Africa

A child being screened for malnutrition as part of Action Against Hunger’s work in Isiolo County, Kenya. — February 5, 2025. Credit: Abel Gichuru for Action Against Hunger

By Michelle Brown
NEW YORK, Sep 22 2025 (IPS)

As world leaders convene in New York, September 22-30, for the 80th session of the UN General Assembly, they will confront a humanitarian sector in crisis. With only 9% of the $47 billion requested for global humanitarian needs currently funded, the sector faces what UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher calls “a crisis of morale and legitimacy” alongside devastating funding cuts. So where do we go from here?

The UN’s Humanitarian Reset, launched this past March, represents the most ambitious attempt in decades to transform how we deliver aid. Rather than viewing this as just another round of reform, we must see it as an opportunity to build something fundamentally better: a system that is locally-led, globally supported, and dramatically more efficient.

The Crisis Driving Change

The scale of today’s humanitarian challenge is daunting. Humanitarian needs continue to increase while funding dwindles, forcing impossible ethical choices about which kinds of programs to prioritize and which communities to serve.

Recent cuts to US foreign aid have accelerated this crisis, leaving organizations scrambling to maintain essential services while thousands of humanitarian workers face layoffs.

Critics have claimed that we are a wasteful, divided bureaucracy. Our response must be to demonstrate that we are efficient, united, independent, and saving lives. If this moment of constraint is forcing our sector to confront uncomfortable truths, it also may unleash us to more fully deliver on our promise.

Reimagining Roles for Maximum Impact

The reset’s core insight is that each actor in the humanitarian ecosystem has unique strengths. Rather than competing for the same roles, we should optimize for what each does best.

• UN agencies excel at diplomacy, coordination, and norm-setting. Their relationships with national authorities and convening power are irreplaceable. But direct implementation often isn’t their strength, and their structures can be prohibitively expensive with high overhead costs and complex security requirements.

• International NGOs bring technical expertise, can access hard-to-reach areas, and maintain principled independence. They can bridge global knowledge with local realities, strengthen national systems, and operate in contexts where civic space is restricted.

• Local and national organizations are the frontline responders with deep community knowledge and long-term presence. They understand cultural dynamics, can negotiate access more effectively, and provide the foundation for sustainable systems.
Communities in access-constrained areas have built schools through diaspora funding, negotiated their own security arrangements, and created supply chains that reach areas many international organizations cannot.

This clarification of roles should drive funding decisions.

If the role of UN agencies is focused on norm and standard-defining, coordination, and pass-through, more resources will be available for international, national, and local actors to drive implementation. The goal isn’t to bypass the UN, but to optimize the entire system. Fund UN agencies for diplomatic engagement and coordination. Fund international NGOs for implementation and technical assistance. Fund local organizations for community engagement and sustainable service delivery.

Cash, Data, and Dignity

Three innovations deserve acceleration regardless of funding levels.

Cash-based programming, particularly multi-purpose transfers, exemplifies the reset’s principles. It’s cost-effective, context-sensitive, and upholds recipient dignity while promoting local ownership. We should shift towards cash-transfer programming where possible.

Similarly, better data sharing and early warning systems can dramatically improve targeting and coordination. Donors should continue to fund a more harmonized data collection and data sharing system for better diagnosis, targeting and coordination of needs, reducing duplication while improving effectiveness.

Critically, as the system streamlines, we cannot lose sight of how central protection must be to all of our work. Most humanitarian crises are protection crises, even if they aren’t acknowledged as such. Gender-based violence services, child protection, and civilian safety aren’t add-ons to humanitarian response—they’re foundations that enable all other interventions to succeed.

The Path Forward

The humanitarian reset isn’t about doing less with less; it’s about doing differently with what we have. It’s about moving from a system driven by the money we can raise to one based on greatest need, even more rooted in and responsive to the communities we serve.

As member states discuss UN80 reforms during this General Assembly session, they must resist the temptation to simply cut programs. Instead, they should invest in the transformation needed to make humanitarian aid more efficient and effective. Member states attending UNGA 80 must champion a humanitarian system that measures success not by institutional survival, but by lives saved and communities empowered.

This means supporting innovative funding mechanisms, investing in local capacity, and having the courage to redistribute power from global headquarters to frontline communities. Fundamentally, radical reform requires those with power to give it away.

The choice facing world leaders in New York is clear: continue with a system that struggles to meet growing needs, or embrace a reset that puts communities at the center and optimizes every actor’s unique contribution.

The humanitarian sector’s breaking point can become its transformation moment, but only if we have the courage to truly reset how we work.

Michelle Brown is Associate Director of Advocacy, Action Against Hunger

IPS UN Bureau

 

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Charlie Weimers with EU flag and the Sweden Democrat’s party symbol, a bluebell.

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Sep 19 2025 (IPS)

On September 11, Charlie Weimers, a Swedish Member of the European Parliament and active within the European Conservatives and Reformists Group, rose up during a Parliamentary session and asked for a minute of silence to honour the memory of Charlie Kirk, who the day before had been shot and killed during a political meeting at the Utah Valley University in the U.S.

“Madam President, dear colleagues, the murder of political activist Charlie Kirk, a husband, loving father and patriot has shocked the world. We must strongly condemn political violence and rhetoric that incites violence. Will you stand with me in reflection and prayer in his honour, and I yield the rest of my time for a moment of silence.”

