Education systems are being weakened by austerity, debt, and privatization by Dr. Maria Ron Balsera Executive Director, Center for Economic and Social Rights   Jan. 2026   As governments mark the International Day of Education on January 24, too many are left behind because of chronic underinvestment.   Education systems are being weakened by austerity, debt, and privatization. This moment demands a clear shift toward public financing that is grounded in rights and accountable to people.   Education is essential for peace, dignity, equality, and participation in public life. Yet across the world, this right is being denied.   Chronic underfunding, deepening inequalities, unsustainable debt, and growing military budgets are pushing education further out of reach for millions of people.   On this International Day of Education, we movements around the world in calling for public financing that meets the scale of the crisis. Governments must not delay. Fulfilling the right to education requires investing public resources where they are most needed, guided by human rights and international cooperation.   The right to education is well established under international law. The 4As framework defines its core components: availability, accessibility, acceptability, and adaptability. States must ensure enough schools and trained teachers, eliminate barriers to access, deliver quality and culturally appropriate education, and adapt to the needs of different learners and communities.   But these commitments cannot be fulfilled without accountability. Transparency, participation, and enforceable remedies are necessary to make the right real. Without them, states avoid consequences when they fail to meet obligations, and communities are denied the power to shape decisions that affect them.   Public education systems are under growing pressure. Governments are cutting spending, even as needs increase. Many countries are locked into cycles of debt and austerity, spending more on interest payments than on health or education.   In 2024, developing countries paid $921 billion in interest on public debt. Over 3 billion people live in countries where debt service exceeds public investment in core social rights.   This crisis is rooted in systemic inequalities. Wealthier countries and institutions have structured global finance in ways that limit public budgets in the Global South. Debt relief is delayed, borrowing costs are unequal, and tax systems remain regressive and porous. In this environment, education is often treated as optional, rather than as a right protected by law.   Militarization is adding to the strain. As conflicts escalate, military budgets are expanding, while social investment is deprioritized.   The promised shift from defense to development, often referred to as a “peace dividend,” has not materialized. On the contrary, schools and teachers are being sidelined in favor of weapons and warfare.   Governments can and must reverse course. A justice-based approach to public finance can strengthen education systems while upholding rights. The 4S framework provides a clear path forward:   Share: Increase the proportion of public budgets dedicated to education. Meeting or exceeding the global benchmark of 15 to 20 percent is a necessary step to fulfill legal obligations.   Size: Expand the overall amount of resources available. This requires reducing debt payments, raising more revenue through progressive taxes, and ending tax loopholes and harmful exemptions that benefit the wealthy. International cooperation is key. A UN-led tax convention would help create fairer global rules and allow countries to mobilize resources for rights.   Sensitivity: Budget decisions must prioritize equity and inclusion. That means focusing on the needs of marginalized learners, including girls, children with disabilities, rural and migrant communities, and others who are too often excluded. Equity must be built into every stage of the budget process.   Scrutiny: Transparent, participatory, and accountable budget systems are essential. People must have access to information, a voice in decisions, and mechanisms to hold institutions to account.   Under pressure to deliver services without increasing public spending, some governments and donors have embraced privatization. But these approaches have repeatedly failed to uphold rights. Low-fee private schools often exclude the poorest students and students with special needs and disabilities.   Public-private partnerships shift risk onto the public while private actors profit. Financialization turns education into an investment product, removing it from public oversight.   These models deepen inequality and weaken public systems. They are promoted by powerful corporate interests, but they are incompatible with the right to education. Governments have a duty to regulate, not retreat.   The right to education cannot be realized through domestic policy alone. Wealthier countries and international institutions shape the rules of the global economy, and they must be held to account. That includes:   Supporting debt relief and restructuring instead of pushing austerity. Ensuring that international financial institutions do not impose conditions that restrict public investment. Contribute adequate, grant-based funds to multilateral education mechanisms like the Global Partnership for Education.   International cooperation is not an act of generosity. It is a legal obligation rooted in the right to development and global human rights law.   Public education is a foundation for dignity, equality, and shared prosperity. It supports gender and climate justice, strengthens democracy, and enables collective action.   Financing it is not a secondary concern. It is a test of whether governments are serious about building fair and sustainable societies.   On this International Day of Education, the demand is clear. Fund education as a right. Fund it publicly. Fund it fairly. And do it now. Visit the related web page
