Three Humanitarian Emergencies Overshadowed in 2026
Humanitarian attention is not distributed according to need.
It is distributed according to what generates headlines, what aligns with donor governments' strategic interests, and what happens to be trending on a given news cycle. That imbalance has a name in the humanitarian sector: neglect. And according to the Norwegian Refugee Council's (NRC) 2026 report — the tenth edition of its annual "world's most neglected displacement crises" index — that imbalance has never been starker.
The NRC's ranking is built on a rigorous, four-part methodology: media coverage (tracked through the Meltwater monitoring platform across Arabic, English, French, and Spanish), humanitarian funding levels (tracked via the UN Financial Tracking Service and the UNHCR Refugee Funding Tracker), international political engagement (scored against ten indicators covering UN Security Council action, diplomatic engagement, and accountability mechanisms), and, new for the tenth edition, the sheer scale of displacement involved. Only countries with more than 200,000 displaced people and a severity rating of 4 or 5 on the INFORM Severity Index qualify for consideration at all.
The result is not a list of the worst humanitarian crises in the world by raw numbers — it is a list of the crises where suffering is most disproportionate to attention. And the gap has been widening for a decade. When NRC published its first neglected crises report in 2016, the crises on that year's list were, on average, 54 percent funded. In the 2026 report, covering the 2025 calendar year, that figure has more than halved to just 25 percent. Total humanitarian funding from OECD donor countries fell 23.1 percent in 2025 alone — the largest single-year contraction on record.
This article examines three of the crises currently sitting at the top of that list — Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Colombia — in detail, with the numbers behind each, because the first step in ending neglect is simply seeing it clearly.
Crisis One: Sudan — The World's Worst Displacement Crisis, By the Numbers
By the end of 2025, Sudan's civil war had passed its one-thousandth day. According to NRC's analysis, nowhere on earth are more people currently suffering, and nowhere is the gap between documented need and actual international response wider. Sudan tops the 2026 neglected crises index — not because the world doesn't know what's happening, but specifically because it does, and has largely failed to act regardless.
The scale of displacement
Sudan's population stands at approximately 46.8 million people. Of those, 30.4 million — nearly two-thirds of the entire country — are classified as being in need of humanitarian assistance. The conflict has displaced 9 million people within Sudan's own borders, while more than 4 million additional Sudanese have fled across borders into Chad, South Sudan, Egypt, Libya, and beyond. Combined, that puts the total number of people displaced from or into the Sudan crisis at 13.3 million — a figure comparable to the entire population of a mid-sized country uprooted by a single conflict.
Many of the countries absorbing this outflow were already managing humanitarian crises of their own before Sudanese refugees began arriving in large numbers, yet they have continued to act as hosts, at a cost the region can increasingly ill afford.
Hunger as a weapon
Almost 29 million people in Sudan faced acute hunger in 2025, with several areas of the country meeting the formal threshold for active famine. In besieged areas — including Zamzam camp, El Fasher, Kadugli, and Dilling, where the Rapid Support Forces and allied groups enforced prolonged sieges cutting civilians off from food, water, and aid — families were documented resorting to boiling leaves to survive, or scavenging discarded cow hide from slaughterhouses. In Kadugli and Dilling specifically, aid workers documented cases of mothers waking to find children who had died of starvation in their sleep overnight.
Mass atrocities that made headlines — and changed nothing
In April 2025, the siege of Zamzam camp escalated into a massacre, killing large numbers of people and forcing hundreds of thousands more to flee. Six months later, in El Fasher, large-scale atrocities were committed: thousands killed, widespread sexual violence documented, and countless people disappeared without a trace. Civilians were targeted both within the city and as they attempted to flee it — there was, in the words of NRC's own reporting, no escape.
Critically, the fall of El Fasher did make international headlines. It is one of the only moments in Sudan's three-year war that briefly broke through into global news coverage. And yet, according to NRC's analysis, that spike in visibility did not translate into a corresponding spike in political engagement, funding, or diplomatic pressure. This is the central, uncomfortable finding of the entire 2026 report: visibility does not equal action.
The funding and access gap
By the end of 2025, Sudan's humanitarian response plan was less than 40 percent funded — meaning that for every $5 humanitarian organizations determined was needed to meet documented needs, only $2 was actually made available. On NRC's 30-point political will index — which scores the existence and effectiveness of international diplomatic engagement, UN Security Council action, and accountability mechanisms — Sudan scored just 6 out of 30, in the "little effect" band.
