Annual Report 2022

Start Network has launched its 2022 Annual Report and Financial Accounts, highlighting the fantastic achievements of our members, partners, donors and staff. The report demonstrates the collective efforts our network has made to drive the sector towards a more collaborative humanitarian system.

Through five keys of systems change that we adopted in 2021, we pushed ourselves further in challenging humanitarian structures that are no longer fit for purpose.

The five keys:

  • Purpose - We continued to redefine our vision, mission, and theory of change to focus on locally led humanitarian action.
  • Power - We increased our push for resources, decision-making, programme design and implementation to be shifted to local and national actors.
  • Practice - We continued to champion a locally led humanitarian system by tweaking our programmes and activities to deliver increased accountability towards communities at risk of or affected by crises, thereby challenging traditional ‘upwards accountability’ – usually reserved for donors at the expense of impacted groups.
  • Resources - We made resources more easily accessible and available to local organisations. 21% of funds from the global Start Fund flowed to and were managed by local and national organisations to respond to and increasingly act ahead of predictable crises.
  • Relationships - We continued to enable increased collaboration and stronger relationships to grow between different players by creating space for national and local organisations to participate in global convenings, many of which remain inaccessible to the communities they discuss.

Other notable 2022 impacts and achievements:

  • We reached 2.7 million people in 48 countries
  • We disbursed £18.5 million towards emergency humanitarian assistance
  • An additional £5.5 million was disbursed through our family of funds towards crisis anticipation
  • Start Ready—our new and unique disaster risk financing mechanism—successfully implemented its first risk pool with £4 million in funding, offering protection to almost 600,000 communities at risk of crises.
  • We strengthened community-led innovation through our CLIP partnership and by supporting Start Network hubs around the world to develop context-responsive innovation projects.
  • We also made progress on our journey towards decentralisation by working with actors in countries that are considering establishing hubs (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Kenya, the Philippines, Somalia and South Sudan) so they can begin defining their humanitarian areas of focus and build structures that would enable them to achieve future hub goals.

The Annual Report and Accounts has been released in English with the Trustees Report and Financial Statements, it has also been released in abridged PDFs in Arabic, Bengali, and Spanish.