By Irwin Loy
THE pageantry of the UN General Assembly’s high-level week is over for another year. What happens next?
Politicos and civil society floated solutions to long-standing problems. Countries promised to save multilateralism in a broad pact for the future. Gaza was conspicuously sparse on official agendas but cast a shadow as tensions escalated around Israel, Lebanon, Iran, and fears of an even wider war.
Here are five trends, with humanitarian implications, that picked up steam at UNGA:
Mia Mottley’s Bridgetown pitch
The Barbados-led plan to overhaul global governance has been recoded as version 3.0, and it’s reaching beyond the climate crisis.
Prime Minister Mia Mottley unveiled parts of the so-called Bridgetown Initiative 3.0 over several UNGA appearances. It expands on earlier versions’ proposals to reform the lopsided global financial architecture – which was built for another era and still favours its wealthy creators while penalising countries on the front lines of climate change.
Mottley is leaning heavily into one new element in particular: a global tax meant to raise funds and drive investments in global public goods – everything from climate action, pandemic preparedness, digital governance, and conflict fallout.
“Whether we like it or not, most of the G7 countries are in some kind of fiscal restructuring, turbulence, anxiety – call it what you want,” Mottley said during an appearance at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, the glitzy bash that celebrates solutions, snack-sized inspo, and Clintons. “It therefore means that the level of public money is unlikely to be there on the scales that we need.”
The tax might apply to a mix of fossil fuel behemoths and renewable energy companies – “those who contribute to the problem,” she said, “or those who stand to benefit egregiously from the solution”.
And proceeds from the tax – billed as a solidarity levy by Mottley’s colleagues – wouldn’t be limited to climate. Mottley suggested the money could support things like AI regulation, pandemic preparedness, and “the consequences of war”, including cities and countries in the Americas “where there’s not a military theatre for war but where there’s in fact a level of homicides that are destabilising the functioning of societies.”
Mottley’s is not the only proposal for a solidarity levy, which has also been pitched as an alternative to fickle humanitarian funding. But there’s political capital behind it. Barbados, France, and Kenya are helming a task force exploring the possibilities. They plan to agree on a final design of the tax(es) during next year’s UNGA, and for each country’s leader to make a declaration at the COP30 climate summit, scheduled for November 2025 in Brazil.
Mottley has long been seen as a solid candidate to be the next UN secretary-general, though she hasn’t publicly expressed interest. She’s armed with a public persona and dishes up a reform agenda that world leaders and old-guard institutions find palatable. António Guterres’s term is up in December 2026, and the campaign for a woman to helm the world body – for the first time – is well underway.
South Africa is pushing on Gaza accountability, and on global reforms
Who better to call out the crime of apartheid on a global stage than South Africa? That’s the message the country’s leaders brought to UNGA.
“We believe we are the correct country to point to apartheid when we see it,” Ronald Lamola, South Africa’s minister of international relations and cooperation, said at an event hosted by Oxfam and the Ford Foundation. “And we believe in Israel, that is what is happening, particularly in Gaza and the West Bank.”
South Africa made waves last December by taking Israel to the International Court of Justice, accusing the state of committing genocide in Gaza. South Africa says Israel’s “75-year-long apartheid” toward Palestinians forms the backdrop to its case.
“South Africa has a moral duty and obligation to ensure the Genocide Convention is enforced and is implemented,” Lamola said.
South Africa, meanwhile, is a Pact for the Future believer. Passed during UNGA, the broad agreement meant to reset global governance and salvage multilateralism has been described by some as underwhelming, but Lamola sees potential.
“We believe it’s groundbreaking,” he said. “We think the pact… is a very good foundation through which we can build. Because it does speak about the transformation of the global financial architecture, financing for climate change, governance of artificial intelligence.”
South Africa is the G20 host next year, and plans to put implementation of the pact on the agenda, Lamola said.
Saudi Arabia wants to be seen as a humanitarian player
Saudi Arabia was a ubiquitous presence on UNGA’s official agenda.
It co-hosted a high-level event on the crisis in Sudan, as well as events on antimicrobial resistance. It had top billing at a leadership-level humanitarian event on “the future of humanitarian action”, where the kingdom was described as representing the Global South. There were photo ops with the UN’s humanitarian aid arm, OCHA.
Saudi Arabia also enlisted a PR firm to be its hype man during UNGA. The broad message: Saudi Arabia is a humanitarian contributor, and it wants the world to know.
With budgets squeezed and getting tighter, the humanitarian sector has long urged Saudi Arabia and other so-called “emerging donors” to pull their weight.
