On 10 July 2026, UN Women published Beyond the Breaking Point: The Continuing Impact of Funding Cuts on Women’s Organisations in Humanitarian Settings, a follow-up to its 2025 study At a Breaking Point. Where the earlier report captured the shock of sudden funding withdrawal, this one documents something more troubling: that shock has become a permanent operating condition, and its consequences are compounding rather than easing.
The findings are drawn from a survey of 855 predominantly national and local women-led and women’s rights organisations across 52 countries and contexts, complemented by 20 in-depth interviews with civil society leaders and women receiving support. As an organisation working at the intersection of women’s rights, humanitarian response and peace research, AFRIW believes this report deserves close attention — not only for what it documents, but for what it implies about the direction of the humanitarian system as a whole.
A widening gap between need and capacity
The report’s central finding is a scissors effect: needs are rising while capacity to meet them is collapsing. 84% of organisations surveyed report that the number of women and girls requiring support has increased since January 2025; 88% say their organisational capacity now falls below current levels of need. The result is not abstract. Nearly 6 in 10 organisations report reaching fewer women and girls than before the funding reductions began, and the report estimates that close to one million women and girls who previously received support are no longer being reached.
The services most frequently cut are not marginal programming. They are livelihoods and economic empowerment support (72%), safe spaces and women’s centres (62%), and gender-based violence case management and referral pathways (61%) — precisely the services that determine whether a woman can leave an abusive situation, whether a survivor of violence receives care, or whether a family facing economic collapse has any alternative to harmful coping strategies.
Protection risks are rising as protective systems disappear
Perhaps the most alarming pattern in the report is the simultaneous rise in protection risks and reduction in protective services. 92% of respondents observe increasing economic vulnerability among the women and girls they serve; 88% observe worsening mental health distress; 86% observe increases in gender-based violence; 82% report rising school dropout among girls. 72% report increases in early and forced marriage, and 61% report increases in survival or transactional sex.
These are not independent trends. They describe a single, coherent picture: as GBV case management, safe spaces, and protection outreach are withdrawn, the very risks those services exist to prevent are intensifying. UN Women’s press materials accompanying the report note that conflict-related sexual violence reportedly doubled in 2025 — precisely as the systems built to respond to it were being dismantled.
The human cost behind the organisations
Beyond the statistics, the report is candid about what is sustaining service delivery in the interim: the personal sacrifice of women staff, most of whom are themselves members of crisis-affected communities. 65% of organisations report staff working unpaid or volunteering extensive additional time to keep services running. 77% have lost staff altogether. Nearly half report burnout and salary reductions among those who remain. The report’s case studies — from Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and elsewhere — describe organisational leaders borrowing money from relatives, staff travelling by public transport with sensitive case files because vehicles can no longer be maintained, and survivors turned away from shelters that can no longer feed the families they house.
This is not resilience in any sustainable sense. It is the absorption of systemic funding failure by individual women, at direct cost to their own health, security and livelihoods — a cost the humanitarian financing system has, in effect, been permitted to externalise onto the very organisations it claims to support.
A structural, not a temporary, problem
The report is explicit that this is not simply a matter of insufficient volume of funding, but of how that funding is structured and distributed. 89% of organisations call for flexible, multi-year core funding; 86% call for greater direct access to donors; two-thirds call for fewer layers of intermediary organisations between donors and the local actors actually delivering services. Yet the data on localisation commitments is stark: a decade after the Grand Bargain set a target of channelling 25% of humanitarian funding directly to local and national actors, direct funding reached just 4.3% in 2025, with combined direct and indirect funding to these actors actually falling between 2024 and 2025. 43% of respondents identify a persistent donor preference for larger international organisations over local and national actors as a significant barrier.
This matters for a straightforward reason: women-led and women’s rights organisations are frequently the only actors with the trust, proximity and long-term relationships needed to reach women and girls in remote, conflict-affected, and displacement settings that larger international actors cannot access. When these organisations lose capacity or close, the loss is not simply of a service provider — it is of institutional memory, community trust and specialised expertise built over years or decades, which cannot be quickly rebuilt even if funding eventually recovers.
Why this matters to AFRIW’s work
The findings reinforce what frontline organisations have long argued: that locally led, women-led humanitarian response is not a supplementary or optional layer of the international system, but foundational infrastructure for reaching the most excluded, and that infrastructure is currently being allowed to erode.
The report’s recommendations: protecting funding for essential services, preventing irreversible organisational and workforce loss, reforming financing systems toward direct and predictable support, and recognising women-led organisations as essential humanitarian infrastructure rather than peripheral implementing partners align closely with the structural changes AFRIW continues to advocate for in its own work with donors, UN mechanisms, and civil society partners.
A call to action
Beyond the Breaking Point does not present new demands. As the report itself notes, it presents systematic evidence for demands that women’s organisations and movements have raised for years. What it adds is the scale and urgency of the cost of continued inaction — measured now in closed shelters, turned-away survivors, and nearly a million women and girls who have lost access to support that once existed for them.
AFRIW will continue to follow and amplify this evidence in our own advocacy, and we encourage partners, donors and fellow civil society organisations to read the full report and consider what role they can play in reversing this trajectory before more of these organisations — and the women and girls who depend on them — reach their own breaking point.
The full report, “Beyond the Breaking Point: The Continuing Impact of Funding Cuts on Women’s Organizations in Humanitarian Settings” is available from UN Women’s Humanitarian Section, Geneva, July 2026.