Aid Worker Security Report 2025 – Defenceless: Aid worker security amid the humanitarian funding collapse

This year’s Aid Worker Security Report comes at a major inflection point for international humanitarian assistance and during an alarming new peak of violence against humanitarians. The 2025 edition – our 15th since data tracking began – was almost not produced after the Aid Worker Security Database (AWSD), lost its US government funding when the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was dismantled. The funding crisis now rocking the sector comes on top of escalating conflicts and a steep erosion of respect for humanitarian norms and the laws of war by state actors – amplified in some places by public smear campaigns against aid organisations. 

The conflicts in Gaza and Sudan continue to drive the greatest numbers of aid worker casualties, but incidents were on the rise in other contexts as well, with historically high numbers seen in Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lebanon, Nigeria, Somalia, Ukraine, and Yemen. 

The loss of funding, security risk management capacities, and in some places public acceptance, have put humanitarians at increased risk. Anecdotal accounts and some formal reporting indicate direct links between programme cuts and violent incidents. At the same time, incident monitoring has become more difficult as data and analytics providers face severe funding reductions. Aid organisations report having to cut security positions, communications capacity, and other critical supports, forcing difficult choices between accepting increased risk exposure and abandoning communities. 

Amid the bad news of rising violence and decreasing support for humanitarian action, an encouraging development has been a spate of diplomatic initiatives to protect aid workers. UN Security Council Resolution 2730 (2024), for the first time, not only condemns attacks on humanitarians but also calls for accountability and judicial redress – offering a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dark time for humanitarian action.

This report will be available in Arabic, French and Spanish by end August.