11 August 2025
For years, the world has been witnessing radical transformations in the humanitarian aid system. These transformations are reflected in a rapid decline in the amount of humanitarian and development aids and funding allocated to countries classified as developing. This includes all fields, including food, health, education programs, knowledge production, and other sectors. Impact is direct on the rights of children, parents, and caregivers in all their forms.

During the last two years, donor countries led by the United States and several European countries have cut aid to record levels. This comes as the conflicts, massacres, displacement, starvation, political instability, and climate change have reached their highest levels in decades. The Arab region has a significant share of these multifaceted crises, from Gaza Strip and the occupied West Bank to Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and others.

Humanitarian and development aids had already been scarce and disproportionate to the needs level of the segments of these states, especially young children. With the increase in the multitude and scale of crises, donor countries have been balancing their humanitarian expenditures on one hand and their military and defense budgets on the other.

As usual, the balance tilted toward increasing military and defense budgets to an unprecedented level not seen in decades at the expense of humanitarian allocations. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, global military expenditure increased by 37% between 2015 and 2024.

This comes at a time when development experts agree that the international order is not moving in a direction leading to a future where the world will be less reliant on humanitarian and development assistance and necessary funding for vulnerable groups. This raises questions about relying on alternative financing mechanisms, developing policies, and establishing institutions to compensate for the shortfall in international funding. To this end, we can discuss, for example, strengthening local financing and the role of local governments, municipalities, and local organizations, instead of funding through international intermediaries. We can also consider community-based financing, such as community initiatives and solidarity funds based on domestic support, in addition to decentralized multi-channel humanitarian financing aiming at transferring financial authority from central international bodies to multiple local entities.

The field of early childhood development (ECD), in particular, suffers from a severe funding shortage, at a time when one child out of 11 globally needs humanitarian assistance. The reduction directly and indirectly affects the main international organizations concerned with children, such as UNICEF, UNRWA, Save the Children, the World Food Program, the International Organization for Migration, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Despite the overall dire situation, local organizations and institutions are the most affected by funding and aid cuts, especially in Arab countries.

During the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, ESCWA tackled “systemic inequalities in the global financial architecture that have long constrained sustainable development in the Arab region”. This issue represents the core of the problem facing Arab organizations, particularly those working in ECD. According to ESCWA, FFD4 provided an opportunity to address financing disparities including a “reform of an outdated international financial architecture that has deepened financing gaps” and severely affected the Arab region.

Indicators of the obsolescence of this system include:

• Extreme centralization of decision-making and resource distribution, with overwhelming bureaucracy and imposed complex technical and administrative requirements beyond the capacity of many local organizations
• Severe weakness in direct funding to local entities despite the increasing calls for localizing aid in recent years and thus depriving local organizations of a prominent role in real leadership
• Funding focused on specific crises with double standards
• Using funding as a tool for political pressure in many cases.

The most prominent features of funding cuts and their impact on EC sector

The recent shift in aids and funding frameworks has left a dramatic impact on the ECD sector, particularly on local organizations in Arab countries. Given that the Arab Network for Early Childhood (ANECD) is an Arab organization working in partnership with international, regional, and local organizations within this sector, we find ourselves concerned with shedding light on the background to funding cuts and their impact, whether directly on young children and their care givers, or on their intermediaries being the organizations involved in the EC sector.

1. Reducing funding allocated to combating malnutrition in children under the age of five, which leads to:
   • Denying treatment to 2.3 million children in low and middle income countries, resulting in high child mortality rates, with an estimate of 369,000 additional deaths annually, according to a coalition of nutrition and food systems experts.
   • Reversing decades of progress in reducing child and maternal malnutrition.
   • Long-term repercussions, including delayed physical and cognitive development for malnourished children.
   • High economic costs resulting from human capital loss and increased healthcare costs, and thus decades of decline in public health and development indicators.
   • Affecting millions of children in Arab countries causing high mortality rates, particularly with the widespread starvation and deliberate decrease in food supplies in Gaza and Sudan, in addition to high malnutrition rates in Somalia, Yemen, Lebanon, and South Sudan.
2. Reducing funding for health sectors and life-saving global health projects, leading to:
   • Putting global immunization efforts at growing risk with increases of preventable diseases outbreak and the number of children missing routine vaccinations in recent years, particularly in middle and low income countries, as WHO, UNICEF, and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization warned.
   • Affecting displaced communities, especially children, and depriving approximately 12.8 million forcibly displaced people including 6.3 million children of life-saving health interventions during 2025 according to UNHCR.
   • Depriving hundreds of thousands of pregnant women of access to prenatal care, which increases rates of miscarriages, premature births, and birth defects.
3. Decrease of aids allocated to pre-school education:
   • The funding proportion for EC education was falling even before the US abandoned its programs and global bodies shrank their spending.
   • According to some reports, pre-school education aids tend to be concentrated in the hands of a few donors. Among these few donors is UNICEF which also reduced its spending allocations. Given that UNICEF is an organization dedicated to children, this decrease is a cause for concern.
   • According to a report by researchers at the University of Cambridge for the charity “Their world”, aid allocated to the education sector is heavily skewed towards higher education at the expense of pre-school education, generating an imbalance and a defect in the child’s educational growth.
   • The greatest impact of these reductions will be in the countries that are most in need, especially those experiencing ongoing or current conflicts, such as Gaza, Sudan, and Syria.
4. Decrease of funding for knowledge production:

Despite the global progress achieved in knowledge production related to ECD over the past decade, Arab countries still lack sufficient production. ANECD focuses on bridging this gap, by establishing, for example, the “Arab Working Group for Early Childhood Research” and the “Strategic Studies Group” in the Arab countries.

Impact:

• Reducing the volume and quality of knowledge production within ECD, especially in local contexts
• Difficulty to conduct field research and decline in the issuance of periodic reports or policy papers based on evidence and accurate data.
• Weak capacity to document and accumulate local knowledge and difficulty to build an Arab knowledge base at the level of production within this sector
• Impeding national research capacity building due to a lack of incentives, especially among young people interested in early childhood and the withdrawal of local researchers in favor of more stable employment opportunities
• Limiting the ability of Arab organizations to establish regional and global research partnerships, leading in turn to weak Arab presence on international knowledge platforms
• Undermining initiatives similar to the “Arab Research Group” established by ANECD.

Accordingly, ANECD calls for the following:

• To unify the efforts of EC organizations, regionally and globally, in order to build on the outcomes of conferences dedicated to discussing aids and funding cuts.
• To focus attention on organizations operating in Arab countries experiencing the highest levels of multidimensional crises and to avoid double standards.
• To focus research efforts on the issue of aids and funding cuts and their impact on ECD.
• To launch advocacy campaigns around the theme of the possibility of finding alternative funding to compensate for the shortfall in international funding in Arabic countries.
• To consider alternative funding sources including community initiatives, solidarity funds, governments, local organizations, and regional cooperation between institutions involved in the early childhood sector, among others, provided this is part of an integrated policy
• To note that a reduction of this magnitude of funding and aids to EC programs will not only lead to an increase in the number of children at risk of death, but will also undo years of hard work established by hundreds of organizations and stakeholders.

In order to support our children, let us act now before it’s too late!

Translated by: Rania Sahili