Funding cuts put 8.3 million refugees at risk of losing vital assistance
The family received a one-off cash grant from the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) on crossing the border, but without a steady income and with a leg injury that limits his ability to work, Mr. Shafi now lives in a makeshift shelter in Kabul Province, its walls patched with stones and its windows covered with plastic sheets.
“When there is little food, I give it to the children. If they are hungry, they cry,” he says.
“We have nothing prepared for winter. If someone helps, we can manage. If no one helps, we have nothing.”
His family is among nearly 8.3 million refugees and other forcibly displaced and stateless people on the brink of losing access to vital assistance as severe funding cuts push protection systems towards breaking point, UNHCR warned on Tuesday.
In a new report, titled Protection Eroded: The Human Cost of Underfunding, the agency said available funding fell from $5.178 billion to $3.932 billion between 2024 and 2025.
By July it had received only 32 per cent of the $8.5 billion needed this year – even as the number of people under its mandate remained at historically high levels.
Below a certain threshold the system doesn’t shrink, it fails
“When registration stops, safe houses close or child protection services disappear, the very risks that people fled – violence, exploitation and abuse – reappear in displacement,” said Dominique Hyde, UNHCR’s Director of External Relations.
In Afghanistan, where more than a million people have returned in 2026 alone, the cash grant on arrival has been cut from $375 per person to $170 per household, and reintegration grants have reached just 175 households so far this year, compared with 5,300 in 2024.
In Chad, 319,000 refugees face registration delays that leave them without documentation and exposed to detention, up to 200,000 women and girls risk losing access to safe spaces, and around 233,000 children could lose child protection services.
In Ethiopia, the number of safe houses for survivors of gender-based violence has more than halved in a year, from 29 to 13, while child protection coverage in some areas has fallen by as much as 85 per cent. In Sudan, more than 50,000 survivors of sexual violence in Darfur and Kordofan could lose access to life-saving post-rape care.
The report warns that unlike food and shelter, protection cannot be rationed into smaller portions. “Below a certain threshold the system doesn’t shrink, it fails,” it states.
The refugee agency said it had cut its workforce by a third in 2025 and closed offices in 140 locations, but that even its highest priority work was now affected.
The share of funding tied to specific projects has risen from 19 per cent in 2022 to 51 per cent this year.
“Flexible funding helps us move the right expertise and funds to where they are needed the most,” Ms. Hyde said, adding that, protection cannot be “reduced indefinitely without systems collapsing”.
UNHCR is urging donors and partners to provide urgent support and expand flexible funding to protect progress already made.