Wise individuals have long assured us that the arc of history bends toward justice. Yet this year, per numerous global aid organizations, it has taken an extremely winding path. Wealthy nations have halted financial support to poorer countries. Conflicts have dragged on longer and claimed more lives. Those who violate international law have faced no repercussions. Stable, resource-rich nations have turned inward, while people fleeing dysfunction and chaos have flooded into regions already under strain. The International Rescue Committee (IRC), an organization that assists refugees, describes the current situation as “.”
In 2024, data from the (PRIO) showed 61 active wars across 36 countries—the highest number since World War II. “This is not just a spike–it’s a structural shift,” a PRIO researcher said at the time. Unsurprisingly, in 2025, most of these conflicts persisted, and their impacts intensified. Aid workers note that war is costly; the longer conflicts continue and the more desperate each side becomes, the greater the chance that opportunistic groups will exploit the unrest to trade weapons or cash for access to natural resources or land at low prices. These external actors then have an incentive to block peace efforts.
Fighting has also forced people to leave their homes and farms, leading to food shortages and . Save the Children’s found that 60 million children went hungry due to wars this year, with 11 million facing “emergency levels of hunger that require desperate survival measures to avoid death.” The projects that in 2026, 318 million people will face crisis-level hunger or worse—twice the number in 2019.
For Bob Kitchen, IRC’s vice president for emergencies, no country better illustrates this deadly combination of events than . Over two years of civil war have led to and widespread displacement. “I can attest to the fact that it’s the largest humanitarian crisis anywhere in the world,” he says from Addis Ababa airport, fresh off a trip to the in Darfur. “Sixty to 70% of the population is urgently in need of humanitarian assistance. There is a larger number of people in [the most severe category of famine] in Sudan than anywhere else in the world, including in Gaza pre-ceasefire.”
In December of last year, the U.N.’s 2025 estimated it would need $4.2 billion from the global community to help people inside Sudan, plus an additional $1.1 billion for Sudanese refugees in neighboring countries. Why such a large sum? Partly because of the number of people fleeing violence, and partly because the war means much aid must be trucked from Chad over a mountain range into Darfur via a route Kitchen calls “a donkey track.” The 45-mile journey takes aid trucks three days to complete.
“The sheer number of people being displaced ongoingly means our operations are massive, and the complexity of the areas we work in is off the charts,” Kitchen says. “Everything from basic shelter to food, water, latrines, education, and clothing must be provided—they have nothing, and almost no ability to cope after what they’ve endured.”
But war isn’t the only issue. Climate changes have left many nations struggling to grow enough crops. New analyses from the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) predict that and will need humanitarian food aid at least until May 2026, due to record-high temperatures and low rainfall.
2025 also saw wealthy countries drastically cut humanitarian and development funding to poorer nations. This year, the U.S. foreign aid agency USAID— which provided $44 billion in foreign aid in 2023—was suddenly told to , then was and its reduced duties transferred to the State Department. Budget cuts to foreign aid were also announced by the U.K., Canada, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Belgium, New Zealand, Finland, Switzerland, and Sweden. Together, these countries account for about 43% of the world’s nominal GDP.
As the year ends, global agencies are assessing the impact of these cuts and sounding alarms. The reductions mean the WFP can now feed only about 110 million—just over a third—of those going hungry, per a new . Oxfam’s of the USAID shutdown suggested it could leave 95 million without basic health care and 23 million children out of school. stated it closed 42 programs, affecting 3.6 million people.
The on-the-ground impact is becoming clearer, even in lower-middle-income countries. “In Kenya, we have a huge increase in new [HIV] infections among children,” said Maurine Murenga, head of Kenyan community group Lean on Me, at a Dec. 17 briefing organized by to announce a . “These children are born to adolescent girls and young women, and the reason for the new infections is that after the stop-work order, all standalone HIV clinics closed.” Pregnant women were directed to hospital outpatient departments instead, but “in the outpatient department, we don’t have specialists,” Murenga says. “You get a general practitioner who lacks detailed knowledge of HIV prevention.” Experts also report rising infections in Ugandan babies and among sexual violence victims in Ethiopia and the DRC.
So far, most of these warning signs have been ignored. The Sudan Response Plan received only about a third of its requested funding. Starting in January, the WFP will cut food rations to “70% for communities facing famine, and 50% for those at risk of famine,” a WFP director told . “By April, we’ll hit a funding cliff.”