	Devastating funding cuts have left millions of people without aid by UNICEF, UN Office for Humanitarian Affairs   Feb. 2026   UNICEF calls for urgent investment in life-saving services for children to meet urgent needs, by Catherine Russell - UNICEF Executive Director   "The global environment for children remains extraordinarily difficult. Conflict, climate shocks, economic instability and inequality place enormous pressure on children, families and communities.   The humanitarian situation facing children today is among the most severe we have ever seen. More than 200 million children across over 130 countries need humanitarian assistance in 2026.   Last year saw the highest number of verified grave violations against children on record. These violations include horrendous acts such as killings, abductions, and sexual violence. At the same time, famine re-emerged in 2025, when two famines were declared simultaneously - an unprecedented and deeply alarming development. Beyond these formal famine declarations, millions more children suffer from malnutrition and are living one shock away from life-threatening catastrophe.   Yet even as needs grow, we see resources shrink. Abrupt, severe funding cuts are forcing impossible choices across humanitarian operations - which lives do we prioritize as we limit supplies, reduce the frequency of services, and scale back interventions that children depend on to survive.   The global humanitarian funding environment has deteriorated dramatically. Announced and anticipated funding cuts by donor governments are already limiting UNICEF’s ability to reach millions of children in dire need.   Across UNICEF’s nutrition programming alone, a 72 per cent funding gap in 2025 forced cuts in 20 priority countries – reducing planned targets from more than 42 million to over 27 million women and children. In education, a shortfall of US$745 million has left millions more children at risk of losing access to learning, protection and stability.   The current global funding crisis does not reflect a decline in humanitarian need, but rather a growing gap between the scale of suffering and the resources available. Children are paying the price of shrinking humanitarian budgets.   UNICEF is urging national governments, public sector donors and private sector partners to increase their investment in children, prioritising flexible and multi-year funding; support locally led response and national systems; uphold humanitarian principles and the centrality of protection; and remove barriers that impede humanitarian access".   http://www.unicef.org/emergencies/launch-2026-humanitarian-appeal http://www.unicef.org/emergencies http://www.unicef.org/topics/humanitarian-action-and-emergencies   Dec. 2025 (OCHA)   In 2025, humanitarian funding saw its greatest contraction in a decade, with donor cuts causing funding to drop below 2016 levels.   The United States of America—traditionally, the largest humanitarian donor—funded $2.5 billion against the 2025 Global Humanitarian Overview (21 per cent1 of total GHO funding), compared to $11 billion in 2024 (which was 45 per cent of the total).   This came on top of reductions from other donors, including France, Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, and on the back of a reduction in humanitarian aid from 2023 to 2024.   Confronted with this reality, in mid-2025, humanitarians took excruciatingly difficult decisions to hyper-prioritize response for people facing the most life-threatening needs.   This hyper-prioritization led humanitarians to collectively focus their efforts on reaching 114.4 million people out of the 178.7 million total people targeted for 2025, and to urgently appeal for $29.1 billion out of the full $44 billion required.   The dramatic reduction in funding forced humanitarian organizations to severely reduce delivery to people in crisis—shutting down programmes, closing offices and laying off thousands of staff—with devastating consequences.   In Colombia, 13 per cent of partners were forced to suspend or scale down humanitarian operations. In Mali, at least 45 per cent of life-saving programmes implemented by local NGOs were disrupted.   Globally, these funding shortfalls have meant that:   Millions of crisis-affected people around the world did not receive the help they needed. While some form of humanitarian assistance reached nearly 98 million people in 2025, this represented just 65 per cent of people targeted through country-specific plans. This is a stark reduction from 2024, when 123 million people—25 million more than in 2025—received at least one form of assistance.   The contraction of humanitarian action was particularly evident in 21 countries which received less funding and reached fewer people.   In countries like Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Venezuela and Yemen, millions of people in each country did not receive planned assistance.   