Feminist Demands for a Just Humanitarian System
Earlier this month, senior representatives of the Grand Bargain's signatories, from donor governments, UN agencies, INGOs and INGO networks, met in Geneva to discuss progress against the commitments they made to reforming the humanitarian system ten years ago. Commitments that were made to ensure a more just system that better meets the needs and upholds the rights of those affected by crises around the world, including women, girls and gender-diverse persons.
Commitment makers met against a backdrop of multiplying crises and deepening inequality - a backdrop of genocide, occupation, armed conflicts, climate disaster, economic instability, attacks on gender equality and women and girls’ rights, and shrinking civic space. They met at a time when the humanitarian system is failing, in which the impacts of major donors’ aid slashes are becoming more and more starkly visible. The collapse of safe spaces and services for women and girls amidst pandemic levels of sexual and Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is catastrophic in crisis-affected contexts. From Sudan, where most emergency obstetric and newborn care facilities are non-functional due to funding gaps, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where over half of GBV service points have shut down, and Haiti, where women and girls face severe restrictions in accessing essential protection and reproductive health services.
The mainstream humanitarian system and the donors who fund it - who have committed not only to maintain it but to strengthen it - have failed women, girls and gender-diverse people in crisis-affected contexts everywhere.
And yet across the world, there is silence, which grows heavier by the day. Lives are being lost, injustice is blatant; but still, the women, girls, gender-diverse persons and other vulnerable groups who, with children, face the worst consequences of crisis together keep showing up - feeding, healing, rebuilding, and resisting. They show up as organisations, they show up as movements. And behind them are families, communities and people who are essential in building a world that is free of violence and instability. A world that thrives for everyone.
In Gaza, Sudan, Afghanistan, DRC, Myanmar, Haiti, Syria, Venezuela, the Pacific and beyond, Women’s Rights Organisations (WROs) and Women-led Organisations are saving lives. They are reimagining what humanitarian response looks like when it is rooted in care, justice, and survival. But as donors cut funding, they are forced to choose between paying staff or keeping a safe house open, between distributing food or medicine. These are not efficiency measures. These are acts of silencing, of systemic injustice.
A feminist record of truth
The Feminist Humanitarian Network’s new report lays bare what many have been saying for months: funding cuts are not random. They are political choices made in rooms far removed from the women, girls and gender-diverse persons they impact.
Our research, built from a survey and conversations across our movement, captures the voices of feminist organisations and WLOs/WROs across 50+ countries, revealing a painful pattern. It gathers firsthand testimony from organisations led by women living with disabilities, refugee women, Indigenous women, young feminists, and LGBTQI+ activists, all responding from the frontlines of crises.
Many said there are no alternative funds to turn to, even as crises intensify and the gendered impacts of climate change and conflicts worsen. They shared about the reality of losing staff, institutional knowledge, and hard-won progress; organisations led by women with disabilities warned of deepened isolation, and young feminists spoke of suppressed voices and broken intergenerational renewal. Across the board, feminists and WLOs/WROs demand recognition that defunding feminist response is not neutral and that it entrenches inequality. They call for quality, flexible, long-term, care-rooted funding that values their unique role in humanitarian response and in resisting injustice.
The research uncovers what dependency by design looks like: a system that celebrates women’s leadership in speeches but abandons it in budgets, and in the spaces where decisions are made. The research evidences how most organisations already faced resource scarcity before the sudden cuts of 2025 and how, now that hardship has been compounded, women’s organisations are being pushed further out - excluded from funding, from power, from decision-making. Yet they remain the first to respond when a crisis strikes.
““A BUDGET DECISION IN EUROPE CAN DECIDE WHETHER WOMEN IN MY COMMUNITY EAT, WHETHER OUR CLINIC STAYS OPEN, WHETHER OUR DAUGHTERS ARE SAFE. THAT IS COLONIAL POWER DRESSED UP AS AID. THIS IS HOW COLONIAL POWER STILL MOVES - QUIETLY, BUT WITH LIFE AND DEATH CONSEQUENCES.”
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The Grand Bargain and the grand betrayal
For nearly a decade, the Grand Bargain has promised to localise aid, shift power, and make funding more inclusive. Yet localisation remains elusive, direct funding to local organisations is still far below targets, while local organisations remain under-resourced and unheard. Feminists, WLOs and WROs continue to receive crumbs, while intermediaries multiply and bureaucracy deepens. The humanitarian system says it wants change, but only if the northern governments can stay in charge of it.
As Grand Bargain signatories gathered again in Geneva this year, the FHN, as a signatory, was present. We ask: How many more reports, commitments, and consultations will it take before women’s participation and leadership are recognised as the very heart of effective response? Yet we know promises are not progress. Until feminist leadership and women’s rights organisations are properly funded and centred in decision-making, the system will remain broken, still responding to symptoms instead of transforming root causes.
The fact that signatories' self-reported data on funding to WLOs in 2024 was not presented at the meeting says enough. Gender, the role and funding to WLOs/WROs simply continue to be sidelined.
The FHN’s report is both evidence and a roadmap. Evidence showing how deeply unjust the current system is, how it impacts marginalised groups, and a roadmap towards one where feminist leadership is not an exception but the norm.
Because when women, girls and gender-diverse persons lead, communities don’t just survive, they transform. And in a world that feels like it’s burning, that kind of leadership isn’t optional; it’s the only way forward.
What must change, our demands:
Fund feminist work as strategy, not charity. Our movements are not side projects; they are survival plans for humanity.
Trust women to lead. WLOs /WROs do not need permission to save our own communities.
End dependency by design. Power must flow to where the pain and possibility already live, at the frontlines.
Turn promises into practice. The entire humanitarian system, including donors, governments, UN agencies, and International Non-Governmental Organisations, must deliver on what has been pledged: shifting and sharing power, equity, not only efficiency.
This is a moment to choose
The humanitarian system stands at a crossroads - one path continues the cycle of control, conditionality and dependency; the other chooses to listen, learn, trust and let go.
The FHN’s report is holding up a mirror to a system that ignores its cracks and the damage this causes to the communities it serves.
Every cut, every silenced voice, every closed safe house tells us what is at stake. And yet, feminist organisers are still building, still dreaming, still fighting for a world where justice guides every choice.
What we invite you to do
Read the report. Understand the human cost of funding decisions made far from the crisis zones.
Share the report. Amplify the voices of feminist leaders and WROs who refuse to be invisible.
Use the report. Shape your advocacy, funding strategy, and decision-making in a system that must change.
We demand the humanitarian system we need, where power, resources and decision-making no longer flow away from those who are leading the response, but to them.
This report is a rallying cry. A record of loss, courage, strategy, and the refusal to disappear.