WHO Launches $1 Billion Appeal to Aid Global Crises

A pregnant woman attends a health check at a UN-supported clinic in the eastern DR Congo.

The World Health Organization (WHO) on Tuesday launched its 2026 global appeal for nearly $1 billion to ensure millions of people living in humanitarian crises and conflicts can access healthcare.

“This appeal is a call to stand with people facing conflict, displacement, and disaster, to give them not just services but the confidence that the world has not turned its back on them,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

The 2026 appeal seeks to respond to 36 emergencies worldwide, including 14 “grade 3” crises that require the highest level of organizational response, at a time when humanitarian and health financing is experiencing its sharpest decline in a decade, the agency said.

“Around one quarter of a billion people are living through humanitarian crises that have stripped away safety, shelter, and access to healthcare, while global defence spending now exceeds $2.5 trillion a year,” Tedros said at the launch in Geneva.

‘Not charity’

With the requested resources, WHO can sustain lifesaving care in the world’s most severe emergencies while “building a bridge towards peace,” said the lead agency for health response in humanitarian settings, which coordinates more than 1,500 partners across 24 crisis areas globally, ensuring that national authorities and local partners remain at the centre of emergency efforts.

“It is not charity,” the WHO chief said.

“It is a strategic investment in health and security. Access to healthcare restores dignity, stabilises communities, and offers a pathway toward recovery.”

Priority response areas

As global humanitarian financing continues to contract, the 2026 appeal comes amid converging global pressures, as protracted conflicts, escalating climate change impacts, and recurrent infectious disease outbreaks drive increasing demand for health emergency support.

WHO’s priority emergency response areas include Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Myanmar, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. Efforts will also address ongoing outbreaks of cholera and mpox.

‘Forced to make difficult choices’

“Renewed commitments and solidarity are urgently needed to protect and support people living in the most fragile and vulnerable settings,” WHO said.

With shrinking funding, WHO and other humanitarian partners have been “forced to make difficult choices” to prioritise the most critical interventions, leaving only the most impactful activities, including:

Keeping essential health facilities operational

Delivering emergency medical supplies and trauma care

Preventing and responding to outbreaks

Restoring routine immunisation

Ensuring access to sexual and reproductive, maternal, and child health services in fragile and conflict-affected settings

Emergency services reach millions

Early, predictable investment enables WHO and partners to respond immediately when crises develop, reducing death and disease, containing outbreaks, and preventing health risks from escalating into wider humanitarian and health emergencies with far greater human and financial costs.

In 2025, WHO and partners supported 30 million people through its annual emergency appeal. These resources helped to:

Deliver lifesaving vaccinations to 5.3 million children

Enable 53 million health consultations

Support more than 8,000 health facilities

Deploy 1,370 mobile clinics

Last year, humanitarian funding fell below 2016 levels, leaving WHO and partners able to reach only one third of the 81 million people originally targeted to receive humanitarian health assistance.