No to funding cut: EHF 2025 make us united

European Humanitarian Forum 2025 (EHF2025) held during 19 and 20 May in Brussels, around 1000 humanitarian activist / officials across the world have had participated.

After Trump administration funding cut this is the first global gathering, created space to humanitarian and development activist to raise voice.

Funding to humanitarian and development is a global responsibility. There should not be funding cut, we are united, still humanitarian crises are underfunded e.g., Rohingya response in Bangladesh, peoples especially vulnerable groups like women, mothers and children are dying as Tom Fletcher the UN Emergency Coordinator said this in the conference inaugural session.

In my island in Kutubdia, we know more about American Army in humanitarian response, i.e., what are the massive humanitarian response they conducted by “operation sea angel” during May 1991 otherwise there will be loss of not less then 1 million people.

We saw the technology, how they were cleaning dirty water to drinking water, how amphibious ship transporting relief materials to remote islands. How American Helicopters carrying jeeps and officials everyday two / three times in those remote islands.

We hardly imagine that Americans are setting back from such humanitarian response, indeed these were the golden pride of American people.

EHF 2025 now 4th in kind, and for me this is the first time, I have participated with COAST own funding. But my participation was so organized as because of Charter 4 Change (C4C) group. On 18th May in a group meeting, we have sorted out, where and what to speak, especially on how and what to speak in a donor roundtable with local NGO / CSO leaders.

In the donor roundtable in response to a FCDO (official aid agency from UK) I said, trust will only be strengthening if there will be an effort of equal level of partnership, it should be mutual. We cannot deny the role of international actors, we the local and national actors believe in complementarity and inclusiveness. In a plenary on humanitarian diplomacy, I got the scope to intervene, I mentioned that Rohingya response should not be forgotten in these sprees of funding cut, develop / donor countries hardly doing anything to address root cause to mitigate Rohingya crisis.

I heard that EU Polish Presidency has given chunk of funding to different group specially to facilitate participation of local actors. I have approached several groups, but there is hardly any response, transparency, criteria-based competition, and conditions for multiplication of learning in back home / country level.

Like me a lot of others from audiences hardly got scope to intervene as I found most of panel members tend to speak again and again, and they have use slido.com which prevent participant to speak. Otherwise, it could be a lively conference, and it should have been. We consider the European position on humanitarianism and democracy still inspiration for other part of the world.

I can remember the speeches from different leaders and EU officials in different sessions, especially the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Tom Fletcher, he describes how funding cut creating chaos in aid recipient countries, he also describes how climate crisis link to the humanitarian crisis, e.g., 1 degree temperature raise will create around 1 billion people vulnerable.

EU presidency will be handed over to Demark next time, still I remember during 2008 how Denmark and Denish civil society facilitate the UNFCCC CoP (Conference of Parties), I hope in next year EHF will be happened with more participation and with more voice especially from local and national actors. We thank EU to rejuvenate us in organizing EHF.