Between January 2025 and early 2026, humanitarian funding suffered the sharpest contraction on record. U.S. humanitarian aid alone dropped from approximately $14 billion in 2024 to $3.7 billion in 2025 — a 74% collapse — while other traditional donors followed with their own reductions. By May 2025, at least 233,818 jobs had been lost across 159 humanitarian agencies , and 54% of NGOs operating across 150 countries reported staff layoffs.
And yet, donor reporting requirements have not gone away. If anything, the surviving funding is more conditional, more compliance-heavy, and more closely scrutinised than ever. The agencies running today’s response are doing it with half the people, the same 5W matrices, the same logframes, the same cluster submissions, and the same audit trails — only now with no margin for error. This is the reporting paradox at the heart of the 2026 humanitarian sector — and it is precisely the gap that 5W-AI is built to close.