International cuts to development aid foreshadow profound changes to the system: ‘We are terrified of going back to the 1980s’
Leaders meeting at the UN General Assembly face a humanitarian polycrisis as the 40th anniversary of the adoption of the right to development is marked, while calls for a rethink of an obsolete cooperation model increase.
“Trust and legitimacy have been broken. There is a questioning of the legitimacy of the humanitarian system,” says Hibak Kalfan, director of the NEAR Network for Empowered Aid Response, which groups together 370 local NGOs from 45 Global South countries. Kalfan says that what the organizations they work with are experiencing in this new context is a more transactional, more centralized, and more conditional approach.
Kalfan, stresses that despite this bleak picture — or paradoxically because of the crisis — there is a certain optimism. “The interesting thing is how the Global South has mobilized. There is a new confidence,” Kalfan says; her platform has launched a fund managed exclusively by and for Southern organizations.
Read the article in Spanish here: https://elpais.com/planeta-futuro/2026-09-22/los-recortes-internacionales-de-ayuda-al-desarrollo-vaticinan-cambios-profundos-en-el-sistema-nos-aterroriza-volver-a-los-ochenta.html
Read the article here:https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-09-22/international-cuts-to-development-aid-foreshadow-profound-changes-to-the-system-we-are-terrified-of-going-back-to-the-1980s.html