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Development Initiatives (2023) Global humanitarian assistance report 2023. Bristol: Development Initiatives (https://alnap.org/help-library/resources/global-humanitarian-assistance-report-2023/).
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Chapter 2: Scope setting: defining humanitarian parameters
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There are few collective definitions of humanitarian action and response. This definition largely draws on the Good Humanitarian Donorship principles (GHD, 2023).
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The HPC is the annual process through which UN-led HCTs compile their assessments of need and estimates of cost to respond. Taken together, the HNRPs are synthesised into a Global Humanitarian Overview, which provides the most comprehensive and coordinated global picture of needs and response requirements and, as such, plays a unique role in describing and setting the parameters for international efforts.
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When applied to the 2025 HRPs, this approach in some protracted crises meant that assessments were only conducted for populations who had experienced a specific and recent shock such as a flood or acute outburst of armed conflict. This caused some concern that populations traditionally considered for humanitarian support had been scoped out of needs assessments. These issues have been addressed to some degree in the guidance for 2026, which notes the need to allow exceptions for areas experiencing acute increased mortality or severe acute malnutrition (OCHA, 2025).
Chapter 3: Prioritising
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In 2014, to support member states to expand UHC, WHO commissioned a panel of experts to develop a prioritisation approach. This paper draws on several elements of WHO’s approach, in particular the identification of ‘success dimensions’, the identification of priority populations and services, and the use of ranked principles.
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While current guidance for the 2026 HNRPs instructs HCTs to draw from a menu of activities and also consult with people affected by crisis, it does not explicitly suggest providing them with the menu of activities directly. Nor does it offer concrete suggestions on how input from communities should be collated and used to inform and prioritise across this menu (OCHA, 2025).
Chapter 4: A 'pluralist' way forward for prioritising people and programmes
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A working assumption of the first principle is that using the severity threshold classification is an adequate proxy, or replacement, for ‘hard to reach’ populations. In other words, being ‘hard to reach’ is not sufficient as a category to claim that a person is worst off with respect to a crisis. If individuals are far from access to aid but meet severity threshold 3, then they should not be prioritised over individuals who are easier to reach but meet severity level 4. In practice, however, ‘hard to reach’ populations also tend to be highly deprived and therefore are generally much more likely to have higher severity threshold rankings than those who are closer to access points.
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However, it should be stressed that there is very little evidence that enables comparison of these two situations. Such a decision should be based, as far as possible, on evaluations and research comparing the two options – this could lead agencies to switch the order between principles 2 and 3.