The Humanitarian Compass: Responding to Crisis in 2025

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the suffering in our world in 2025 and don’t know where to begin, this is a guide for you. The Humanitarian Compass is a series we will publish to provide impartial, human-centered information and coverage to humanitarian crises, helping readers navigate complex global crises, highlighting where help is most needed, how to take meaningful action, and how to stay grounded in empathy.

2025

We are living through a time of profound human suffering. In Sudan, entire communities are starving and millions subjected to brutal starvation, massacres and sexual slavery. In Gaza, entire families are reduced to starvation, their bodies fading from extreme malnutrition as war and deprivation stretch into further a second year.

These are not distant, disconnected tragedies. They are real human stories playing out in the same global community we all share. With social media, our world is able to keep up with these crises on a daily basis and the harrowing videos, photos and reports online circulating daily never get easier to digest. You might feel overwhelmed, burdened the weight of it all. But in times like these, the most powerful act is to not look away. Our most powerful tool is our humanity.

Whether you can give money, time, voice, or care, there are many ways to help. This article shares what’s happening right now, and how to take meaningful action if you feel compelled.

Sudan

Photo: WFP/Mohamed Elamin

Sudan is now experiencing one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises in 2025. Since the outbreak of war in April 2023 between rival factions, the army and the Rapid Support Forces, millions have fled, and millions more remain trapped in cities like al-Fashir under siege.

With more than 30.4 million people, including 16 million children, requiring urgent food, water, and medical supplies, the situation of conflict-affected children is dire, according to the UN Relief Coordination Office.

In parts of Darfur, survivors have resorted to eating hay, animal feed or tree bark. Mass graves are filling faster than aid is arriving.

The tragedy is not just the scale of this crisis; it is the surprising lack of mainstream awareness. Sudan’s story rarely makes headlines. Yet this is a famine driven by blockade, violence, and abandonment; not drought or natural disaster.

How to Help:

• Donate to: International Rescue Committee, World Food Programme, or local Sudanese-led relief networks like the Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs).

• Raise awareness: Share stories, data, and photos from trusted sources. Tag your representatives. Use your voice to break the silence.

• Support artisans, shop consciously: Consider buying from MADE51 and others supporting displaced refugees and communities.

Gaza

AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi

An entire population of over two million Palestinians in Gaza are enduring famine-like conditions as basic necessities, water, food, and electricity, are cut off or restricted. Malnutrition is rampant. Humanitarian aid is trickling in at not even a fraction of the level needed.

1.9 million Palestinians, 90% of the population, are estimated to be displaced. Many families have been displaced multiple times. 100% of the analysed population (2.1 million) is projected to face high levels of acute food insecurity classified in IPC Phase 3 (Crisis) or above, including 1 million people facing emergency levels of food insecurity.

Ensuring humanitarian access and food aid is a matter of international law and shared human decency.

How to Help:

• Donate: You can donate via organisations such as the IRC (International Rescue Committee) or use the Shekinah House PCRF Donation page here.

• Advocate and spread awareness: Demand protected humanitarian access through petitions and calls to your government.

• Buy ethically: Support displaced artisans through platforms like MADE51.

100 Years Ago: What Have We Learned?

If we take a walk down history lane and look to where we were 100 years ago, what have we learned? In 1925, the world was reeling from the aftermath of World War I, and there were, like today, a number of crises happening in real time as the world struggled to regain footing.

• The Armenian Genocide (1915–1923) ended with the tragic deaths of over 1 million people.

• The Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) had displaced over 1.5 million people in one of the largest forced migrations of its time.

• On Aug. 8, 1925, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) brought nearly 40,000 members in full regalia to Washington, D.C., for a march down Pennsylvania Avenue in a show of force. 

• The Great Depression was a global economic catastrophe that started in 1929 and continued to 1939, rooted not only in the U.S. stock market crash but also in the fragile post–World War I global financial system. Burdened by war debts, reparations, and economic instability across Europe, the global economy collapsed as U.S. credit dried up, leading to mass unemployment, widespread poverty, and a dramatic decline in trade and industrial production worldwide.

Humanitarian efforts were in their infancy, with the International Red Cross and Fridtjof Nansen (League of Nations) leading early refugee resettlement efforts. These moments were defining. They taught the world that suffering left unchecked metastasizes, into resentment, radicalisation, and collapse. But they also showed us what’s possible when the world responds with empathy. The Nansen Passport gave stateless people dignity. Aid convoys saved children in famine zones. International cooperation, imperfect and slow, was born. These efforts laid the groundwork for what would later evolve into the United Nations, UNHCR, ICRC expansion, and a global humanitarian framework we still rely on today.

Now, 100 years later, we face crises that echo those past wounds. But this time, we are not starting from nothing. We have the tools and information at the ready. We just need the will to fight and speak up on behalf of humanity.

Conclusion: Be a Witness. Be a Participant.

This is not just a moment in history, it is the moment to respond. Years from now, people will ask what the world did when Sudan and Gaza starved.

And you will have an answer.

Whether you gave, organised, spoke out, or bought a handmade craft that gave someone hope, you were part of the resistance to indifference.

So if you are overwhelmed by the pain in the world right now, let that overwhelm move you to act. Because small actions, multiplied by millions of people, have the power to rewrite the future.

Let us not only document this era of crisis, but rise together to shape its outcome.