International organisations face growing political backlash, funding cuts, and earmarked contributions. This was happening even before the recent funding cuts by some of the world’s largest humanitarian donors, such as the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom, and the growing practice of earmarking multilateral funding. During these difficult times, many are therefore questioning the effectiveness of international organisations in allocating humanitarian aid.

This leaves international organisations with little room for manoeuvre, and compromises their efficiency. Some humanitarian emergencies were more underfunded than others. In 2025, the best-funded UN-coordinated humanitarian response plan, for Ukraine, had funding six times higher than the worst-funded plan, for Honduras:

Funding levels for humanitarian needs and response plans in 2025, in % of required funding

Source: OCHA Financial Tracking Service, as of 24 June 2026

Motivations for humanitarian aid allocations

Against the backdrop of these larger structural shifts, our new study re-evaluates bilateral donor motivations in humanitarian aid allocations. The study is based on a statistical analysis of humanitarian appeals in the UN, between 2000 and 2021. Controlling for a number of social and political factors, our research revealed two key findings.

Firstly, bilateral donors do provide funding where needs are most urgent and severe. However, some aspects of need matter more than others. For example, humanitarian response plans receive more funding in contexts with large numbers of refugees. The number of internally displaced people, meanwhile, has less influence on donor allocations. Donors also sometimes take their own political and economic interests into account.

Media coverage is strongly linked to humanitarian funding. Response plans for a humanitarian crisis covered in around 100,000 news articles received 24 percentage points more funding than a crisis covered in only 100 articles

Secondly, the most consistent finding is that media coverage is strongly linked to humanitarian funding. On average, response plans for a humanitarian crisis that was covered in 100,000 news articles per year had a funding coverage that was 24 percentage points higher than response plans for a crisis covered in only 100 articles. This was the case for Syria in 2016, at the height of the conflict with Islamic State. This finding tallies with interview evidence from directors and senior policymakers in major donor countries documented in previous research.

United Nations aid crowds in bilateral humanitarian aid

Donors must make decisions about humanitarian funding in a complex media and political landscape. To help them, UN humanitarian pooled funds' mandate is to bring the decision-making on funding allocations closer to humanitarian crises. Such funds – like the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) at the global level, along with country- and regional-level funds also managed by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – are tasked with needs-based funding based on humanitarian principles. They also largely adhere to these principles.

By funding new or deteriorating emergencies, the Central Emergency Response Fund draws attention to these crises and catalyses funding from other sources

Our second, new study shows that pooled funds may go even further. The study reveals a pattern in which CERF aid tends to precede bilateral humanitarian funding, based on quantitative and qualitative evidence. By funding new or deteriorating emergencies, CERF draws attention to these crises and catalyses funding from other sources. Linking bilateral and CERF aid flowing to the same recipient countries, our study finds that bilateral humanitarian donors follow CERF in their aid allocations.

This finding holds even when accounting for a range of other factors, including humanitarian need, conflict, trade, and economic development. It also does not depend on donor size, and remains robust across a series of additional tests.

Total amounts of bilateral humanitarian aid (HA) and CERF aid allocations each year, in million constant 2020 $US, across all recipients

A Swedish case study

To illustrate this crowding-in effect of UN pooled funds, Lisa has examined more closely how CERF encourages other donors to give, using Sweden as an example. Sweden is one of the world’s major humanitarian donors, which makes its funding decisions politically important. SIDA, The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, uses thematic and geographic priorities to guide its decisions. But they often revise these decisions several times during the year as crises change and new information becomes available.

In Somalia in 2017, for example, Sweden announced humanitarian contributions in response to the famine. This and other cases reported in the study explicitly mentioned CERF funding. This suggests that CERF can help put a crisis on the agenda and encourage bilateral donors to provide additional support.

The Central Emergency Response Fund can help put a crisis on the agenda and encourage bilateral donors to provide additional support

These findings align with what the humanitarian country teams that receive and implement CERF funding report. Almost all of them say that a CERF allocation helps them to mobilise funding from other sources. Similarly, by the end of 2025, 14 of the 26 CERF-funded anticipatory action frameworks had mobilised $50 million in co-financing from other humanitarian donors and partners.

How the UN can catalyse spending

Taken together, in 2016, donors and humanitarian organisations agreed on the 'Grand Bargain' that they would provide most funding with as much flexibility as possible. In so doing, they seek to reduce the practice of earmarking, where funding is tied to specific activities, which can be inefficient. Our findings clearly show that UN pooled funds can help in this endeavour.

We uncover a mechanism we don't usually think about: how the UN can catalyse spending for underfunded emergencies and protracted conflicts, as well as for new or deteriorating emergencies, even after bilateral donors have already decided on their multi-bi and multilateral aid.

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