In February an armyworm outbreak led to the significant damage of maize fields across Ethiopia. The Start Fund enabled a targeted rapid response to meet farmers’ immediate needs. Dorcas gave farmers appropriate chemicals to control the infestation and guidance on how to protect their maize from future outbreaks.
In early April, Mocoa city in the south west of Colombia, was hit with one of the worst natural disasters the country has seen in its history. Heavy rains had resulted in a mudslide that swept through the city and left 333 dead and hundreds missing. The destruction caused by the floods left 22,310 people affected.
Last week was the official launch of the G7 and G20 initiated InsuResilience Global Partnership. The partnership aims to better protect poor and vulnerable people against the impacts of disasters, by using climate and disaster risk finance and insurance solutions. It has a strong coalition of partners involved, including governments, private sector, UN and civil society organisations, such as the Start Network.
The Start Network has signalled its intention to support and join the efforts of the InsuResilience Global Partnership (IGP).
Start Network and Welthungerhilfe joined the international political community at COP23, the Bonn Climate Change Conference, to discuss how data and new financial instruments can enable aid agencies to mitigate the effects of extreme weather on communities.
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.
This guide outlines some of the conceptual questions, and practical tools, that can be used to evaluate drought risk financing (DRF) initiatives. It offers a framework for thinking about the impact of drought risk financing, along with risk financing more broadly and the wider general issue of the added value of earlier humanitarian response.
We are looking to recruit a team of consultants to conduct the final evaluation of the Shifting the Power project. This evaluation is to fulfil the project’s accountability to its primary stakeholders – the local partner organisations – and to its secondary stakeholders – the project consortia and donors (INGOs, Start network and DFID). The evaluation will cover all five Shifting the Power countries (Bangladesh, Pakistan, Ethiopia, DRC, and Kenya) and the coordination work done at global/UK level.
Over the past year, the drought emergency has shown how climate change and natural hazards are increasing humanitarian needs in Ethiopia. As communities cope with shocks in agricultural and livestock production and access to food, national humanitarian organisations working with these communities find themselves apart from the decision-making spaces.
A new publication from the Shifting the Power project looks at whether and how INGOs following their own rhetoric of localising humanitarian aid.