Charlie Weimers began his political career as a member of the Swedish Chrisitan Democrat Party, but later switched to the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist, right-wing populist party, which in spite of efforts to tune it down finds its roots in Neo-Nazi fringe organizations. It is now Sweden’s second largest political party with more than 20 percent of the electorate behind it.

There is nothing wrong in condemning murder political violence and defend freedom of speech, but this cannot hinder us from scrutinizing who is canonized as a victim of radical aggression. Charlie Kirk was 33 years old when he was murdered, leaving a wife and two small children behind. He had admitted that when he in 2012 started Turning Point USA, which eventually would become a rich and powerful organization, he had “no money, no connections and no idea of what I was doing.” At that time, Kirk had dropped out of college and been rejected by The U.S. West Point Military Academy. Nevertheless, he had rhetorical gifts for countering progressive ideas, being sensitive about cultural tensions, and endowed with an aptitude for making provocative declarations that resonated with frustrated college audiences, who followed and agreed with his web postings. Kirk’s frequent college rallies eventually attracted tens of thousands of young voters, as well as the attention and financial support of conservative leaders. President Trump was not wrong when he declared that:

The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie.

After his death Kirk has been praised for showing up at campuses where he talked with anyone who would approach him. Conservative journalists have declared him to be one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. Kirk’s message was readily embraced by youngsters who accepted his view that Democrats had spent hundreds of billions of dollars on illegal immigrants and foreign nations, while the young “lost generation” of the U.S. had to pinch their pennies, but would not be able to own a home, never marry, and even be forced to work until they died, abused and childless. However, he also gave them hope, telling these unfortunate youngsters that they did not have to stay poor and accept being worse off than their parents. They just had to avoid supporting corrupt political leaders, who were lying to them only to take advantage of their votes. Kirk assured his young audience that it is an undeniable fact that cultural identity is disappearing, while sexual anarchy, crime and decadence reign unabated, private property is a thing of the past, and a ruling “liberal” class controls everything. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, was probably right when she said that Kirk had inspired millions of young people “to get involved in politics and fight for our nation’s conservative values.”

Kirk allied his Turning Point USA not to any poor radical fringe groups, but to conservative, wealthy donors and influencers. He preached a “Christian Message” well adapted to several members of such groups, declaring that Turning Point USA was dedicated to “recruiting pastors and other church leaders to be active in local and national political issues.”

Kirk fervently defended the 2nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, i.e. “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed “, declaring that it was worth “a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can keep a Second Amendment which protect our other God-given rights”.

However, Kirk was not happy about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed “discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin in employment, education, and public accommodations.” He stated that the Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake” and declared that if the majority of Americans were asked if they respected the Civil Rights Act the answer would have been a “no”. Adding the caveat that “I could be wrong, but I think I’m right.”

Undoubtedly, there was a racist ingredient in Kirk’s ideology. He did for example state that the concept of white privilege was a myth and a “racist lie”. In October 2021, he launched an Exposing Critical Racism Tour to numerous campuses and other institutions, to “combat racist theories”, by which he meant the propagation of an understanding of the relationships between social conceptions of race and ethnicity, social and political laws and mass media, all of which Kirk considered to be propaganda and an unfounded brainchild of liberal Democrats. He blamed the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programmes for threatening U.S. competitiveness and security, even claiming that upon sitting in a plane and realising that the pilot was “Black”, he could not help thinking “’Hey, I hope he’s qualified”.

Like most populist, “patriotic”, European right-wing political parties, not the least the Sweden Democrats, though they nowadays try to hide it more carefully than before, Kirk endorsed the so-called “great replacement theory”. This way of thinking assumes that powerful, nefarious actors, for some obscure reason, are trying to replace an upright indigenous, generally white-skinned population with immigrants of “doubtful” origin. Kirk did not even hesitate to state that Democrats supposedly wanted to make the U.S. “less white”.

Kirk also argued that humans have no significant effect on global climate change and joined antivax activists by, among other statements, calling the mandatory requirements for students to get the COVID-19 vaccine “medical apartheid”. Kirk was outspoken when it came to claim that Trump’s loss in the president elections of 2022 was due to fraud, supported the “stop the steal” movement and denied that the violent attacks on the Capitol were an insurrection.

Opposing political violence and supporting free speech does not mean that you have to sanctify a victim like Charlie Kirik, who after all was a racist and an incendiary agitator against underprivileged groups, as well as he degraded scientists who warned against climate change and vaccine denial. It is not defensible that such a voice, no matter how despicable it might be, is silenced by violence and murder. However, we cannot refrain from pointing out the great harm the kind of agitation Kirk devoted himself to can cause. As an educator, I have often been forced to experience how children suffer from racism and bigotry preached and condoned by influencers like Charlie Kirk. Accordingly, to sanctify such persons and tolerate their prejudiced ideology is hurtful and dangerous.

Furthermore, let us not be fooled by deceitful propaganda trying to convince us that Charlie Kirk’s so called “debates” were neither aggressive, nor mendacious. They were brutally provocative; opponents were shouted down, or belittled. The rhetoric was hateful, contempt was poured out over women, Black people, immigrants and Muslims, queer and trans people. Liberals were branded as enemies, science demeaned. And, yes – Charlie Kirk turned to young people, who felt frustrated, marginalized and despised, telling them that he wanted to give them hope and a will to fight injustice. But at what price? Based on what truth? Incitement to violence and contempt for humanity might be safeguarded in the name of free speech, but it should never be accepted and defended. It must be attacked through an unconstrained press based on facts, a well-founded science, and an unfaltering respect for human rights.

IPS UN Bureau

 

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