters. OCHA considers any appeal below 40% funded to be critically underfunded — at this level, basic humanitarian standards cannot be maintained. Sudan, Yemen, and DRC have been below this threshold for multiple consecutive years.

Funding does not follow need equally. Crises with higher geopolitical visibility — Ukraine, Syria — receive proportionally more funding than crises in sub-Saharan Africa, even when the scale of need is comparable or greater. This is called the forgotten crisis problem.

Data sourced from the OCHA Financial Tracking Service, the most comprehensive real-time record of humanitarian funding flows globally.