As 2025 began, the humanitarian system entered a year of profound reckoning. At the start of the year, the global humanitarian community set out to assist more than 180 million people affected by conflict, climate shocks and displacement. Almost immediately, however, those ambitions collided with unprecedented budget cuts across the humanitarian system, forcing painful trade-offs, reduced operations and a fundamental reassessment of how much more must be done with far fewer resources.
These pressures were visible not only in field operations, but also across the humanitarian information landscape. At ReliefWeb, we observed that the overall volume of humanitarian updates published in 2025 declined by about 20 percent year-on-year. Even more strikingly, the number of job vacancies published on the platform fell by approximately 65 percent compared with the previous year - a stark indicator of contraction, lost capacity and uncertainty across organizations of every size.
Behind these figures are real consequences: fewer assessments, delayed analyses, smaller teams and reduced visibility for crises struggling to compete for attention and funding. And yet, thanks to the commitment of organisations and frontline workers under extraordinary pressure, humanitarians still managed to reach nearly 98 million people worldwide in 2025.
ReliefWeb’s Quiet but Profound Transformation
While the external environment was growing more constrained, ReliefWeb itself was in the midst of a major internal transformation. Over the past two years, the platform has undergone a substantial overhaul - one that is largely invisible to visitors, yet fundamental to how ReliefWeb functions today.
User experience research was central to guiding this transformation. By listening closely to humanitarians, we reshaped workflows, simplified complexity and focused investment where it would have the greatest impact.
Withstanding the Funding Shock
As part of a new staffing strategy designed in early 2024 to ensure long-term sustainability, we had to bid farewell to nearly two-thirds of the team in 2025. This was a deeply difficult and emotional goodbye and one that came with real human cost. Colleagues who had shaped ReliefWeb for years left with professionalism, generosity and a shared commitment to the mission.
Yet that strategy proved crucial as ReliefWeb was not immune to the funding cuts that intensified throughout 2025. The project was able to withstand the funding shock because critical decisions had been taken nearly a year before the crisis fully unfolded:
- An aggressive push for automation, replacing labour-intensive manual workflows with scalable systems.
- A new staffing model, prioritising flexibility, cross-skilling and resilience.
These choices proved decisive. In just 12 months, ReliefWeb has improved operational efficiency by more than 50 percent, significantly reducing both total cost of ownership and cost per transaction. The original efficiency target for 2025 was 24 percent - already ambitious - but this figure was more than doubled as the urgency - and opportunity - created by the funding crisis accelerated change.
This internal transformation would not have been possible without a remarkable team of project managers, developers and editors who embraced change, learned new skills and thoughtfully integrated AI tools into their work. Their openness, professionalism and willingness to evolve ensured that ReliefWeb did not simply survive 2025, but emerged stronger.
Thirty Years In - Ready for What’s Next
Few digital platforms - inside or outside the humanitarian sector - have endured as long. ReliefWeb predates Google, which launched in 1998, and Wikipedia, founded in 2001. Over three decades marked by successive waves of technological change, shifting humanitarian practice and evolving expectations around access to information, ReliefWeb has continued to adapt while staying anchored to a clear mission: enabling better decisions for people affected by crises.
Today, as conversations around the Humanitarian Reset and the Humanitarian Data Collaborative advance, ReliefWeb is well positioned for its next chapter. The platform represents a unique and irreplaceable asset for the humanitarian community:
- More than three decades worth of curated humanitarian information;
- More than 1.1 million humanitarian updates, reports, maps and more;
- Contributions from almost 8,000 organizations; and
- Approximately 1.2 terabytes of trusted, high-quality data.
The potential use cases - spanning situational awareness, analysis, prediction, research, policy and AI-assisted decision support - are immense.
Looking ahead, we are exploring how to make this high‑quality, curated, unstructured data more accessible and usable through next‑generation services, including a Semantic Search API. This work builds on the strong foundation of ReliefWeb’s existing API, which recorded 238 million queries in 2025 alone - clear evidence of the monumental demand for trusted humanitarian information at scale.
At the same time, the launch of a new Publish API marked an important evolution for ReliefWeb: making the platform fully bidirectional. For many years, humanitarian organizations have been able to pull information from ReliefWeb to power their own tools, dashboards and analysis. With the Publish API, information can now flow in both directions. Organizations can not only access ReliefWeb content programmatically, but also submit reports and updates directly from their own systems, reducing manual work, speeding up publication and improving consistency.
At a time when capacity is constrained and needs are growing, enabling information to move more easily between organizations is not a technical upgrade: it is a systemic one.
If your organization could benefit from such capabilities, we would welcome the conversation.
An Ethical Imperative
The lessons of 2025 extend beyond ReliefWeb. What this year has made unequivocally clear is that doing more and doing better cannot be a reaction to financial pressure alone. It is an ethical humanitarian imperative, pursued consistently - especially in moments of relative stability.
Efficiency, innovation and user-centered design are not cost-cutting exercises; they are responsibilities owed to people affected by crises. As ReliefWeb enters its fourth decade, that principle will continue to guide our work - because in a world of growing needs and dwindling resources, there is no alternative.