The Protection Cluster has published an analytical note by HelpAge International on what this year’s funding cuts are doing to older people and people with disabilities. Its finding is blunt. When donor money contracts, the specialised programmes built for these two groups are frequently among the first to be scaled back or categorised as non-essential. The note looks at Ukraine and Ethiopia, and draws on interviews and focus group discussions with 12 local Older People’s Associations and Organisations of Persons with Disabilities.
In Ukraine, around 26 per cent of the population is aged 60 or older, which is why the note calls it the world’s oldest humanitarian crisis. A large share of people there have specific protection, health and mobility needs. Those are exactly the needs the cuts fall on. In Ethiopia the note looked at Older People’s Associations working inside a protracted emergency, and found funding constraints biting into locally led protection work. Across both countries the evidence runs the same way: as targeted support is withdrawn, protection risks rise for the people already most at risk.
A cut to a budget is a cut to people. Staff are the most expensive thing a large aid organisation runs, so the first thing a shrinking budget removes is the caseworker. That is the person employed to go into camps and settlements and find people with disabilities. Recruiting that worker costs money. So does training, insuring and housing them, on top of a salary — all before a single person with a disability has been identified and assessed and finally supported. A top-up sent digitally to a phone needs no caseworker and no salaries, and the person makes the call themselves. What is left when the funded programmes go is not nothing. It is the neighbours and the small local associations this note is built on, and we believe credit on a phone is how someone with a disability reaches them.
Calling for Help exists to close that gap. Digital inequality leaves refugees with disabilities cut off from help that already exists, so we send free mobile top-ups every month and the person uses them to reach whoever is best placed to help — a caseworker, a clinic, a local organisation, their own family.
We believe it is the most cost-effective humanitarian aid there is. Nobody has to be employed to find them and nobody has to travel: the credit arrives on the number they already use, once they have passed AI-based identity and anti-fraud checks. The pilot has a limited number of places while we find out what it changes.
If you have a disability and are living as a refugee, or you support someone who is, apply to the pilot. To follow what we find, join the newsletter.