When people did receive humanitarian assistance and protection, it was often significantly reduced. In the Central African Republic, more than 50 per cent of people who received assistance only received one-third of the expected aid. In Somalia, food security partners reduced transfer values, the duration of assistance and had to cut people assisted by 70 per cent.   Meanwhile, Sudanese refugees arriving in Uganda only received 60 per cent of the standard food ration (worth $8). In Egypt, a monthly cash assistance programme for refugees was reduced both in terms of the number of people reached as well as the transfer value, which decreased by 11 per cent. In Venezuela, people reached with aid saw their food rations cut in half and often given at a lower frequency.   Cuts in food assistance and emergency agriculture are jeopardizing lives.   While acute hunger rose in 2025, humanitarian funding for food assistance, nutrition, and emergency agriculture plummeted, with a 51 per cent projected drop between 2022 and 2025. This would return funding to levels last seen in 2016–2017, despite the prevalence of acute hunger doubling since then. The impact is severe.   Humanitarian actors are forced to hyper-prioritize responses, reducing coverage and sharply cutting rations. Programmes to treat acute malnutrition are being scaled back, leaving millions of children at risk of death.   At the same time, funding shortfalls are eroding the ability to collect and analyse reliable food security and nutrition data, weakening the evidence base for effective response.   At the start of 2025, Food Security Cluster partners identified 190 million people in need out of 295 million facing IPC/CH Phase 3 (Crisis) or above.   Initially, 104 million were targeted. By mid-year, funding shortfalls forced a reduction to 79.8 million, leaving nearly one in four people originally targeted without aid.   Funding cuts may drive 13.7 million people in IPC Phase 3 (Crisis) towards Emergency levels of hunger.   Across Sudan—one of the worst food crises with confirmed famine in El Fasher and Kadugli—only 3.5 million out of 10 million severely and extremely food insecure people are receiving regular monthly food assistance.   In Uganda, only 45 per cent of Sudanese refugees received rations in 2025. In Myanmar, 825,000 people did not receive life-saving emergency food assistance, while in Afghanistan, only around 1 million of the most vulnerable people will receive food assistance during the lean season in 2025, compared to 5.6 million during the same period in 2024.   By mid-2025, only 16 per cent of people targeted with emergency agriculture were reached, compared to 26 per cent by the same time in 2024.   This shortfall means that, looking ahead to 2026, more people will likely require food assistance—at a higher cost than if they had been supported to produce their own food—and many may face worsening acute food insecurity.   Health services for 52.6 million people were shuttered or reduced due to underfunding, significantly increasing the risk of preventable death. The funding cuts affected more than 6,600 health facilities across 22 countries (as of 20 September 2025), a third of which were forced to suspend operations.   In Sudan alone, more than 180 health facilities are no longer supported, affecting almost 2.7 million people’s ability to access health care services.   In Somalia, more than 150 health facilities have closed due to funding cuts, including at least eight hospitals and 40 primary care centres.   In Myanmar, 600,000 people will not receive essential healthcare services, supplies or emergency referral services. In Yemen, no health service for communicable diseases was available in 39 per cent of health facilities monitored by the World Health Organization (WHO), while in Libya, this proportion was as high as 41 per cent.   Communicable disease outbreaks became harder to prevent and contain, including due to cuts to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH).   In South Sudan, partners struggled to control the spread of cholera due to access and underfunding, while in Chad underfunding stalled investments in water systems and sanitation, undermining efforts to contain the disease.   In Syria, WASH partners suspended or decreased their response in more than 350 camps in northeast and northwest Syria, leaving more than 250,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) with limited access to WASH services. Meanwhile, in Yemen, water and sanitation conditions will deteriorate for over 15 million people who are already water insecure. And in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, limited health services combined with reduced water availability, uncollected waste and poor sanitation have increased the risk of disease outbreaks for the Rohingya.   Children faced a heightened risk of severe malnutrition and death as nutrition programmes are cut back.   In Yemen, one of the worst nutrition crises globally, a staggering 70 per cent of the needs for moderate acute malnutrition are unmet, leaving an estimated 450,000 vulnerable children and mothers without critical care each month.   Haiti’s nutrition crisis is at a tipping point: one in three children with acute malnutrition will remain untreated without additional resources, placing over 187,000 children at heightened risk of preventable death.   