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  • Publication | 2025

Humanitarian action: Global Annual Results Report 2024

Highlights:

Conflict, climate emergencies and natural disasters continued to be calamitous for the realization of children’s rights in 2024. Children were killed and injured; suffered other grave violations of their rights; and were forcibly displaced. They were malnourished; they were left without healthcare; and their education was disrupted. For many of them, their prospects for a childhood free from fear were shattered. UNICEF estimated a total of 183.5 million children required humanitarian assistance during the year.

In 2024, UNICEF achieved the following results in humanitarian settings:

  • Clean water and sanitation for 41 million people;
  • Measles vaccinations for 24.7 million children;
  • Early detection and treatment of wasting and other forms of malnutrition benefiting 109.3 million children under 5 years of age;
  • Access to education for 9.2 million children and adolescents;
  • Community-based mental health and psychosocial support services for 22.3 million children, and interventions to prevent gender-based violence and support survivors for 17.7 million children and women;
  • Humanitarian cash assistance for 3.6 million households;
  • Delivery of $1.234 billion worth of supplies in preparation for or in response to emergencies.

The results for children were made possible through the support of our resource partners. In 2024, UNICEF received $3.02 billion in humanitarian funding, resources that contributed to saving the lives and improving the prospects of many children and families. Resources that were provided as flexible funding – global humanitarian thematic funding, regional humanitarian thematic funding, or country thematic funding – provided UNICEF with maximum flexibility to respond to emerging and chronic needs of children in some of the worst places on earth to be a child.

The present report describes the humanitarian situation of children and how UNICEF engaged with partners at the local, regional and global levels to save lives, protect childhoods and ensure that children’s rights were upheld.