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Start Network at the Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Week (HNPW) 2025

This year, Start Network will be leading three sessions to convene diverse voices from our membership, donors, and partners to discuss key issues in the humanitarian sector. 

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The Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Weeks (HNPW) is an annual humanitarian event organised by UN OCHA which brings together participants from the UN, NGOs, Member States, the private sector, the military, academia and beyond to discuss and solve common challenges in humanitarian affairs.

This year, Start Network will be leading three sessions to convene diverse voices from our membership, donors, and partners to discuss key issues in the humanitarian sector. We will also be participating in a handful of other sessions organised by our partners.

Check out our hybrid sessions at HNPW:

Launch of the Pooled Funds Community of Practice – Wednesday 26 March, 14:00-15:30 (UTC+1), Pleniere C

Register to attend the session in person or online.

This session will celebrate the launch of the Pooled Funds Community of Practice (CoP). Start Network and the International Council for Voluntary Agencies (ICVA) have been collaborating to create a Pooled Funds CoP in a cross-sectoral effort supported by key donors, such as Jersey and the Netherlands, the Good Humanitarian Donorship, as well as interested pooled funds.

This CoP aims to bring together fund managers across a diversity of funds working in humanitarian and fragile contexts, including feminist funds, refugee-led funds, locally-led funds, as well as funds led by UN agencies, members of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, the private sector, and INGOs. Its purpose is to facilitate synergies among funds and enhance knowledge on risk-sharing, anticipatory action, accessibility of pooled funds to local actors, and coordination.

Leveraging Local, Indigenous, and Traditional Knowledge in Humanitarian Action: Addressing Challenges and Opportunities – Wednesday 26 March, 16:00-17:30 (UTC+1), Salle 16

Register to attend the session in person or online.

While local actors, including community leaders, civil society organisations, and grassroots organizations, are often among the first to respond to humanitarian crises, knowledge generation in the humanitarian sector has been largely shaped by the Global North with limited integration of local histories, experiences and priorities. Start Network’s recent report on Local, Indigenous, and Traditional Knowledge (LITK) underscores the critical importance of integrating traditional knowledge into humanitarian programming. 

This session will reflect on key insights from Start Network’s ongoing research in this area and explores opportunities for integrating LITK into humanitarian policy and practice. We will also address challenges, including the perception of LITK as anecdotal rather than empirical and the structural barriers that prevent its inclusion in mainstream humanitarian practice. By highlighting both successes and obstacles, this discussion aims to move beyond rhetoric and identify tangible steps towards systemic change in knowledge validation, funding models, and programme design.

Enhancing Disaster Risk Financing: Maximising the impact of anticipatory action through coordination and collaboration – Thursday 27 March, 14:00-15:30 (UTC+1), Salle 15

Register to attend the session in person or online.

A key barrier to more impactful humanitarian action is ineffective coordination among humanitarian actors, impacting the effective use of financial resources and the overall impact of responses. At Start Network, we have a duty to promote and foster coordination and collaboration among our own members. As a system change organisation, we also believe it is crucial to engage other key stakeholders in this conversation to examine current approaches to coordination and explore how to support and enhance tools and strategies to work together to ensure efficiency, reduce duplication, and maximise the impact of anticipatory and early action across disaster risk financing (DRF) systems.

This session will explore the coordination challenges and opportunities involved in DRF delivery and how the sector can enhance collaboration at country-level to maximise the impact of anticipatory and early action.

We will also be sharing our insights in the following sessions led by our partners:

Reach out to us at advocacy@startnetwork.org for potential engagements and partnerships at HNPW. If you are attending HNPW in-person, be sure to stop by at the Start Network booth in the exhibition space!