In Somalia, nutrition services declined by 39 per cent in 2025 compared to 2024, with over 60,500 children with Severe Acute Malnutrition (SAM) missing treatment, alongside 140,000 moderately malnourished children and 17,000 pregnant or lactating women.   In Chad, 240,000 children did not receive planned nutrition assistance, and in Burkina Faso, more than one-third of all nutrition programmes—and thousands of children’s lives—are at risk.   In Nigeria, the scale down of nutrition programmes in July 2025 affected more than 300,000 children. In areas where clinics closed, malnutrition levels deteriorated from “serious” to “critical” in the third quarter of 2025.   Gains in reducing maternal mortality risk immediate reversal, as sexual and reproductive healthcare services are cut. Sixty-two per cent of surveyed partners working on maternal, newborn and child health reported having to downsize their programs, while 37 per cent temporarily suspended activities, and 19 per cent permanently closed initiatives.   Support for midwives in crisis settings has been dramatically scaled back, jeopardizing the health and lives of pregnant women and newborns. In Syria, funding cuts are impacting reproductive and maternal health, with 24 safe spaces and service delivery points, 15 hospitals, 54 health facilities and 26 mobile teams at risk of closure.   Protection programmes, more broadly, were forced to scale down or stop altogether in multiple countries, increasing the risk of exposure to violence and exploitation.   In Nigeria, despite renewed violence, 1.4 million people did not receive protection support. In Afghanistan, protection services for over 3.3 million people, including more than 1.6 million children, could no longer be provided.   In Syria, about 2.5 million children, including those with disabilities, remain exposed to the worst forms of violence and exploitation and will not have access to timely child protection preventive and response services.   In Uganda, loss of experienced child protection staff has weakened survivor-centered care: by September 2025, child protection cases had surged by 37 per cent to 26,245, compared to the same period in 2024.   In Somalia, protection services were halved, affecting 1.7 million people, including 600,000 children. In Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, resource constraints meant lower-risk protection cases were de-prioritized, and limited outreach, legal aid, and psychosocial support placed Rohingya survivors and persons with disabilities at greater risk.   Funding cuts have also affected mine action: 65 per cent of the Syrian population (15.4 million people) will continue to be exposed to the risk of explosive ordnance contamination. In Afghanistan, which has one of the world’s highest explosive ordnance casualty rates, the number of mine action teams has decreased by a third, from 300 teams a month to only 176.   In Yemen, where funding cuts have halted mine clearance programmes, five children were killed in July while playing football, highlighting the risk that unexploded ordnance poses to all people.   Gender-based violence (GBV) response and prevention efforts were reduced or shut down, removing access to vital services for survivors and increasing the risk of harm at a time when GBV is increasing.   One-third of women-rights organizations and civil society organizations working to end violence against women reported programme suspension or closure.   As of 20 November 2025, only 19 per cent of GBV requirements were funded— forcing decisions about which safe spaces stay open and where the last post-rape kits go. The consequences are already visible: over 460,000 people in West and Central Africa have lost access to GBV services. In the Central African Republic, GBV service coverage dropped from 44 per cent to 22 per cent while in Burkina Faso, only 45,000 people received dignity kits (9 per cent of the target). Seventy-two per cent of localities in northern and central Mali lack any GBV service due to funding shortages.   Hundreds of thousands of children’s futures are in jeopardy, as cuts hit education services. In emergencies, schools are more than places of learning: they are safe spaces that provide hope, stability, protection and access to essential services.   In Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, underfunding left over 190,000 Rohingya children without education due to closures of 43 per cent of learning facilities and disrupted teaching material distribution including textbooks. In Afghanistan, around 145,000 children (60 per cent girls) will not be able to access education through community-based interventions, and an additional 130,000 children (67,600 girls) will not be reached with a second round of teaching and learning materials. This comes at a time when more than 2.2 million Afghan girls are banned from attending school beyond primary school.   In Turkiye, underfunding of the Syria refugee response meant that approximately 250,000 refugee children remained out of school, with 32 per cent of families citing financial difficulties as the primary barrier to enrolling and retaining their children in school.   In Uganda, funding cuts forced the layoff of 2,000 teachers, causing the pupil-to-teacher ratio to balloon from 1:77 (2024) to 1:117 (2025)—more than double the national standard of 1:53, with nearly 120 students per classroom.   Overall, if funding cuts materialize as envisaged in 2026, 6 million more children—30 per cent of them in humanitarian settings—risk being out of school by the end of 2026 (increasing from 272 million to 276 million).   