The World Is Still Failing Its Children. We Can Change That in 2026

As we enter 2026, one truth is impossible to ignore: children around the world are facing their greatest levels of need in modern history - just as the humanitarian system meant to protect them and their futures battling some of its biggest challenges in decades.

The events of 2025 marked a dramatic rupture in global humanitarian and development efforts. When the United States abruptly halted foreign aid in January, billions of dollars vanished overnight. Critical programmes were suspended, offices closed, and millions suddenly lost access to food, healthcare, education, and protection. Overnight, lifelines that communities had depended on for decades were thrown into jeopardy- and children, as always, paid the highest price.

For international NGOs, the shock was immediate and severe. At Save the Children, we were forced to take some of the most tough decisions in our 105-year history. We had to close country offices, cut thousands of staff positions, and wind down life-saving operations. We estimated that about 11.5 million people - including 6.7 million children - would feel the immediate impacts of these cuts while many more will be impacted in the longer term.

The aid cuts came at time when children globally were already facing major challenges, from conflict, to displacement to climate change, with decades of progress at risk of being reversed.

The facts are startling. In 2025 one in every five children was living in an active conflict zone where children are being killed, maimed, sexually assaulted and abducted in record numbers.  The number of children displaced globally is about 50 million. About 1.12 billion children globally - or almost half of the world’s children - are unable to afford a balanced diet. About 272 million children are out of school.

The crisis of 2025 revealed how much the global aid system depends on a handful of government donors and how fragile it becomes when geopolitics shifts. It exposed deep weaknesses and forced a global conversation about what needs to change.

But amid this turmoil, something extraordinary happened.  

Across our Save the Children movement, people found ways to keep going. About three-quarters of our programmes continued, driven by the unwavering commitment of staff, partners and communities determined to protect the world’s most vulnerable children.  

Despite the pushback on human and child rights, we’ve seen some landmark reforms from the ban on corporal punishment in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Thailand, to Bolivia criminalising child marriage and passing a digital protection law. These are examples of some of the progressive changes for children in 2025.

Our humanitarian footprint reached 13.9 million people including 7.1 million children, spanning health, education, child protection, nutrition, and other life-saving interventions.

In the world’s major conflicts we played a critical role for children, such as providing play-based learning, psychosocial support, and essential supplies for over 60,000 children in Gaza and the West Bank via 26 temporary learning spaces and community led initiatives.

But this crisis also revealed something else: an opportunity to adapt, to innovate, and to reimagine what sustainable humanitarian action could look like in the years ahead.

One year later, the humanitarian world is adapting - fast. Already 2026 is emerging as a year defined by reinvention rather than recovery. Across humanitarian agencies, there’s a clear shift away from crisis management toward rebuilding models that are leaner, more local, and more sustainable.

The sector is now asking fundamental questions. How can we protect humanitarian work from political volatility? What would a truly diversified funding system look like? And how do we ensure that the people most affected by crises have real power in shaping the response?

The funding collapse has accelerated changes that were too slow moving. There’s growing momentum toward locally led action - moving decision-making and resources closer to communities, rather than in global capitals. For example, this year Save the Children made the principled decision to withdraw from UN-OCHA Country-Based Pooled Funds (CBPFs) to create more space for local organisations to directly access this funding. This is a step toward genuine localisation, and we hope other international NGOs will join us.  

There’s also a sharper focus on innovation - using digital tools, data, and community-driven design to deliver aid more effectively and transparently. These shifts are not just operational, but they challenge the very definition of what “humanitarian” means in a world facing overlapping crises - from climate shocks to conflict to displacement.

Children do not stop wanting to learn or play simply because the world around them is collapsing. They remind us why our work—and our ability to adapt—matters so profoundly.

I ensure that I travel several times a year to visit our programmes and talk to the children and families we work with as well as smart, inspiring child campaigners. Children can and do make a difference, and children must have their views and recommendations heard, from the streets to the corridors of power, to ensure decision-makers are responding to their real needs, hopes and dreams.

In Gaza this year I witnessed the horrors that children are living through daily with the war now raging for more than two years and most of the Strip lying under rubble. I saw children facing malnutrition at our healthcare clinics and heard how some now wish to die to join their parents in heaven. No child should ever be living under such terror that death is preferable. They are children and their voices need to be heard.  

While in Qatar for the World Summit for Social Development, I met child campaigners from Lebanon including 16-year-old Lara who spoke with such conviction about the  marginalisation of girls’ rights in society and how she and her friends want to have an education and not be forced to leave school to marry  - and they want their voices to be heard.  

If 2025 exposed the vulnerabilities of the old aid model, 2026 is the year we build something better. A system that is more accountable, more inclusive, and more adaptable to the world as it is - not as it once was.

Eglantyne Jebb, who founded Save the Children in 1919, once said: “Humanity owes the child the best it has to give.” A century later, that promise still stands. The challenge now is to reshape our systems so that, no matter how the world changes, we can keep that promise alive and put children first, always, everywhere.