START Local Hub: Inception Workshop to form national and regional hubs

The India hub is an initiative in response to the global call of Start Network to facilitate the formation of national and regional hubs.

Given that, the India hub will collaborate closely with the global Start Network and other national and regional hubs of the network.

Start Network, a network of 42 aid agencies across five continents, which aims at delivering more effective emergency aid, initiated its decentralisation process at the beginning of 2018 with the purpose of enabling a wider range of organisations to join the network in order to transform the humanitarian sector. In response to the Start Network’s call for Expression of Interest (EoI), 16 organisations from India (including 7 INGO HQ, 7 L/NNGOs, 1 INGO country office and one consortium), submitted the application, out of which 13 expressed the interest of setting up either a national hub in India or a South Asia hub.

To follow-up on the process so far and to initiate the national hub development process, a roundtable meeting took place on 18 March 2019 in New Delhi hosted by CAF, Caritas India, HAI, SEEDS, and START. Total 35 participants from 27 organizations participated in this event with common thinking of shifting more power and resources to those closest to humanitarian crises.

The India hub will facilitate international actors to deliver better on their commitments made under the Agenda for Humanity, Grand Bargain, and Charter4Change. In order to do that, the India hub will particularly focus on commitments 4A: Reinforce, do not replace local and national actors; and 5A: Invest in local capacities of Agenda for Humanity, all 51 commitments of the Grand Bargain and 8 points of Charter4Change. The day long discussion came to an end with the following key points:

Network to raise funds
Increasing existing capacities of local humanitarian actors
Use of information and communication technology
To work as complementary to other networks and not as a competitor

The participating organizations expressed a positive outlook towards creating such a hub. A small core group is formed who will take the idea forward and will be working upon developing ToR and organizing the next meeting in the coming six months.