But there are questions about whether Saudi Arabia’s funding will be consistent, reliable, and accessible, one diplomat told The New Humanitarian. Its humanitarian contributions have been unpredictable, bouncing up and down over the past decade.
As this recent analysis shows, Saudi Arabia has been a significant, if selective, humanitarian donor for several years. Its funding has heavy strategic interests – a focus on Yemen, for example – but shows signs its scope may be widening. This year, Saudi Arabia ranks seventh among donors including the European Union, according to UN data.
Saudi Arabia upped its contributions to UNRWA, the UN’s embattled agency for Palestinian refugees, when many Western donors froze funding in response to baseless Israeli claims of mass staff involvement in the 7 October Hamas attacks. But some humanitarians point out that Saudi Arabia could have single-handedly made the agency’s funding crisis a moot point with larger donations.
Then there are the ample human rights concerns, from equality for women and girls to crackdowns on civil society and critics (including executions), to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
There’s also the problem of Saudi Arabia’s interests in the crises where its aid money has flowed. At the humanitarian UNGA event, for example, Abdullah Al Rabeeah, head of Saudi Arabia’s relief agency, touted its work “removing over 460,000 landmines and other dangerous devices” in Yemen; he didn’t mention that Saudi Arabia is a party to the conflict. And European diplomats believe “Saudi Arabia has given money to Sudan’s military”, a recent New York Times story reported.
Then again, many top donor governments fuel militarisation and conflict with one arm while funding emergency aid with the other. Humanitarian groups decide whether to refuse the money; in practice, most do not.
Philanthropy as an incubator for risk-taking
Neglected ground-level aid movements are turning to philanthropies to fund the projects that traditional donors won’t.
In Sudan, for example, homegrown volunteer aid – known as emergency response rooms (ERRs) – have shouldered the load and risk, especially in areas where the conventional aid system doesn’t reach. But these mutual aid groups struggle to receive funding, weighed down by a bureaucratic and risk-averse system.
During UNGA, a new coalition of philanthropies, including the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced a plan to fund mutual aid.
The initial pledge is modest: $2 million this year “to vetted mutual aid groups”. An existing pooled fund already promised the same amount last year, while ERR groups say they can absorb a lot more: 5% of humanitarian funding (this year’s UN-led response plan totals $2.7 billion).
The coalition (and humanitarians involved behind the scenes) say they hope the move to more direct, grassroots aid will push other donors to do the same.
The new Coalition for Mutual Aid in Sudan is not to be confused with the slightly older Mutual Aid Sudan Coalition, which is coordinating with the ERRs through a national-level council and working on direct funding channels. The two coalitions are collaborating, humanitarians involved with both groups say, though there evidently was no joint meeting on choosing distinct names.
Elsewhere, local aid groups have long looked to philanthropic funders to step in where the international system’s localisation promises to fall short.
For example, NEAR, a network of local civil society groups, is spearheading a locally managed emergency pot called the Change Fund, with support from the Hilton Foundation. Critics say existing pooled funds are too slow and fail to fund local organisations on an equal footing.
“We need to be in the driver’s seat, and our solutions need to be funded,” Degan Ali, executive director of the Nairobi-based NGO, Adeso, said at a side event on locally led development.
Still, the big philanthropies that dish out humanitarian funding are beneficiaries of the same imbalanced system that has long favoured a tiny minority in the Global North. (Full disclosure: The New Humanitarian receives funding from governments and philanthropies, including several mentioned in this piece).
Lofty ideas have lift
Negotiations over the Pact for the Future put reform on the mainstream agenda at this UNGA. Ideas for change, previously shoved to the margins, may have momentum, buoyed by years of prodding from figures like Mottley, recent wins for the climate movement, and shifting narratives.
There’s Bridgetown 3.0’s proposed solidarity levy, which has a timeline and political support.
Elsewhere, Vanuatu is supporting a push to create a permanent global citizens’ assembly in time for COP30 in 2025. The Pacific Island nation has some political capital these days, having steered the push for the ICJ to weigh in on climate change.
Security Council reform and interrogating the much-criticised veto are written into the Pact for the Future, as is the wording on transforming the global financial system.
There are also movements to reform the UN charter, revamp global environmental governance, extend the reach of international courts to promote accountability, replace aid financing with the concept of global public investment, or reform the international tax system – all among many ideas aired at UNGA.
Edited by Andrew Gully.
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The New Humanitarian puts quality, independent journalism at the service of the millions of people affected by humanitarian crises around the world. Find out more at www.thenewhumanitarian.org.
