The UN Humanitarian Response Plan for Haiti for 2024 remained critically underfunded throughout the year, with only a fraction of the requested hundreds of millions of dollars committed by international donors despite a crisis that UN officials had described as among the most severe in the world. The funding gap left humanitarian organizations unable to reach millions of Haitians with essential food, water, healthcare, and protection services.
The underfunding of the Haiti humanitarian response was part of a broader global pattern in which donor governments’ commitments did not keep pace with humanitarian needs, but the gap for Haiti was particularly stark given the severity of the crisis and the specific international responsibility for some of the conditions producing it. A crisis partly sustained by American weapons, partly produced by international policy failures, and partly enabled by years of inadequate international response was being addressed with resources a fraction of what the situation demanded.
Humanitarian organizations were making agonizing decisions about which communities to serve and which to leave without assistance. Food distributions that should have reached specific numbers of households were being cut as funding ran short. Health program coverage was being reduced. Protection services for survivors of sexual violence were being maintained only at minimal levels.
Advocacy organizations used the funding gap as evidence that international rhetoric about the severity of Haiti’s crisis was not matched by genuine commitment. They pointed out that the same governments expressing alarm about Haiti’s situation in Security Council meetings and press releases were failing to fund the humanitarian response at levels that their own assessments of the crisis demanded. The gap between stated concern and actual resources was, they argued, itself a form of complicity in the suffering that the underfunding perpetuated.