Jeremy Konyndyk Remarks at UN ECOSOC HAS Financing Session

Refugees International President Jeremy Konyndyk delivered the following remarks at the 2025 ECOSOC Humanitarian Affairs Segment (HAS) financing session in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 19.

Thank you Chair, thank you excellencies, colleagues, and fellow humanitarians. It really is a privilege to address this group today.

As my colleagues here today have said: we are at a very perilous point. John, I think your term of the “brutal paradox” of shrinking budgets in the face of rising needs perfectly captures where we are. Global humanitarian need is at historically high levels and yet we are facing an apparent reality that the decades-long global political consensus around the importance of investments in humanitarian aid appears to be collapsing. 

As Tom Fletcher reminded us yesterday, what the humanitarian system is asking for here is merely one percent of what the world spends on defense budgets. And if we cannot muster that to save the lives of the people affected by those conflicts, and the other crises in the world, that really is a profound indictment of where we are.

But that is the reality we face. And so that leaves the humanitarian sector with no choice but to DO less, WITH less. And so how we choose to prioritize, and what we choose to reimagine, really is a matter of life and death for the people that we serve.

So I want to leave you with three big messages today, all of which are interrelated and mutually reinforcing:

• The first is that we must accelerate localization and locally-led financing.

• Second, in order to enable that, we need to fundamentally rewire and rethink the humanitarian financial architecture: particularly how we envision the role of pool funding, and the role of the traditional UN agencies as pass-through intermediaries for donor funding.

• And third, to achieve any of this will take a level of focus and political will amongst member states and donor institutions that goes beyond what we’re seeing at the moment.

So to dive in on each of those:

The first half of this year has been absolutely brutal on the humanitarian sector. Humanitarians have had to make devastating cuts to life saving response operations. As we’ve heard from Ugo and John and Lisa, the “hyper prioritization” so far has really been about how the system – as it exists today – prioritizes in the immediate term to save as many lives as possible. But that cannot be where we stop. We have to look forward now with a pivot from cost cutting towards restructuring and optimizing the system – taking a hard and unsentimental look at how best to do that, unrestrained by the financial models that exist today.

This is a “never waste a crisis” moment for the humanitarian sector. We have to live within a reality that, for the foreseeable future, we will have something on the order of one-third to one-half less funding to deal with than we have traditionally had. That is not just one donor, that is many donors, stepping back from the support they have traditionally given. 

In this new world of austerity, FIRST we must genuinely commit to localization. I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I have been hearing commitments to localization for all of that 25 years. For a decade certainly – I was part of the grand bargain process 10 years ago – we have made these commitments many times. But the reality is we have not lived up to that. The share of humanitarian financing that goes directly to local and national actors has barely increased (and in some instances decreased) since the grand bargain. So we need to finally tackle that in a serious way.

We know the ethical case, we know the practical case. The case is made for doing more and shifting more to local leadership. But we need to find ways to do that. And we have to state clearly the reality that that will mean large international institutions in some cases stepping back, and doing less, and getting smaller. And that is a hard and difficult thing to do, especially in the present moment. But it is hard to see how we follow through on the commitments to localization without also doing that, in a managed and thoughtful and intentional way.

And that leads to my SECOND point, which is the imperative of now rewiring the financial architecture of humanitarian response. Over the last 20 years there has been very very little change to donor behavior and donor practice. The share of humanitarian funding that went to major institutions in the sector and the division of labor between those same institutions is about the same now, at a thirty-five billion dollar system in recent years, that it was 20-25 years ago with a five billion dollar system. So we need to take a hard look at that. 

I do very much agree with the push towards pooled funding. I think we must recognize that while we have many official pool funds, we also in effect have unofficial pooled funds that are affiliated with many large NGOs and large multilateral agencies, and that makes for a very crowded space. There is a lot of room for streamlining and rationalizing that architecture.

We also have to do that streamlining with great care in a period of extreme austerity. We need each part of the system to play to its comparative advantage. In particular for UN agencies – which are facing massive cuts right now – we must take care that as they make those cuts they continue to be able to uphold their mandates to provide the normative leadership and advocacy that only they can do; and to do things like managing global logistics and supply chains that only they are well placed to do.

But – we also need to recognize that passing through funding for frontline delivery is not always a great comparative advantage for a UN agency. In many cases pooled funds may be a better model. Pooled funding mechanisms like the country-based pooled funds have been a really strong proof of concept for that. 

We should also explore more ambitious models. If we look at the global health sector, models like Gavi and the Global Fund for HIV, TB, and Malaria have been highly effective, highly efficient models for pooling funding at a global level and allocating it efficiently and effectively at a country level. There is no equivalent to that sort of a model in the humanitarian system right now. We should think hard about how we might borrow some of those lessons in humanitarian action. 

Finally on that point, we need to finally unlock truly unified multi-purpose humanitarian cash, which is the single most effective and efficient intervention we have. But it is still something where after 10 years of cash work in the humanitarian sector we have not fully cracked the nut – and that is in part a political issue.

And that brings me to the THIRD and final point: political will. We are gathered here as humanitarian leaders and member states, and as the director general of IOM Amy Pope reminded us yesterday, sometimes the obstacle to change is us. We need to let go of the traditional habits, we need to let go of some of the turf battles. There was a strong commitment from the stage to that yesterday, and we are hearing from the agencies and the traditional humanitarian players they are ready and willing to do that. I think that is really important and commendable. 

We also need donors to step up with commitments to funding differently, and to cultivating amongst themselves champions who are willing to invest the time and energy and political commitment to push the system in a different direction; to tackle issues of risk appetite that have needlessly gotten in the way of localization; and, I think it also must be said, to find the political will to reverse some of these debilitating cuts. Because no matter what changes we make, we will not be able to do as much as we could with, frankly, twice the money that we’re like we’d have next year. 

And for member states in general (and this is the final point) we are in divided time politically and it is really important that we not let the political divisions in the larger world get in the way of some of the critically urgent reforms that we face here. So I urge all of you to work together across some of the geopolitical divides in the world to make sure that we can continue a shared global commitment to the effectiveness and impact of the humanitarian system.

Thank you. 

Cover Image: Jeremy Konyndyk delivers remarks at the 2025 ECOSOC Humanitarian Affairs Segment (HAS) financing session in Geneva, Switzerland, on June 19.