FINANCIAL FLOWS MAPPING PAPER 3

The Start Fund is a collective mechanism, allowing Start Network members to access rapid financing for crisis anticipation and response. Its focus is on underfunded small to medium scale crises, spikes in chronic humanitarian emergencies, and forecasts and early action / anticipation for impending crises (Start Network, 2019b). Between its inception in 2014 and mid-March 2019, the Start Fund was alerted 311 times. Out of these, 209 alerts were successfully activated, resulting in a total of US$ 65.6 million awarded for anticipation and response in 60 countries. Building on a global mapping of humanitarian and disaster-related financial flows, this paper analyses past Start Fund alerts and allocations considering the predictability, severity and timing of the Start Fund caseload.

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. MAPPING FINANCIAL FLOWS TO HUMANITARIAN CRISES

The first paper attempted to answer this by conducting a summary mapping of financial flows to humanitarian crises, by types of context, recipient, sector and other parameters. This also included a survey of key disaster risk financing and wider funding flows that may be relevant.

3. 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).