What communities have taught us about effective and accountable humanitarian aid in Chad

Chad is facing a severe and deepening humanitarian crisis. In 2025 alone, nearly 7 million people, around 40 per cent of the population, required humanitarian assistance. Needs are expected to rise further in the coming years, driven by escalating food insecurity, climate-related shocks, health emergencies, conflict, population movements, and protracted displacement and refugee crises. At the same time, overall humanitarian funding is declining, placing significant additional pressure on already stretched response systems. As of October 2025, only 21 per cent of the Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) for Chad had been funded.

In this challenging context, Concern Worldwide in Chad and Ground Truth Solutions partnered in 2025 to explore how humanitarian and early recovery programming can be improved in practice, based on how communities themselves define aid quality. The joint initiative sought to move beyond listening alone, developing a structured framework that enables community perspectives to be discussed, prioritised, and translated into concrete, feasible improvements while explicitly recognising the operational and resource constraints faced by humanitarian actors.

The findings highlight a set of cross-cutting factors that shape both the impact and acceptability of humanitarian responses in resource-constrained settings. From the perspective of affected communities, the quality of aid is determined by its ability to meet essential needs at the right time; its contribution to autonomy and longer-term resilience; the meaningful involvement of communities in decisions that affect their lives; and clear, regular, and transparent communication.

This report is intended as a practical decision-making tool to support humanitarian actors, donors, and partners to make choices that are more coherent, accountable, and better aligned with the expectations and lived realities of people affected by crisis in Chad.