The Five
1. Aid. UN Women warns 1 million women and girls have lost critical support. UN Women's new report Beyond the Breaking Point documents that at least one million women and girls have lost access to critical humanitarian support since January 2025 as women-led organisations face the steepest annual aid decline on record. Nine in ten organisations can no longer meet current need. 84% report increased demand for their services. 63% have reduced services in remote and hard-to-reach communities. Around 120 million women and girls worldwide now require humanitarian assistance. UN News
2. Sudan. Army rejects US peace plan pending RSF withdrawal, 265 civilians killed by Russian attacks in June. Sudan's army says it will not accept a US-backed plan to end the three-year war unless the RSF withdraws from all captured cities. The US proposal, per documents reported by Reuters, includes a UN-led mechanism to support limited RSF withdrawals prioritising North Darfur and North Kordofan, plus an immediate 90-day humanitarian truce. Separately, the UN said Russian attacks killed at least 265 Ukrainian civilians in June alone. OkayAfrica | Democracy Now
3. Venezuela. Earthquake death toll passes 3,800, IMF talks $350 million SDR use for aid. Venezuela's earthquake death toll has passed 3,800 amid what Democracy Now describes as a public health crisis. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva spoke Thursday with Venezuela's Acting President Delcy Rodriguez about using the country's paid-in $350 million reserve tranche of IMF Special Drawing Rights to address urgent humanitarian needs from the twin quakes. Democracy Now | FDD Overnight Brief
4. Gaza. 1,000 Palestinians killed since October ceasefire, aid worker killed in Tuesday strike. An Israeli airstrike Tuesday killed Mohammed al-Waheidi, a Palestinian aid worker who facilitated deliveries of humanitarian aid and organised World Cup watch parties in Gaza. The IDF said it struck a Hamas militant, without identifying the target. More than 1,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the October ceasefire, per the Gaza Health Ministry. The Palestinian Authority announced first legislative elections in over 20 years for 28 November. Just Security Early Edition | Democracy Now
5. Bangladesh. 13 Rohingya killed in landslides, camps use loudspeakers for relocation. Authorities in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh used loudspeakers and a network of volunteers and community leaders to relocate people from risky areas Thursday, after landslides killed at least 13 refugees in the past few days. The camps at Cox's Bazar remain chronically underfunded and vulnerable to monsoon-season flooding and landslides. FDD Overnight Brief
The One That Matters Most
One million women and girls have lost critical support, and the organisations that reached them are collapsing.
UN Women released a report yesterday called Beyond the Breaking Point. The title is doing the work the diplomatic register usually softens. The core finding, worth quoting directly: at least one million women and girls have lost access to critical humanitarian support since January 2025 as a direct result of the steepest annual decline in aid on record. Nearly nine in ten of the 855 women-led organisations surveyed across 52 crisis-affected countries can no longer meet current levels of need. 84% report increased demand for their services. 63% have reduced services in remote and hard-to-reach communities, precisely the communities where women and girls have the fewest alternatives. Around 120 million women and girls worldwide now require humanitarian assistance and protection.
The report is important for reasons that go beyond the specific numbers. It puts a name to a dynamic that has been developing under the surface all year, which is that the humanitarian funding collapse we have been covering (the 16% Sudan appeal, the 15% Afghanistan appeal, the 10% Gaza funding, the Somalia July cutoff) is not distributed evenly across the humanitarian architecture. It is falling hardest on the parts of the system that are least visible, least politically defensible in donor capitals, and most difficult to replace once they are gone. Women-led organisations operating in Afghanistan, DRC, Haiti, Sudan, Somalia, and elsewhere have historically been where the system has directed reproductive health care, gender-based violence prevention and response, midwife training, dignity kits for displaced women, and the psychosocial support that survivors of the specific forms of violence directed at women in wartime require. This work does not have a large donor constituency. It does not appear in most Council briefings. It is being defunded first, and the consequences are becoming visible now.
Sofia Calltorp, UN Women's Chief of Humanitarian Action, put the framing crisply: "Every dollar withdrawn from women's organisations is a dollar withdrawn from survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, displaced mothers, girls forced from school, and communities struggling to survive." That framing is worth carrying into the next round of pledging conversations because it makes visible what the aggregate funding cuts actually take away from specific populations. In Afghanistan, where the Taliban's restrictions have already made it near-impossible for international agencies to reach women, the women-led organisations that have continued to operate (often at considerable personal risk to their staff) are precisely the ones being defunded. In DRC, where sexual violence has been endemic to the eastern conflicts for two decades, the local organisations that treat survivors are the ones cutting programmes. In Haiti, where the gang violence crisis has produced specific and gendered forms of victimisation, the women-led organisations documenting and responding are collapsing. The pattern is the same across the 52 countries the UN Women report covers.
There is a second dimension that the report is careful to develop, which is the compound loss when women-led organisations collapse. It is not just the humanitarian services that go. More than half of the organisations surveyed report declining involvement of women in local leadership roles. The organisations we are talking about are, in many cases, the pipeline through which women enter local political life, participate in peace processes, and shape post-conflict recovery. When they close, the pipeline closes. The peace processes that are notionally underway in Sudan, Ukraine, and Lebanon become peace processes conducted almost entirely by men, over the heads of populations that are majority-female and where women have specific interests in the terms of settlement. This is not an abstract concern. The Women, Peace and Security agenda that the Council formally adopted in Resolution 1325 in 2000 has been degrading in practical implementation for years. The current funding collapse is accelerating that degradation. What we are watching is, in effect, the operational unwinding of the international commitment to women's participation in peace and security, without any explicit political decision to unwind it.
The wider frame that has been developing across the ICRC, IRC, UNICEF, UNFPA, and now UN Women reports is worth stating plainly. Four major agencies plus one now have said, in official documents in the space of eight months, that the humanitarian system is being asked to do more than it can, with less than it needs, at exactly the moment when the international humanitarian law framework that has underwritten its work is eroding fastest. The specific populations who show up in these reports (women, children, detainees, displaced people, health workers, aid workers themselves) are the populations that international humanitarian law was designed to protect. UN Women's report is not a rhetorical outlier. It is the fifth data point in a pattern that the Council and the pledging architecture have not yet responded to at the scale the pattern requires. The one million women and girls who have lost critical support since January 2025 are the concrete face of what "hyper-prioritisation" (the Fletcher-era euphemism for triaging populations) actually looks like when applied to a specific vulnerable group. The report should be read carefully, and it should be cited in the Council briefings on Sudan, Afghanistan, DRC, and Haiti in the coming weeks. Whether it will be depends on the priorities of the delegations doing the briefing.
Calltorp's closing line captures what is at stake: "Without immediate action, the organisations that have kept women and girls alive through the world's worst crises risk becoming another casualty of war." That framing is not a metaphor. In some of the contexts we cover regularly on this brief (Sudan, Haiti, Afghanistan) the collapse of women-led organisations will be measurable in preventable deaths and preventable violations in the coming months. Whether donors move on the report, or whether it becomes another well-argued document that sits in the record while the operations it describes continue to close, is the question the next several weeks will answer.
Watching the Sudan peace plan trajectory over the weekend: the RSF response to the US framework will shape whether the humanitarian truce concept moves. The Venezuela death toll is expected to keep climbing. Back Tuesday.
End of a long week. Have a good weekend.
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