The need for humanitarian aid is rising due to a global polycrisis, at a time when nearly half of all deaths in children under five are linked to malnutrition. Despite this, global humanitarian financing is under severe pressure: funding cuts in 2025 hit women, children, older and displaced people the hardest, with 64 million fewer people receiving aid compared to the previous year.
The choices made in the EU’s 2028–2034 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) will therefore have direct consequences on the EU’s role as a humanitarian actor, and on its ability to prevent avoidable deaths and respond to humanitarian crises.
What GHA is asking for:
An ambitious and accountable post-2027 EU external budget that protects humanitarian financing and keeps nutrition visible as both a life-saving intervention and a long-term investment in child survival and human development.
The challenge is not simply to secure political recognition for nutrition. It is to make that political recognition count in the architecture of the next EU external action instrument. Nutrition must not disappear into broad categories such as health, food security or human capital, where investments can become difficult to identify, protect, and track.
Our priorities:
1. Protect the EU’s capacity to respond to humanitarian crises
In line with the ambition outlined in the Joint Communication on Humanitarian Aid, the next MFF must preserve an ambitious humanitarian envelope within the Global Europe Instrument, at a time when needs are increasing and humanitarian financing is under unprecedented pressure. We call for the European Commission proposed €25b budget for humanitarian aid to be protected in current and upcoming negotiations and be set as a minimum binding amount to ensure the EU can provide sustaining life-saving assistance in protracted and rapidly emerging crises.
2. Keep nutrition at the heart of EU external action and humanitarian action
Long-term investments are key to improving nutrition outcomes. In the next Global Europe Instrument, 50% should be dedicated to Human Development objectives, which includes nutrition.
In humanitarian contexts, acute malnutrition is more than a consequence of crisis: it is a life-threatening emergency in itself. We will press for nutrition to continue to be explicitly recognised as a core, life-saving pillar of EU humanitarian action, in Commission priorities and Member State positions alike.
3. Build accountability into the post-2027 nutrition architecture
The European Commission has previously played an important role in the fight against malnutrition, through frameworks such as the EU Action Plan on Nutrition, which ended in 2025. A successor for the framework is critical to avoid policy limbo, safeguard nutrition gains, and reaffirm EU leadership in global food and nutrition security.
At a time when aid resources are under increasing pressure, the EU should focus its resources on interventions that are proven to work and can genuinely change children’s lives: addressing child malnutrition is exactly the kind of impactful investment we need.
Nutrition should remain visible and traceable within the Global Europe Instrument, so that the EU and other stakeholders can track what it invests, where resources go, and what they achieve across the different pillars of the instrument.
Our campaign:
According to the European Commission’s Directorate General for Humanitarian Aid (DG ECHO), this is the cost per citizen, per year, for the EU to bring life-saving support to millions of people worldwide.
Indeed, whilst we often hear that humanitarian and development assistance are “too expensive” and that the EU can’t afford it in times of austerity, we want to get back to the facts: the collective effort required from the EU and its citizens is marginal compared with the human cost of unmet humanitarian needs.
The EU has the capacity to make a difference. The next EU budget will determine whether it maintains that ambition.
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