Current international aid accounting systems do not enable easy tracking of donor commitments and funding specific to young women and girls in crises. Therefore, this report uses multiple data points and proxies to interrogate this support, including aid information published in the OECD Development Assistance Committee’s Creditor Reporting System (CRS) database; to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) open data standard; and by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)’s Financial Tracking Service. It also shares insights from new interviews with experts and activists in three case study countries – Afghanistan, Sudan and Ukraine – which reflect the role of young women and girls, and young feminists, in humanitarian responses and the challenges they face in accessing resources from the same international aid system that’s pledged to support them among other local actors.

These findings echo other research that has shown a lack of data that is disaggregated by age and gender in the humanitarian sector, and within international aid more generally4; accountability gaps in responding to sexual abuse by humanitarian workers for international agencies and NGOs; as well as challenges faced by women working in this sector.5 These trends represent systemic failures in the international response to humanitarian crises that must and can be corrected. To support more gender-just responses to crises, this report critically analyzes the status quo, and what’s needed to change it, from an intersectional feminist perspective that prioritizes historically marginalized groups having the resources they need to build resilience.