FINANCIAL FLOWS MAPPING PAPER 1

This paper provides a summary mapping of the disaster risk financing, humanitarian and wider funding streams that may be relevant to the implementation of an NGO risk financing facility (the Start Financing Facility). The vision for the Start Financing Facility is to provide a financial infrastructure to the Start Network which will allow members to deploy ‘donor money at scale, in timely, predictable and efficient ways’ to support them in protecting communities at risk (Start Network, 2019). This paper analyses how funding currently flows within the humanitarian sector, to what contexts and disasters, from what sources and to which actors, for what kind of sectoral interventions.

The Start Network is embarking on an ambitious design process for the Start Financing Facility (SFF); envisaged as the future financial infrastructure for the network. The long-term goal is for the SFF to incorporate existing Start Network funding mechanisms as well as new national and global instruments to provide a continuum of funding that will enable frontline humanitarian actors to better support communities at risk.

This paper summarises and extract the most relevant findings from these three papers, and lays out some of the potential implications for the design of the SFF. These are preliminary findings only and will be complemented by country-level consultations to surface field-level and members’ perspectives on the needs and niche of the SFF.

2. ANALYSING GAPS IN THE HUMANITARIAN AND DISASTER RISK FINANCING LANDSCAPE

What are the gaps in the humanitarian financing landscape? This second question was addressed by doing a gap analysis of the global humanitarian caseload versus humanitarian financing flows to surface and quantify the gaps between needs and allocation of resources. The analysis is structured along three main dimensions typical to the development of Disaster Risk Finance strategies; predictability (in what form is funding required), severity (for what scale of events) and timing (at what point in a crisis).

3. ANALYSING THE START FUND CASELOAD

How does the Start Fund case-load compare to the wider humanitarian financing landscape? This question was addressed by analysing the database of over 300 alerts to the Start Fund, along the three dimensions outlined above. The intention was to identify the extent to which the Start Fund caseload mirrors, or differs from the global humanitarian gap analysis.