Reimagining Humanitarian Partnerships
Lessons from European Humanitarian Forum 2025
The European Humanitarian Forum 2025 took place at a time of global dislocation: forced displacement is at record highs, aid budgets are contracting, and the space for civil society is narrowing in both authoritarian and democratic states. At the same time, local organisations — particularly those led by women, displaced people, and racialised communities — continue to do the bulk of front line work, often without sustained access to funding, infrastructure, or decision-making power.
Ruthless International participated in a series of critical discussions at EHF 2025. Our presence was not only to observe, but to assess how power is organised and redistributed — or not — within humanitarian systems. Three sessions stood out, not only for the urgency of their themes, but for what they revealed about the current limits — and possible futures — of humanitarian action.
1. Breaking Barriers: Forcibly Displaced Women and GBV Response
This panel, focused on the protection and empowerment of forcibly displaced women and adolescent girls, brought together a globally diverse and highly experienced group of speakers, each with deep-rooted knowledge of the gendered impacts of displacement. With representation from the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Ukraine, Ethiopia, Colombia, and beyond, the speakers included both professionals embedded in humanitarian institutions and frontline practitioners from local civil society organisations. Many had direct, long-term engagement with crisis-affected communities, and their work spans legal advocacy, health and psychosocial care, community mobilisation, and protection coordination.
Crucially, these were not abstract discussions. Each panelist grounded their contribution in real-world practice — sharing case studies of individual women and girls navigating border closures, sexual violence, restricted mobility, and institutional neglect. Several shared how GBV is not only a consequence of conflict, but often an embedded feature of displacement systems themselves: from the violence of detention centres and border policing, to the exploitation of aid dependency, to the routine invisibilisation of women in emergency planning.
The discussion underscored how GBV intersects with statelessness, forced migration, militarisation, and economic collapse. The panelists also highlighted the compounding risks faced by adolescent girls — particularly those separated from family networks or living in informal shelters — whose protection needs are often deprioritised or misunderstood within mainstream humanitarian programming.
What was particularly powerful was how the panelists approached this work: not simply as implementers of programmes, but as strategic actors embedded within affected communities, with the ability to articulate needs, co-design responses, and challenge institutional blind spots. Their work is not only responsive — it is preventative, political, and rooted in long-term care infrastructure.
Despite the extraordinary depth of experience on the panel, the session itself was restricted by time and structure. The conversation remained high-level, and there was little room for genuine policy dialogue, collective strategy-building, or cross-regional reflection. It was a missed opportunity to elevate this expertise to a more prominent space within the Forum.
At a time when women’s rights are being eroded globally, and when humanitarian budgets are increasingly gender-neutral by design but gender-blind in execution, the marginalisation of this session — both in visibility and placement — was emblematic of a broader pattern.
When gender is deprioritised structurally — as it often is — the effects are not symbolic. They are material:
Women-led organisations are systematically underfunded.
GBV protection is treated as secondary rather than essential.
Gender “mainstreaming” becomes procedural rather than transformative.
There is no serious commitment to humanitarian protection without gender justice.
The security and dignity of forcibly displaced women and girls is not a thematic sidebar — it is a litmus test for whether the humanitarian system is functioning as it claims to be.
The panellists brought the clarity, the experience, and the solutions. What was missing was the platform — and the power — to carry them forward.
2. The Afghanistan Crisis: Regional Implications and Protection Challenges
The panel on Afghanistan’s crisis attempted to frame the humanitarian situation regionally, focusing on the forced returns of Afghan refugees from Pakistan and Iran, the collapse of core state infrastructure, and the complex interplay of regional geopolitics.
Afghanistan’s current state cannot be understood in isolation. It is the product of more than four decades of conflict, foreign intervention, and international mismanagement. From the Soviet invasion in 1979 to the US-led occupation and eventual withdrawal in 2021, Afghanistan has experienced near-constant war, state collapse, and externally driven political experimentation — with little regard for the long-term sovereignty or stability of the Afghan people.
Since the Taliban’s return to power, women and girls have been banned from secondary and higher education, employment in many sectors, and public space participation. Minority communities face targeted violence, and economic sanctions — combined with aid withdrawal and frozen central bank assets — have brought the country’s economy to the brink of collapse. Afghanistan is now home to one of the world’s fastest-growing food insecurity crises and a near-total erosion of public services.
In this context, the panel highlighted important data and analysis — including from the World Bank, IOM Afghanistan, and Afghan-led civil society. Panellists described the scale of humanitarian need and the pressures on bordering states, but there was a conspicuous absence of concrete pathways forward.