Delivering aid inside Sudan has become extraordinarily dangerous. In 2025 alone, 92 aid workers were killed, detained, or injured while attempting to reach civilians. Flooding compounded years of conflict damage to transport infrastructure, further slowing an already strained response. As international access shrank, local responders — community volunteers, mutual aid groups, and women-led organizations — became the last remaining lifeline inside blockaded cities that outside agencies simply could not reach, operating under direct threat of detention, torture, and death. And even as their role became more essential, funding cuts forced many of these local groups to halt operations entirely.
Crisis Two: The Democratic Republic of the Congo — Thirty Years of Conflict, Ten Years of Documented Neglect
If Sudan represents neglect despite visibility, the Democratic Republic of the Congo represents something arguably more damning: neglect despite a decade of explicit, repeated documentation. DR Congo is the only country to have appeared in every single edition of NRC's neglected crises report since it began in 2016 — ten consecutive years on a list specifically designed to draw attention to crises the world is ignoring, and ten consecutive years of that attention failing to materialize into a meaningfully different outcome.
A conflict older than a generation
Armed conflict has marked DR Congo continuously since 1996 — three decades. Today, more than 200 armed groups compete for control across the country's east, and for millions of Congolese, displacement, violence, and poverty have simply become the ordinary texture of daily life rather than an emergency exception to it.
DR Congo's population is 117.8 million, making it one of Africa's most populous nations. Of that population, 21.2 million people are currently in need of humanitarian assistance. In 2025 alone, nearly 10 million individual displacement events were recorded — meaning that the same people were frequently forced to flee multiple times within a single year, sometimes three or four separate times, as fighting intensified across North and South Kivu provinces.
When "return" isn't safety
A particularly telling detail in NRC's 2026 findings: as fighting shifted, many displaced families attempted to return home — but return was often unsafe, and simply the only option available given the alternative. Families frequently found their homes damaged or occupied by others, their farms untended, their businesses destroyed, and their livestock stolen. Access to land — the foundation of survival for most rural Congolese households — had often vanished entirely. While most displaced families had owned land before fleeing, only a small fraction retained the legal documentation needed to reclaim it upon return.
In Ituri province, in the country's northeast, clashes between ethnic groups, armed actors, and foreign forces turned entire villages into frontlines. Schools were converted into barracks. Livelihoods were destroyed. Civilians were left with, in NRC's words, no safe place to turn.
The funding collapse
DR Congo's 2025 humanitarian response plan was only 27 percent funded — the lowest level of funding the country has received since 2016, the very first year NRC began tracking it. As a direct consequence, health clinics across the country were forced to close, protection services for vulnerable civilians were scaled back, and food assistance programs were reduced at precisely the moment displacement was reaching record levels.
On NRC's political will index, DR Congo scored just 1 out of 30 — effectively the lowest possible score, reflecting an almost total absence of meaningful international diplomatic engagement relative to the scale of the crisis. Media coverage was similarly rated "negligible." The total number of people displaced from and to the DR Congo crisis stands at 6.1 million.
NRC's Secretary General, Jan Egeland, was blunt in the report's framing of DR Congo's decade on the list: "This is a testament to the world's failure to respond to crises that are not regarded as strategically important for rich countries. Millions of people are being abandoned because we have chosen not to act, not because we cannot."
Crisis Three: Colombia — A Sixty-Year War That Never Quite Ends
Colombia is, in some respects, the most counterintuitive entry on this list. It does not fit the pattern of a poor, low-income country overwhelmed by a single acute emergency. Colombia is a nation of substantial economic wealth and extraordinary biodiversity — and yet nearly a decade after its landmark 2016 peace agreement was signed, more than 9 million people continue to live under the direct influence and control of organized armed groups.
The scale most people don't realize
Colombia's population is 53.1 million, with 9.1 million people currently classified as in need of humanitarian assistance. The country is now home to the second-largest internally displaced population anywhere in the world, with over 7 million people driven from their homes within Colombia's own borders over the course of the conflict. Combined with cross-border displacement, the total figure tied to Colombia's crisis reaches 10.5 million people — the highest raw displacement figure of any country on NRC's 2026 list, Sudan included.
Colombia is also, separately, the world's third-largest refugee-hosting country, sheltering 2.8 million refugees and migrants who have fled neighboring Venezuela's economic and political collapse. Despite that scale of hosting responsibility, Colombia received less than 10 percent of the international funding actually required to support that refugee population in 2025.
Confinement as a weapon of control
One of the most striking findings in NRC's 2026 Colombia chapter concerns a tactic known as confinement, used by armed groups to assert territorial control without necessarily resorting to displacement or open violence. In 2025, more than 155,000 civilians in rural Colombia were forcibly confined to their own homes and communities by armed groups — trapped in place, unable to move freely, sometimes for weeks at a time. For communities that depend on agriculture, confinement meant farming became impossible. Illness and injury were endured behind closed doors, without access to care. Those who defied confinement orders risked their lives.
