Sudan again tops International Rescue Committee crises watchlist

Sudan – for the second year in a row – topped a 2025 watchlist of global humanitarian crises released by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) aid organization on Wednesday, followed by Gaza and the West Bank, Myanmar, Syria and South Sudan.

While Afghanistan is no longer in the top 10 on the Emergency Watchlist for this year, after being ranked third in 2023, the country still features in the unranked second half this year – between 11 and 20 on the list. 

According to the report, the improvement can be attributed to various factors including the economy having now settled at a low-level equilibrium and because of crises in many other countries deteriorating rapidly.

The report stated that Afghanistan’s economic crisis continues to cause some of the highest rates of humanitarian need worldwide and that growth is being held back by a number of factors. These include the country’s economic isolation, particularly the suspension of most development funding (which previously subsidized Afghanistan’s spending on public services by an estimated 75%), the lack of progress on unfreezing the Afghan central bank’s frozen funds (held in a Swiss-based trust fund), and the impact of sanctions and international restrictions on foreign financial inflows.

The New York-based IRC began the watchlist more than 15 years ago as an internal planning tool to prepare for the year ahead, but chief executive David Miliband said it now also served as a call to action globally.

The report said 305.1 million people around the world are in humanitarian need – up from 77.9 million in 2015 – and that the 20 countries on the IRC watchlist account for 82% of them. Miliband described the numbers as “crushing.”

“There are more resources to do more good for more people than at any time in history. This makes it all the more bewildering that the gap between humanitarian need and humanitarian funding is also greater than ever,” he wrote in the watchlist report.  

The report said the humanitarian crisis in Sudan was the largest since records began and that the country accounts for 10% of all people in humanitarian need, despite being home to just 1% of the global population.

War erupted in April 2023 from a power struggle between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces ahead of a planned transition to civilian rule, and triggered the world’s largest displacement crisis.

The remaining 15 countries on the IRC watchlist are: Lebanon, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Mali, Somalia, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Niger, Nigeria, Ukraine and Yemen.