By Muhammad Amaan
The United Nations is “underfunded, overstretched and under attack,” Tom Fletcher, Head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has said.
Fletcher, while lamenting on Monday at the UN Headquarters, said “we have only 19 per cent of what we need.”
The international community is currently dealing with multiple humanitarian crises across the world, including conflict-driven crises in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine.
Other crisis hotspots include Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Haiti, Myanmar and the Sahel.
The Global Humanitarian Overview 2025 (GHO), an annual assessment of global humanitarian needs and responses, was launched in December 2024 and covers 180 million vulnerable people across 70 countries.
The GHO calls for 44 billion dollars, but latest figures show that just under 15 billion dollars has received to date.
So far in 2025, three crises in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Ukraine and Sudan have received almost a quarter of all funding.
The top five donors according to OCHA’s Financial Tracking Service have been the European Commission, the United States and the United Kingdom, followed by Japan and Germany.
According to Fletcher, hundreds of aid organisations have shut down and the humanitarian sector has contracted to just one-third of its size from 10 months ago.
Meanwhile, OCHA has lost 20 to 25 per cent of its staff over the past year.
In June, OCHA made a “hyper-prioritised” appeal for $29 billion to reprioritise individual country humanitarian plans with the goal of saving 114 million lives.
The $29 billion represents just one per cent of what the world is projected to spend on defence in 2025, according to Fletcher.
The OCHA head asked “What does this say about our collective priorities?”
In 2025 alone, six million more children are out of school globally, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
Similarly, officials at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) warned that 11 million refugees may no longer get the help they need.
“We need a ceasefire now,” the humanitarian chief said.
Sudan, facing the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, is expected to be a major topic of discussion at the forthcoming meeting of world leader at the UN from 22 September.
He said Haiti is likewise under the spotlight, where sexual and gang violence remain widespread.
“Women were taking contraception in advance when getting to checkpoints, anticipating acts of sexual violence,” Fletcher said.
The year 2025 also marks a record for aid workers killed in the line of duty, with over 270 killed compared to 380 last year.
We need to see “more anticipatory, more preventive, more efficient and more local approaches,” Fletcher highlighted.
At a time when it is “unfashionable to be defending institutions, defending structures, hierarchies, and order, the alternative is disorder and chaos,” he said.
“We must grieve for what has gone, we must fight for what must be saved and we must imagine what we can be in the future.”
