Amid ongoing funding crises and humanitarian reform processes, finding sustainable ways to finance long-term resilience at the community level is increasingly urgent. This is further exacerbated by climate breakdown and the prevalence of multi-hazard events, which will continue to shape how the sector supports community resilience and reduces humanitarian needs. This session at the Humanitarian Networks and Partnership Week 2026 brought together humanitarian and development practitioners, as well as donors, to examine what has been tested in community-level resilience finance.
Co-Organized by UNDP, DG ECHO, and the Climate and Environment Charter Secretariat
Speakers
1) Resilience finance must be locally embedded and inclusive. Strengthening existing community networks, informal finance systems, and local markets often proves more effective than creating parallel mechanisms. Inclusivity means both considering women and other groups which require tailored needs; this means that scaling may also mean decentralisation. It also means partnering better locally by considering a broader array of stakeholders such as the private sector, local government, and development actors. Locally-led financing is more behaviourally informed (not dependent on infrastructure) by local actors and should be contextualized to the specific needs of communities.
2) Knowledge and trust are critical enablers. Risk literacy, skill building, and peer learning can significantly increase uptake of financial tools. Trusted intermediaries are key for building trust between communities and new partners for finance. Humanitarians can play a role in facilitating this process. Trust and knowledge from donors in local actors is critical for risk sharing and due diligence challenges.
3) Flexibility and innovation in financing are essential. Climate risks, particularly slow-onset hazards like extreme heat, require funding models that allow adaptive, small-scale, and locally led solutions. We must now also be innovative to do more with the constraints the sector is facing, moving away just traditional fundraising, and perhaps being comfortable with more financial fragmentation and at-times less oversight than previous models. Investments are needed in low cost adaptation measures, which are often decentralized models.