Global Annual Results Report: UNICEF Humanitarian Action in 2023
How UNICEF leveraged $3.48 billion in humanitarian funding it received in 2023 to deliver impact for children caught in conflict and other crises.
Progress, results and lessons from a year of humanitarian action
UNICEF's Humanitarian Action: Global Annual Results Report 2023 recounts the situation for children last year and the many ways that UNICEF responded — saving children's lives, protecting childhoods and ensuring that children’s rights were upheld by leaning into local, regional and global partnerships and by leveraging flexible funding from donors.
As the report notes, the rights of millions of children to life and safety, health care, adequate nutrition, education, safe water and protection from harm and exploitation came under grave threat in 2023 due to a number of violent conflicts, climate-induced emergencies and natural disasters — and in some cases, a mix of all three.
The report details how UNICEF, the United Nations agency mandated to uphold the rights of children, worked with partners to save lives and protect childhoods by extending the long arm of its mandate to some of the most difficult places on Earth to be a child, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Gaza, Haiti, Mali, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Ukraine, along with 98 other places.
The original appeal for humanitarian funding for 2023 that UNICEF issued back in December 2022 was for $9.3 billion. Total funding received: $3.48 billion for the year.
UNICEF's impact in 2023 — by the numbers
UNICEF leveraged these resources to provide:
- safe water and sanitation to 42.4 million people
- measles vaccinations to 32.4 million children aged 6 months to 15 years
- services for the early detection and treatment of severe wasting and other forms of malnutrition, benefiting 118.6 million children under age 5
- 17.7 million children and adolescents with access to education
- community-based mental health and psychosocial support services for 13.1 million children, and interventions designed to prevent gender-based violence and support survivors, reaching 23.1 million children and women
- humanitarian cash assistance for 2.9 million households
- delivery of $893.1 million worth of supplies in preparation for or in response to emergencies
The report also highlights UNICEF's cross-cutting efforts in areas such as supporting gender equality, inclusion of children with disabilities, adolescent programming, social and behavior change and community engagement.
"The results show how UNICEF, working closely with partners, and in particular local partners, made great efforts to profoundly impact the lives of millions of children," the report states.
"Yet the global demand for humanitarian assistance in 2023 outstripped its supply: the many threats to children’s rights outpaced the capacity of the humanitarian community to fully protect children in the midst of conflict and violence, forced displacement, storms, floods, droughts and wildfires, and earthquakes and other natural disasters. As happens when demand is high and supply is lower or disrupted, the cost — in this case measured in children’s lives lost, diseases untreated, education disrupted, communities threatened — was unacceptably high."
Critical challenges to UNICEF’s humanitarian action for children in 2023 included obstacles to humanitarian access; an erosion of trust in humanitarian actors; the need for greater prioritization of preparedness; and the scope and scale of humanitarian needs outpacing the financial means to meet them, despite the great generosity of donors, the report states.
"This situation was not unique to UNICEF," the report states. "[G]lobally, the humanitarian community faced not only extreme difficulties accessing people in need, but also “one of the worst humanitarian funding crises we have seen in years.”
The work of UNICEF is funded entirely through the voluntary support of millions of people around the world and UNICEF's partners in government, civil society and the private sector. Voluntary contributions enable UNICEF to deliver on its mandate to protect children’s rights, to help meet their basic needs and to expand their opportunities to reach their full potential.
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