Lack of shelter is leaving millions of people exposed to the elements and violence, while fewer management services risk the quality and functioning of displacement sites and camps.   In Myanmar, 1.3 million conflict-affected internally displaced persons (IDPs) and other vulnerable people did not receive shelter due to funding cuts. In Nigeria, this was the case for 631,000 families. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 85 per cent of people targeted for shelter response did not receive assistance. In Chad, 56,000 vulnerable households remained without emergency shelter following the floods.   In Haiti, only 91 IDP sites out of 238 sites (38 per cent) had a site manager, leaving more than 110,000 displaced people without structured management or coordination of essential services. In Somalia, Camp Coordination and Camp Management (CCCM) partners ceased operations in 15 districts, suspending services for 900,000 IDPs.   Cash and voucher assistance (CVA)—including multi-purpose cash—has been drastically reduced in multiple countries. CVA is projected to drop precipitously in 2025, after already decreasing in 2024 as a proportion of humanitarian assistance.   In Somalia, only 273,000 people (29 per cent of the target) received cash assistance. In Sudan, over 250,000 people did not receive cash-based individual protection assistance. In Lebanon, more than 300,000 vulnerable households will remain without critical cash support through 2026 if funding is not received, forcing families to resort to harmful coping mechanisms such as reducing meals, accumulating debt, or engaging in child labour and child marriage.   In the Central African Republic (CAR), the number of people receiving cash and voucher assistance decreased by 76 per cent (or three quarters), from 407, 000 people in mid-2024 to 96,000 people mid-2025.   Services for refugees and migrants have been hit hard. In Lebanon around 1.4 million people risk losing access to primary health care, with essential refugee health services expected to phase out by the end of 2025. In Somalia, only about 5 per cent of the more than 30,000 transit movements recorded since the start of 2025 received assistance.   By the end of September 2025, only 21 per cent of the 493,400 people targeted under the Venezuela Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan (RMRP) had been reached, while protection monitoring confirmed that unmet humanitarian needs are increasingly translating into harmful coping mechanisms, irregular movements, and social tensions in host communities.   Funding cuts also compromised critical enablers that are the backbone of coordinated humanitarian responses.   The United Nations Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) was forced to suspend or reduce flights in countries such as Afghanistan and Nigeria, while other air operations were on the precipice of collapse due to inadequate or delayed funding.   In CAR, warehouses closed and the Logistics Cluster was only able to transport half of the planned emergency airfreight cargo to hard-to-reach communities.   And yet, the funding requested for humanitarian action is extremely modest in comparison to other expenditures and/or profits globally. It amounts to less than one per cent of global military expenditure (which has reached over $2.7 trillion in 2024) or less than half a per cent of the global banking industry’s profits.   With a minor adjustment of these priorities and/or donation of these profits, global humanitarian action could be immediately and fully funded.   http://humanitarianaction.info/document/global-humanitarian-overview-2026/article/under-fire-and-under-pressure-what-happens-when-humanitarian-action-hindered http://humanitarianaction.info/document/global-humanitarian-overview-2026/article/trends-crises-and-needs-world-breaking-point http://humanitarianaction.info/document/global-humanitarian-overview-2026/article/humanitarians-action-delivering-2025-amid-extreme-challenges http://humanitarianaction.info/document/global-humanitarian-overview-2026 http://www.unicef.org/press-releases/unicef-calls-urgent-investment-life-saving-services-children-global-humanitarian http://www.wfp.org/news/wfp-prioritize-feeding-110-million-hungriest-2026-global-hunger-deepens-amidst-uncertain http://www.nrc.no/news/2025/december/2026-millions-in-need-will-not-get-aid-unless-global-solidarity-revived http://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2025/12/11/abrupt-transitions-global-humanitarian-overview-pushes-dangerous-trend http://reliefweb.int/report/world/year-no-other-ngo-statement-launch-new-un-2026-appeal   http://www.msf.org/us-policies-are-reshaping-global-health-and-humanitarian-aid http://www.msf.org/attacks-medical-care-armed-conflict-reach-record-levels http://www.refugeesinternational.org/reports-briefs/a-generational-collapse-tracking-the-toll-of-trumps-humanitarian-aid-cuts/ http://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/child-under-five-could-die-every-forty-seconds-2030-due-us-aid-cuts-oxfam-analysis http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/07/starmer-accused-of-hypocrisy-over-sharp-cuts-to-world-food-programme http://una.org.uk/un-agencies-brief-the-un-appg-on-the-challenges-of-the-global-humanitarian-landscape/ Visit the related web page
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