In January 2025, the Catatumbo region in Colombia's northeast erupted into open violence as organized armed groups fought for territorial control, claiming civilian lives and forcing thousands to flee. Across the country, 1.5 million people were affected by conflict and violence in 2025 alone — three times the number affected the previous year, illustrating how quickly a supposedly "post-conflict" country can slide back toward acute crisis.
The funding shortfall
Colombia's 2025 humanitarian response plan was only 28.7 percent funded. On NRC's political will index, Colombia scored 10 out of 30 — still in the "little effect" band, though modestly higher than Sudan or DR Congo, reflecting some ongoing, if inadequate, international engagement with Colombia's peace process. Media coverage of the crisis was rated "negligible."
As NRC's Colombia Country Director, Giovanni Rizzo, put it in the report: "People affected by this conflict have found no lasting solutions. Too many are repeatedly displaced and trapped, with no end in sight." Colombia's humanitarian indicators, the report notes, rise and fall from year to year — but that oscillation does not represent genuine improvement. It represents a country locked in cycles of endless, low-visibility crisis.
Why These Three Crises Don't Make the News
Several structural, well-documented factors explain why crises of this scale can persist for years — in DR Congo's case, decades — without generating anything close to proportional international attention.
Geopolitical relevance drives coverage more than human suffering does. NRC's own analysis is explicit on this point: attention flows to where political and commercial interests align, not to where suffering is greatest. A crisis can generate real media coverage and donor pledges while still being fundamentally neglected, if that response bears no relationship to the actual scale of need.
Visibility rarely converts into sustained political engagement. Sudan is the starkest illustration of this dynamic in the entire 2026 report: mass atrocities were livestreamed by their own perpetrators, documented by satellite imagery, and condemned at high-level diplomatic events — and none of it translated into a durable shift in international engagement. The headlines faded once the news cycle moved on; the crisis did not.
Protracted crises lose news value simply by persisting. DR Congo's conflict has run continuously since 1996. Colombia's runs back sixty years. A war that has been ongoing for decades struggles to generate the same coverage as a sudden, acute event, even as the underlying human toll continues to compound year after year.
Global donor funding is contracting sharply, across the board. The funding shortfalls affecting all three of these crises are not isolated incidents — they reflect a broader collapse in international humanitarian financing. Steep cuts in United States humanitarian funding in 2025 were followed by reductions from Germany, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. France announced a €700 million reduction in its 2026 development assistance projections; the Netherlands announced a €2.4 billion cut in aid beginning in 2027. Total OECD donor funding fell 23.1 percent in 2025 — the steepest single-year drop on record. Faced with shrinking resources, humanitarian organizations have been forced into what NRC terms "hyper-prioritization" — effectively triaging which crises receive limited available funding, and which don't, in ways that compound existing neglect.
New and overlapping drivers of displacement are outpacing traditional humanitarian frameworks. Across the crises NRC tracks, displacement is no longer driven by a single, clearly identifiable cause. Armed conflict, climate shocks, and economic collapse increasingly reinforce one another. Even digital threats now displace families with the same effectiveness as physical violence — in neighboring Ecuador, also featured on NRC's 2026 list, a single extortive WhatsApp message from an organized criminal group has proven capable of forcing an entire family to flee overnight.
The Human Cost of Underfunding: What the Numbers Actually Mean
It's worth pausing on what a "27 percent funded" or "38 percent funded" humanitarian response plan actually means in practice, because the abstraction of a percentage figure can obscure the human reality behind it.
In DR Congo, a response funded at just 27 percent of requirement directly translated into closed health clinics, scaled-back protection services for women and children at risk of violence, and reduced food assistance — even as displacement was reaching record levels in the same year. In Sudan, a response funded at under 40 percent has meant that international humanitarian agencies have had to make active decisions about which besieged populations receive assistance and which do not, decisions being made under conditions where dozens of aid workers are themselves being killed or detained annually simply trying to deliver help. In Colombia, underfunding of the refugee and migrant response has meant that a country hosting 2.8 million displaced Venezuelans — the third-highest hosting burden anywhere in the world — has received less than one dollar in ten of what's actually needed to support that population.
Across all three crises, and across the broader set of ten countries in NRC's 2026 report, not a single humanitarian response plan reached even the halfway point of its stated funding requirement in 2025.
What Happens When Crises Are Neglected for Years
The consequences of sustained neglect compound over time, and NRC's decade of tracked data reveals some consistent, troubling patterns across the countries that recur on its list year after year.
An entire generation grows up defined by displacement. In DR Congo specifically, there are people who have lived in a state of displacement for the entire ten-year duration of NRC's report — children who have grown up knowing nothing but life away from home, without stable access to education or a path back to normalcy.
