PSHA Team
The need for a new model of humanitarian action echoed across DIHAD 2025. More than just a gathering of global actors, it became a collective moment of reckoning—where a system under extraordinary strain was called not merely to adapt, but to transform its leadership, funding architecture, and shared responsibilities in a time of global flux and fracture.
From the opening keynote by H.E. Ahmed bin Ali Al Sayegh, Minister of State to the United Arab Emirates, to the DIHAD Personality of the Year acceptance speech by IFRC President Kate Forbes, the message was consistent and urgent: we cannot meet 21st-century humanitarian challenges with 20th-century systems.
“This is not just a time of crisis,” Forbes said. “This is a time of transformation.”
She called for nothing short of a structural reinvention—anchored in courage, conviction, solidarity, and cross-sector collaboration.
Forbes warned that traditional humanitarian financing, often aligned with short-term political cycles, can no longer meet the scale or urgency of today’s global needs. She advocated instead for “new financing models… more anticipatory, more flexible, and more localized.”
These are not theoretical proposals. They reflect the lived reality of a humanitarian system buckling under the weight of demand:
And yet, nearly half of global humanitarian needs go unmet each year.
Meeting these needs requires a decisive shift—from reactive, donor-driven frameworks to proactive, frontline-led financing systems. It is not just about more money; it is about trust, decision-making power, and structural access. True localization demands dismantling the procedural, regulatory, and institutional barriers that continue to marginalize local leadership.
This is not only a funding gap—it is a systems gap, a leadership gap, and a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine how we mobilize resources, expertise, and coordination in a fractured world.
As traditional donors pull back, local NGOs are being forced to scale down life-saving programs. Education, food systems, and healthcare are faltering in fragile regions. And the long-term consequences—deepening poverty, worsening displacement, and systemic breakdown—threaten both national and global stability.
The old model isn’t enough.
That’s why the conversation is shifting—from questions of scale to questions of structure and strategy.
At DIHAD 2025, public-private partnership emerged as central to that transformation. In a joint presentation hosted by the Private Sector Humanitarian Alliance (PSHA) and OCHA, the imperative for new coordination models that include infrastructure for cross-sector collaboration—not just political will.
Governments and aid agencies alone cannot meet today’s needs. But without the systems to integrate private sector capabilities—safely, swiftly, and strategically—time, capacity and lives continue to be lost.
Businesses already play an essential role in crisis recovery—delivering logistics (see the latest case study on logistics from the Connecting Business Initiative), communications, cash support, infrastructure, and local employment. But the humanitarian system still lacks the connective tissue to harness these contributions strategically, consistently, and at scale.
This is where the PSHA’s role becomes not only relevant, but essential. The PSHA’s platform allows for timely, structured, and aligned private sector engagement with a mechanism that translates urgency into action, and good intentions into real outcomes.
Learn about the PSHA Tech Platform that launched in March 2025
The PSHA’s approach speaks directly to the broader ideological shift underway in humanitarian reform, recognizing that without a functional, real-time, and equitable mechanism for collaboration, public-private partnerships remain ad hoc and underleveraged.
By working together strategically, humanitarian leaders, business executives, and policymakers can redesign the system—and act on the words of Kate Forbes by turning this crisis moment into one of transformation.
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