What emerged clearly was the disconnect between the scale of the crisis and the level of response. Even large international institutions acknowledged severe limitations: funding shortfalls, operational access barriers, and political constraints. Several described their current programmes as emergency stopgaps — not sustainable interventions.
While transparency on these limitations is welcome, it raises an urgent strategic question: If major institutions are themselves restricted in capacity and leverage, where does meaningful change come from — and how do we structure power and funding to make it possible?
Additionally, the conversation did not sufficiently surface the realities of everyday life in Afghanistan today. There was little insight into the lived experiences of rural communities, women surviving under Taliban restrictions, or Afghan-led organising in diaspora. Without a clear inclusion of these voices, humanitarian analysis becomes detached from its social base — and response strategies risk reinforcing the same top-down logic that contributed to the crisis in the first place.
If the humanitarian sector is to play a credible role in Afghanistan's future, it must go beyond abstract assessments and engage directly with the people whose lives are most impacted — not just as data points or implementers, but as strategic partners. That means investing in Afghan-led organisations, particularly those led by women, youth, and ethnic minorities; supporting diaspora networks that continue to mobilise despite exile and surveillance; and ensuring that policy platforms reflect the complexity of lived experience, not just geopolitical analysis. The question is not whether there is capacity on the ground — there is. The question is whether international actors are willing to shift power, funding, and visibility to where the solutions already exist. Anything less will simply reproduce the very systems of abandonment we claim to oppose.
3. Advancing Equitable Partnerships Through Due Diligence Passporting
The final session we attended focused on a technical reform proposal: the introduction of “due diligence passporting”, a system by which organisational compliance checks could be mutually recognised by multiple donors. The idea is to reduce duplication, increase efficiency, and help smaller organisations avoid repetitive, resource-draining vetting procedures.
Theoretically, this makes sense. Due diligence processes today are deeply inefficient. Organisations working across multiple donors are often audited, risk-assessed, and reviewed repeatedly — burning time and staff capacity on compliance over impact. Passporting offers a way to harmonise these processes and potentially unlock quicker access to funding.
However, the structural implications of such a system demand closer scrutiny.
Due diligence regimes are not neutral. They reflect the risk perceptions, legal frameworks, and political agendas of donors — often rooted in Global North institutions. As such, passporting may embed rather than disrupt existing hierarchies. Groups with access to legal support, English-language staff, digital infrastructure, and legacy funding are far more likely to acquire and maintain “passports.” Newer, grassroots, or informal organisations — many of which serve the most marginalised — may be excluded altogether.
Furthermore, the analogy of a “passport” is revealing. Like with state-issued passports, some are more powerful than others. The very premise implies tiered legitimacy, creating a potential system of privilege and exclusion rather than one of equitable access.
Beyond access, governance is a critical issue. Who sets the criteria for what constitutes “adequate” due diligence? Who is accountable for bias in the system? What dispute resolution mechanisms exist if local organisations are denied recognition or stripped of their status? These questions were largely unaddressed.
Compounding these risks is the wider political context. Major bilateral donors — including the UK, US, and France — have slashed aid budgets in recent years, undermining the funding base on which localisation and equitable partnerships rely. It’s unclear how passporting will succeed if the resources needed to support its uptake — including capacity-building, translation, and tech access — are not forthcoming.
In short, due diligence passporting could be useful — but only with radical transparency, shared governance, and real investment in organisational development for those who currently sit outside the dominant system.
Otherwise, it risks becoming a bureaucratic sorting mechanism — streamlining access for the already-legitimised while raising new hurdles for others.
Conclusion: Efficiency Without Equity Is Not Progress
Taken together, these sessions at EHF 2025 highlight a sector at a crossroads. Whether discussing gender, protection, or compliance, the themes were consistent: power remains concentrated, funding is shrinking, and the structures built to protect are often the ones creating the barriers.
At Ruthless International, we do not believe these are failures of intention. They are failures of design, rooted in a sector that has not fully reckoned with its colonial history, its technocratic defaults, or its structural inequities.
But the road forward is clear — if we choose to take it.
We must:
Fund and follow the leadership of forcibly displaced women, queer communities, and racialised grassroots actors who know their contexts best and have been sustaining care networks long before formal interventions arrive.
Critically evaluate “innovation” in compliance and localisation to ensure it does not become a new form of institutional gatekeeping.
Invest in political solutions, not only humanitarian ones, especially in contexts like Afghanistan, where geopolitics and aid are deeply intertwined.
Push for equity and justice not only in rhetoric, but in resourcing, governance, and structural transformation.
This is not just about humanitarian reform. It is about a different relationship to power, one that centres dignity, accountability, and shared futures — not management.