Purpose of this resource
This report shows how disaster risk financing reaches – or fails to reach – frontline actors, and identifies practical ways to close the gaps that keep timely, adequate, locally led financing out of reach.
It is built on the experience of the people who know disaster response best: GNDR’s members. Local and national civil society organisations across the Global South are consistently first on the ground when disaster strikes – and this research puts their knowledge, priorities, and lived expertise at the centre of the evidence.
Working with the Centre for Disaster Protection, GNDR surveyed its network to understand how pre-arranged and anticipatory financing reaches – or fails to reach – the organisations doing this work every day. The findings are grounded in members’ own words and direct experience: what’s working, what isn’t, and what needs to change.
The research was carried out as part of GNDR’s Localising Disaster Risk Financing initiative, delivered in partnership with and with funding from the Centre for Disaster Protection.
What the report finds
Belief in pre-arranged finance is high. Access to it is not.
Nearly 90% of respondents believe pre-arranged financing can reduce barriers to access, primarily through faster response, more predictable resources, and earlier engagement with local actors. Despite this, local organisations remain largely confined to consultation or implementation roles – with little influence over decision-making, trigger design, or financial control.
Aid cuts are hitting hardest where reserves are thinnest.
More than three-quarters of respondents report being affected, or expecting to be affected, by international aid cuts. Local and national organisations face the greatest impact, given their limited financial buffers.
Local response is seen as cost-effective – but isn’t funded that way.
Two-thirds of respondents believe local CSOs provide more cost-effective disaster response than alternatives, citing proximity to communities, contextual knowledge, rapid mobilisation, and lower overheads. Funding flows don’t yet reflect that.
Seven recommendations
The report’s recommendations are directed primarily at donors, INGOs, and governments — the funders and decision-makers who shape access to pre-arranged finance.
- Partnerships of intent, not of expedience — where local actors are involved in pre-arranged finance today, it’s typically limited to soft consultation, not design, targeting, or financial management. CSOs need to be meaningful participants in governance and decision-making, setting the agenda rather than serving it.
- Glue for a fractured system — fragmented funding and siloed programme design risk gaps and duplication across the disaster cycle. Pre-arranged finance should support coherent, end-to-end engagement, from risk reduction through to recovery.
- Capacity building: gap or trap? — access barriers, not capacity gaps, are the primary constraint local actors face. Capacity development has real value, but it shouldn’t be used as a precondition, alternative, or delay tactic for funding and delivery.
- Focus on fragility — more than 80% of respondents operate in contexts of fragility, where local CSOs are often the only actors able to reach those in need. Scaling participative pre-arranged finance here is a distinct opportunity to act faster on the shocks that hit hardest.
- A two-way conversation — pre-arranging finance should shift existing power dynamics, moving CSO engagement from afterthought to full participation: earlier coordination, clearer roles, and a seat in the rooms where decisions are made.
- Risk sharing, not risk shifting — complex application and compliance requirements favour larger, well-resourced organisations and treat local actors as a high-risk proposition. Funders need to simplify requirements and share risk with CSOs, not offload it onto them.
- An efficiency multiplier — most respondents have already been, or expect to be, affected by aid cuts, hitting smaller CSOs hardest. Their proximity, contextual knowledge, and lower overheads make them a more cost-effective route for disaster response when resources are stretched.
Full detail on each recommendation, and the actions that follow from it, is set out in the report – including specific considerations for policymakers, donors and financial institutions, and DRR practitioners.
Methodology
This research is grounded in direct input from GNDR members – the local and national CSOs who manage and respond to disaster risk day to day. Rather than starting from external assumptions about what frontline actors need, the survey was designed to surface members’ own experience: their organisational profiles, the funding sources they actually rely on, their awareness and use of pre-arranged finance, how predictable their response funding really is, and the barriers they face in accessing it directly.
Because disaster risk financing is technical and unevenly understood across the network, the process began with two orientation webinars, giving members a shared grounding in key concepts before they were asked for their views. Clear, standardised definitions – aligned with UNDRR and the Centre for Disaster Protection – were provided throughout, so that responses reflected genuine experience rather than differing interpretations of the terminology.
The survey combined closed questions, to generate comparable data across the network, with open-text questions, to capture members’ own words and context in full. It was administered anonymously and deliberately prioritised representation from the Global South, ensuring the findings reflect the perspectives of those most affected – not just those most resourced to respond to a survey.
Project funded by
Centre for Disaster Protection
This report and our Localising Disaster Risk Financing project has been made possible with the support and funding from the Centre for Disaster Protection.
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