The funding landscape has shifted. We haven’t — Not fast enough.

Reflections from The Humanitarian Finance Summit, London

Last week, leaders gathered in London against the backdrop of a stark reality: global humanitarian funding is projected to drop by as much as $25 billion this year. The numbers are sobering. Jobs have been cut at an unprecedented scale. Frontline services are contracting. Hard-won development gains are under strain.

From where we sit, working alongside Belmont Fundraising partners in London, Uganda, Dublin, Rome, and Singapore — this feels less like a temporary contraction and more like a structural inflection point.

The world has changed. But listening to colleagues across the sector, I’m not convinced we have — at least not at the pace or scale required.

There are uncomfortable echoes of the 2008 Financial Crash. In that crisis, we talked about resilience, reform and structural adjustment. Some changes came. Many did not. Today, we risk repeating the pattern: incremental responses to systemic shocks. This moment demands more, and fast!

1. The architectural flaw: Over-concentration of funding

For decades, the financial architecture of global aid has rested on a narrow base:

• Bilateral government funding

• A small cluster of large foundations

• Multilateral pooled funds

• Fractional philanthropy, relative to the scale

  
  

Diversification has rarely been a structural requirement. In many cases, it has not even been a board-level KPI. That model worked in expansionary years. It fails massively under contraction. Most organisations simply don’t have the 18 – 24 months needed to recalibrate their supporter base.

When funding portfolios are overly concentrated, they become inherently susceptible to geopolitical shifts, fiscal tightening, and domestic political cycles. The current downturn exposes this fragility, and it’s hurting many.

Diversification is not a luxury. It is a core pillar of institutional sustainability. Yet in many organisations, it remains peripheral rather than foundational.

2. Fifteen years of “Innovative Finance” — Why isn’t it embedded yet?

We have been discussing blended finance, impact bonds, catalytic capital and private sector leverage for well over fifteen years. While there are a number of well-known examples at scale, Vaccine Bonds (IFFIm), Advance Market Commitments, UNITAID and others, innovative finance remains:

• Experimental rather than mainstream

• Peripheral rather than embedded

• Project-based rather than systemic

Why?

Three recurring barriers emerged in side conversations last week:

1. Institutional risk aversion – Boards and leadership teams prioritise predictable grant income over structured financial experimentation.

2. Capability gaps – Innovative finance requires legal, financial engineering and market expertise not traditionally embedded within NGOs.

3. Misaligned incentives – Donor frameworks rarely reward long-term structural resilience; they reward short-term programmatic outputs.

Innovative finance will not immunise organisations from market shocks. But as an additional strand within a diversified capital stack, it materially reduces exposure risk. It creates optionality. It signals maturity. That alone justifies its integration.

3. Localisation: Long promised, newly urgent

The language of localisation has been with us for decades. “As local as possible, as international as necessary” is not new rhetoric. If anything, it feels jaded.

What is new is the urgency. Now, as funding contracts, localisation is framed not as principle but as necessity. Belmont Fundraising hears this repeatedly from large global funders - more so than ever in recent months.

Too often, “partnership” has masked subcontracting. The funding contraction forces openness and honesty. Either we design genuine co-owned models, or credibility erodes further.

4. The speed problem

A recurring theme in London was pace. Even for the largest organisations, and maybe more so for them, process often supersedes speed:

• Strategic reviews taking 18 months

• Transformation committees often convene without authority

• Incremental adjustments to fundamentally flawed models

  
  

The funding shock has been immediate. The response cannot be procedural. In 2008, those institutions that moved early — cutting costs decisively, diversifying capital streams, investing in relational fundraising — emerged stronger by 2012. Those that delayed struggled for a decade, with several not surviving. We are again at that fork in the road.

5. Is this system redesign — or a meaningful shift?

I think two schools of thought surfaced at the Summit:

1. Full system redesign

• Rethink aid architecture entirely

• Collapse duplicative structures, a welcome and sensible change in my view

• Reallocate power and capital flows

  
  

2. Strategic diversification with discipline

• Maintain core structures

• Diversify income streams

• Honour multi-year commitments

• Focus relentlessly on outputs and measurable deliverables

  
  

In practice, we are likely to see a hybrid, leaning toward the latter, as the second approach is immediately actionable.

Our perspective from the Summit’s margins

It would be disingenuous not to acknowledge: for consultancies like Belmont Fundraising, transition creates opportunity. We are not shedding frontline staff. We are not closing health clinics or education programmes. But we sit close enough to feel the tremors.

Our clients are asking the same questions:

• How exposed are we?

• How diversified are we really?

• How quickly can we adapt, and meaningfully?

• What is our plan if core funding drops further after the US mid-terms?

• What is our value proposition in a more disciplined funding market?

  
  

While this moment is painful, it is also clarifying.

At Belmont Fundraising, we are excited — cautiously — to help organisations adapt:

• Resetting funding strategies

• Recalibrating cost bases

• Building diversified pipelines

• Embedding resilience into financial design

  
  

The humanitarian sector is, and has always been, resilient. But resilience requires adaptation. The new reality is not temporary. It is structural. The world has changed. The question is whether you are prepared to change with it — fast enough, and at sufficient scale.

By Harvey Duthie, Belmont Fundraising Limited

Dublin, 4^th March 2026