A woman seeking refuge from violence arrives at a shelter door that is now locked. A pregnant woman walks for hours to reach a health clinic, only to find it shuttered. A mother is told there is no food for her children. These scenes, drawn from a new UN Women report, are not hypotheticals but the documented consequences of the steepest recorded decline in international aid.

Based on responses from 855 women-led and women’s rights organisations across 52 crisis-affected countries, the report finds that nearly nine in ten can no longer meet current levels of need. Two in five expect to shut down, temporarily or permanently, within the next year. The funding collapse coincides with a historic peak in armed conflicts and a doubling of conflict-related sexual violence in 2025, the agency notes. Some 120 million women and girls require humanitarian assistance and protection worldwide, yet the organisations designed to reach them are unravelling.

The squeeze on aid is compounded by a parallel fiscal reality. Unesco research shows that in 113 developing countries, more was spent servicing foreign debt last year than on education. In sub-Saharan Africa, debt payments were 3.6 times higher than education spending. Low- and lower-middle-income countries have already lost 21 per cent of the education aid they received in 2023, and could lose up to 30 per cent by 2027. Viewed from London, campaigners at Debt Justice note that repayments by poorer nations hit a 35-year high, with 56 countries spending almost a fifth of total revenue on loans. The combined effect, analysts warn, is a cycle of austerity that redirects public funds away from essential services and deepens dependence on a shrinking pool of foreign assistance.

Inside the women’s organisations, staff are absorbing the shock personally. Sixty-five per cent of women-led groups report employees working without pay; nearly half cite rising burnout. Half have introduced waiting lists or are turning away women and girls. In remote, conflict-affected areas—precisely those with the fewest alternatives—63 per cent have already cut services. The organisations that remain are often the only ones able to reach women in places like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Haiti, where international actors cannot operate and where, as UN Women’s humanitarian chief Sofia Calltorp observed from Geneva, they stay long after global attention has moved on.

The dismantling of these groups is occurring against what the agency describes as a global backlash on women’s rights. One in five organisations has suspended work on women’s leadership and gender equality; more than half report declining participation of women in community decision-making. Behind the statistics, the report offers a lasting image: a woman standing before a closed shelter door, the last safe space in her community gone. For the million women and girls who have already lost access to support, that door may not reopen.