One of the ways that Start Fund Bangladesh is shifting more power to local organisations is by ensuring they have more access to funding for operations costs, otherwise known as the Indirect Cost Recovery (ICR) method, this enables them to improve and develop.
Iraq is a very fragile country facing multiple political, economic, social and security challenges after the ISIS crisis. Since October 2019, the political situation has been unstable, with massive civilian protests and a gap in governance at the national level. ISIS has sleeping cells in the country, and there has been a significant increase in IS reported incidents against civilians and Iraqi security forces in April 2020.This situation has been complicated further by the arrival of COVID-19.
This paper offers a number of potential technical solutions to assessing, managing and reducing basis risk. It acknowledges that, in order to be effective, these need to be accompanied by political and coordination efforts, and a wider look at DRF operational systems that are fit for crisis settings. The authors invite further ideas and discussion on this topic, including any opportunities to test and innovate new operational designs.
Dan’s commitment to working with local actors first started when he worked for Christian Aid back in the nineties, and he has always been keen to see localisation in the Start Network agenda. Dan is now leaving War Child to take up the position of CEO at Farm Africa, but we were able to chat with him one last time about the need for system change in the humanitarian sector and how the Start Network is attempting to do this.
The monthly risk briefing reports on new, emerging or deteriorating situations; therefore, ongoing events that are considered to be unchanged are not featured and risks that are beyond the scope and scale of the Start Fund are also not featured. It is collated by the Start Network Anticipation team using information from academia and research institutes, government departments, ACAPS, global risk indexes, risk information provided by Start Members and their partners, and the media. Key risks are shared and collated each month with FOREWARN input.
Across the world, we have seen a consistent rise of disease outbreaks in the past decade and Start Fund has been instrumental in responding to many of them, including Cholera, Dengue fever, Ebola, and Lassa fever. Using project data from 12 activated Start Fund alerts and post-project learning exchanges from 2018 and 2019, we’ve developed four disease-specific learning papers and seven key lessons for COVID-19.
At Start Network we always aim to learn from experience. So, we have endeavoured to analyse the data and information from past Start Fund responses in order to present a set of lessons for COVID-19 projects.
Projects for the first five alerts with the Start Fund COVID-19 were selected this weekend by local project selection committees.
Despite restrictions on movement, limited supplies and the ever-present threat of the virus, Start Network members in the Philippines are continuing to deliver aid to the communities they work with.
Work is beginning to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19 to almost 140,000 refugees and nearby communities in Cameroon. The projects have been enabled by the Migration Emergency Response Fund (MERF), which has released funding, following a crisis alert on 20 March.
