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The humanitarian sector is often criticised for being too top-down and for failing to meet the needs and priorities of crisis-affected people. ‘Innovation’ became a rallying cry for new initiatives, organisations and funding promises. Yet, three years on, the sector has been slow to prioritise and support local leadership or to create systems that allow people affected by disaster to have a hand in shaping innovations within their own communities. A recent research paper suggests that only 33% of humanitarian innovators consult with affected populations during their innovation processes. In response to this situation, several organisations have begun advocating for the use of human-centred design (HCD) in humanitarian innovation: bringing meaningful community participation into developing solutions, services or assistance for that community. The Disasters and Emergencies Preparedness Programme (DEPP) Innovation Labs is a diverse network of national and international humanitarian organisations, set up to identify and grow areas of innovation that come directly from communities affected by crises. The labs drew on the HCD tradition, with the aim of developing more responsive and locally-led humanitarian and preparedness programming.

Scaling sustainable innovations is a critical issue for humanitarian innovation. The added complexity and barriers faced by innovators who work in crisis areas, or in areas that are building resilience to crisis, make this already difficult task even more challenging. Far too few promising innovations have gone to scale. A failure to select, validate and implement appropriate revenue models is one of the key reasons for this. This creates a need for new insights regarding the journey to scale for innovators who lack commercial business opportunities to fund and grow their innovations.

The Disasters and Emergencies Preparedness Programme (DEPP) Innovation Labs is a two-year programme that aims to foster, and eventually scale up, innovations that address key problems faced by disaster-prone communities.

This report from Catholic Relief Services funded through the Start Fund learning grant, identifies best practices and highlights the lessons learnt following the completion of projects within Alert 195 Vietnam (Typhoon Damrey). 

This 'value for money' report from Solidarites International identifies several lessons learnt from the completion of ‘Alert 194 DRC (Cholera)’ and highlights the fundamental value about the impact of the Start Fund for the response.

The DEPP has been producing high impact results since its inception, in the spirit of the Grand Bargain’s commitment to: 25% of humanitarian funding going as directly as possible to local and national responders; the participation revolution; strengthening engagement between humanitarian and development actors; and cash-based programming. Below, are some of the achievements against the programme’s five result areas. These are based on programmatic log frame data and independent evaluations for each project in DEPP.

Donors and humanitarian agencies are thinking carefully about how to use forecasts to provide earlier support to at-risk communities before a disaster occurs. While this interest stems from a desire to reduce the growing humanitarian burden and reconsider how aid is spent on humanitarian crises, forecast-based early action is also of interest to development professionals operating in social protection, disaster risk management and risk financing: preventive action should happen anyway, but in a context of limited resources forecast-based early action can help with decisions about how to best allocate funds in advance of an imminent impact.  You can read about the Start Funds Crisis Anticipation Window by clicking here.

To prepare for the change needed in the future, the Start Network’s 42 members came together over the last six months, to co-create a vision for the network, called Start Evolves, based on experience gained over our first eight years. This proposal was unanimously endorsed by our membership in November 2017.

To prepare for the change needed in the future, the Start Network’s 42 members came together over the last six months, to co-create a vision based on our 8-year experience. This is a summary of this vision.

A new publication from the Shifting the Power project looks at whether and how INGOs following their own rhetoric of localising humanitarian aid.