Neglect creates conditions that armed and criminal groups actively exploit. Communities stripped of education, economic opportunity, and basic stability by years of neglect become more vulnerable to forced recruitment by armed groups and criminal networks, who can offer structure, income, or a sense of belonging that a failed or absent state and underfunded aid response cannot.
Hunger becomes a tool of warfare rather than simply a byproduct of it. In multiple crises tracked in the 2026 report, parties to conflict have used the deliberate denial of food and water as a weapon — a dynamic NRC documented explicitly in Sudan's besieged cities, and one occurring while climate-driven shocks simultaneously strain food systems elsewhere, against a backdrop of shrinking humanitarian budgets.
Local and frontline responders are increasingly left to fill the gap alone. As international organizations withdraw or scale back operations in response to funding cuts and access constraints, local responders — community groups, mutual aid networks, and national staff — are absorbing a growing share of the humanitarian response with a shrinking share of the available resources.
Delivering aid itself has become measurably more dangerous. Access constraints, sanctions regimes, counterterrorism-related bureaucratic obstacles, and a documented rise in attacks on humanitarian workers have made the physical act of delivering assistance slower, costlier, and more dangerous across nearly every crisis NRC tracks — a trend borne out starkly by the 92 aid workers killed, detained, or injured in Sudan in 2025 alone.
The Broader Pattern
Sudan, DR Congo, and Colombia rank first, second, and third respectively on NRC's 2026 index, but they are far from alone. The remainder of the top ten — Yemen, Afghanistan, Honduras, Ecuador, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Mozambique — reveals the same pattern playing out across four continents. In Yemen, more than 18 million people, over half the population, faced acute food insecurity by the end of 2025, following the collapse of the north's entire humanitarian operating environment. In Afghanistan, nearly 4 million children sit on the brink of malnutrition while more than 400 health facilities have closed entirely. In Nigeria, over 6 million children are projected to face acute malnutrition by September 2026, with 2 million of those cases classified as severe and life-threatening.
Across the full ten-year history of NRC's report, 27 different countries across four continents have appeared on the list at least once. Being removed from the list, the report's authors are careful to note, is rarely a sign that a crisis has actually been resolved — far more often, it simply reflects that the neglect of some other crisis has deepened further still, displacing the previous entry from the ranking not through improvement, but through comparison.
A Choice, Not an Inevitability
The central argument running through NRC's entire 2026 report — reinforced by a decade of consistent, methodologically rigorous data — is that neglect on this scale is not an unavoidable consequence of scarce global resources. It is the cumulative result of specific, avoidable decisions made in the capitals of wealthy nations: decisions about where diplomatic capital gets spent, which crises receive sustained funding, and which stories editors and audiences choose to engage with.
As the report's authors put it directly: the world does not lack the skills or resources to address crises like these — a world capable of organizing global sporting events and funding space exploration is self-evidently capable of funding a humanitarian response plan to completion. What has been missing, consistently, across ten years and 27 countries, is the sustained political will to do so.
For organizations and individuals working in global health and humanitarian response — including those in healthcare recruitment who regularly work alongside clinicians serving in crisis-affected regions — understanding the specific, documented scale of these gaps matters. Sudan's health system is functioning at 38 percent of its documented funding need. DR Congo's is at 27 percent. These are not abstract policy statistics; they translate directly into which clinics stay open, which humanitarian medical teams can deploy, and how many of the 30.4 million people in need across Sudan alone can actually be reached.
Sources
Norwegian Refugee Council, "The World's Most Neglected Displacement Crises," 10th Edition, published 4 June 2026
Norwegian Refugee Council, "DR Congo on world's most neglected displacement crises list for tenth consecutive year," 4 June 2026
Norwegian Refugee Council, "Alarming lack of funding for lifesaving aid in 2026," 1 July 2026
Norwegian Refugee Council, "NRC's list of the world's most neglected displacement crises" (methodology and background)
Euronews, "Sudan and DR Congo top list of world's most neglected crises, Norway aid group says," 4 June 2026
Outlook India, "Sudan, DR Congo Top World's Most Neglected Crises: Norway Aid Group," 4 June 2026
Centre for Humanitarian Action, "Launch: Report on the most neglected displacement crises," 23 June 2026
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), Financial Tracking Service (data underlying NRC funding analysis)
UNHCR, Refugee Data Finder and Refugee Funding Tracker (data underlying NRC displacement and funding analysis)
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), Global Report on Internal Displacement (data underlying NRC displacement analysis)
INFORM Severity Index (crisis severity classification underlying NRC's country selection methodology)
OECD, Official Development Assistance data, 2025
Donor Tracker / Focus 2030, French and Dutch 2026–2027 development assistance budget analysis