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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.

Start Fund Bangladesh is demonstrating how localisation makes aid more effective and efficient. People in need are receiving help 10 days faster and operational costs have been halved.

Start Network has announced five founding hubs to be based in countries and regions affected by crises, localising resources and decision-making to improve the quality of humanitarian aid.

Reimagining Systems of Support for Aid Sector Innovators by Dan McClure with support of UNSW and the DEPP Labs.

The Disasters Emergencies Preparedness Programme (DEPP) Innovation Labs are composed of national and international humanitarian organisations under the Start Network and CDAC that support innovation emerging from communities in times of crisis. The Bangladesh DEPP lab is one of four labs recently supported by UK Aid for a two year period (2017-2019). This network of labs also extends to Jordan, the Philippines and Kenya. While each lab followed the core principles of lean innovation each adopted their own approach to applying this methodology.

The monthly risk briefing provides information on global weather, human and health events where members may consider using the Start Fund Anticipation process.

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.

A global mapping of humanitarian and disaster-related financing in the preceding paper has highlighted the range of flows received by countries experiencing crisis. Whilst this has demonstrated a varied landscape of financing mechanisms, further analysis has also drawn attention to the potential gaps in the current humanitarian system. The following paper explores such gaps between the global humanitarian caseload and existing financing flows along the dimensions of predictability, severity and timing, in order to understand the potential for a new risk finance facility for NGOs.

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.