Afghan families recently deported from other countries receive humanitarian assistance from the Afghan Red Crescent Society in Kabul, Afghanistan, 30 September 2026. (Keystone/EPA/Samullah Popal)

⛑️GRAND BARGAIN. In the ten years since donors, UN agencies and NGOs made a deal at the World Humanitarian Summit to deliver aid more efficiently and effectively with increased local involvement, achieving those goals has faced some major challenges, not least the latest funding crisis.

Over the next couple of days, donor countries and aid groups that are part of the Grand Bargain are gathering behind closed doors in Geneva for their annual meeting to review progress and challenges to what was a non-binding plan, before launching a Collective Action Platform for the Grand Bargain, or the group’s latest reform package.

At planning meetings in June, it was agreed that the platform will be leaner and more focused at the local level. It comes a year after the UN’s Humanitarian Reset reform plan, triggered by sharp donor cuts, was announced.

Upheaval. According to this year’s State of the Humanitarian System report, international aid funding fell to an estimated $33.3 billion in 2025, from a peak of $47.5 bn in 2022. USAid’s 55 per cent reduction was the sharpest, while 13 out of the top 20 donors also cut their contributions.

Ongoing humanitarian crises, including conflict – at its highest since World War Two –, displacement and climate impacts, have continued to push up relief needs.

The UN reports that over 250 million people were in need of assistance in 2026.

Reset and pledges. Reflecting its hyperprioritisation of aid – a result of funding cuts – the UN’s aid coordination office, Ocha, recently announced an allocation of $160 million to support 87 m people in 12 countries, down from the assistance it delivered in 2024, which reached 116 m people in 33 countries.

US aid, meanwhile, has been creeping back, selectively, since late 2025. Ireland’s foreign affairs minister recently told European Union development ministers that Trump’s aid cuts had cost the lives of some 700,000 people.

Aid fair. Later this week, aid insiders will converge on Palexpo for a packed programme of panels including on reform, the use of AI in humanitarian contexts, responding to health crises and gender-based violence, as well as lots on funding, including climate finance.

Read more of our coverage on humanitarian aid here

🕊️SUDAN TALKS. On Wednesday, discussions on how to bring peace to Sudan, hosted by Switzerland and the UN, will come to the Palais des Nations, a member of the UN special envoy to Sudan’s team told Geneva journalists ahead of the weekend.

Attendance. Neither the Sudanese government nor the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group, together responsible for the three-year war that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced nearly 13 million, will attend.

Instead, mediators, including delegations from 27 countries, such as the UN Security Council’s five permanent members, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, are set to continue talks to coordinate peace initiatives.

— Paula Dupraz-Dobias

❝Autonomous weapons: what does human control really mean? States meeting in Geneva next month will decide whether to start formal negotiations on regulating lethal autonomous weapons. But without an agreement on what meaningful human control requires in practice, any future treaty risks enshrining a principle open to wide interpretation, writes Gerald Mako, a research affiliate at Cambridge University and a strategic adviser working on AI governance.