CHF 1.25 Million Frozen: Switzerland Halts MSF Grants Over Chad Sex-Abuse Allegations
October 29, 2026 · Frisian News
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Switzerland's development agency has frozen CHF 1.25 million of its CHF 6.25 million annual grant to Médecins Sans Frontières after the charity failed to disclose the full scale of 59 sexual misconduct allegations from its Chad operations in full or on time.
CHF 1.25 million in Swiss public funding sits frozen because Médecins Sans Frontières failed to tell its government paymasters the full story of 59 sexual misconduct allegations involving its staff, workers, contractors and suppliers in Chad.
The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), part of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, withheld that tranche from MSF's annual CHF 6.25 million Swiss allocation after NZZ am Sonntag published internal correspondence revealing long-standing misconduct claims the charity had not proactively shared, as reported by Brussels Signal and Swiss Observer. The frozen sum is one fifth of what Bern committed to MSF for 2026 alone. Across 2024 and 2025, Switzerland paid CHF 7 million to MSF operations in Chad and South Sudan, including CHF 2 million for the specific programme now under scrutiny.
The 59 allegations, catalogued in an internal MSF inquiry, concerned operations in eastern Chad, where hundreds of thousands of refugees had arrived fleeing Sudan's civil war. NZZ am Sonntag, drawing on internal MSF correspondence, reported that staff members, daily workers, external contractors and suppliers were accused of conditioning humanitarian relief, jobs and financial assistance on sexual acts with displaced women and girls. Some allegations were corroborated. Others could not be verified because neither victims nor accused could always be identified. MSF dismissed 18 staff, including six from its Swiss section, and banned all 18 from future work with the organisation.
The timeline of what Bern was told, and when, is the core of the dispute. Swiss officials received an initial alert in November 2024, when MSF's Geneva headquarters emailed the SDC about allegations raised by three female refugees. A federal official wrote the following month that the FDFA had no urgent questions. The file was treated as closed internally by summer 2025. In February 2026, the SDC cited MSF as an example of transparency. MSF completed its own internal report in July 2025 but did not send it proactively to Bern. The scale of the scandal only became public in June 2026, when the Associated Press published its investigation, at which point the SDC demanded full documentation.
MSF representatives acknowledged the charity had not communicated the findings "proactively and early enough". MSF said it had remained in constant contact with the SDC, admitted weaknesses in its 2024 recruitment, and said it had since revised hiring, induction and training procedures and opened confidential reporting channels. The FDFA's formal conclusion, reported by Brussels Signal, was that MSF violated its contractual obligations to provide timely and comprehensive notification of serious institutional misconduct. The SDC said it had found no evidence of deliberate concealment at this stage.
The Chad episode is not isolated within MSF's wider operations. SRF reported that MSF logged 1,122 complaints of abuse and inappropriate conduct across its global programmes in 2025, of which 1,021 concerned its medical and humanitarian projects. That subset was 18 percent higher than the 864 such complaints received in 2024. Of those 1,021 complaints, 299 were confirmed as cases of abuse or misconduct after investigation. Reputations expert Hans-Jakob Boesch, quoted by SRF, said the damage in this case was undeniable given the high ethical standards humanitarian organisations claim for themselves, and that full transparency and concrete prevention measures could help restore trust.
The frozen CHF 1.25 million will remain withheld pending Bern's review of MSF's internal inquiry files. Swiss authorities are assessing potential further sanctions and have reserved the right to order an independent external review. In response, the SDC announced that statutory reporting requirements for all state-funded NGOs would be tightened from 2027, with stricter abuse-reporting clauses written into every partner contract. The gap those new clauses are meant to fill was plain in this case: authorities that paid CHF 7 million over two years were not told the full scale of abuse inside the programme they funded until a news agency told them first.
Published October 29, 2026 · Frisian News