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The DEPP closed two years ago this month. Many articles were published on its achievements and the independent evaluation by Harvard Humanitarian Initiative drew attention to these as well as some of the challenges including its sustainability. As part of our 10-year celebrations, the Evidence and Learning team of the Start Network have been finding out “what happened next” following the close of the DEPP by speaking to some of member organisations and other stakeholders who were involved in the programme.

Here we talk with Sana Zulfiqar who told us about the continuation of the work of the DEPP and how it has led to new initiatives in Pakistan and the wider region. Sana has been able to push forward many of the Start Networks initiatives in localisation and “shifting the power”.

Here Saeed Ullah Khan shares some of his reflections on the achievements and challenges of Start Network’s Disasters and Emergencies Preparedness Programme (DEPP) in Pakistan, his observations on its continuing legacy and his suggestions on how these efforts could be further improved.

The Transforming Surge Capacity project was one of the Start Network DEPP projects. We asked Pamela Combinido, a local consultant tasked with evaluating the programme in the Philippines, about her involvement in the project and its major achievements.

Hitendra Solanki, Action Against Hunger’s Project Lead for the Mindfulness & Wellbeing Project urges NGOs to act now to protect worker’s mental health and wellbeing.

As the Disasters Emergencies Preparedness Programme (DEPP) comes to a close, we have summarised key crisis responses that the DEPP has worked on and the how the DEPP projects impacted the communities.

The region of the Sahel in East Africa has suffered recurring droughts since the 1980s, devasting harvests, economies and traditional farming ecosystems. SOS Sahel Ethiopia, a national Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), works to improve the living standards of smallholder farmers.

The PHEP project was set up to better prepare and prevent disease outbreaks in Gambella, Ethiopia. Below we introduce some of the people who were trained by the project.

The PHEP project, funded by UK aid through the Disasters and Emergencies Preparedness Programme, was set up to strengthen the system for reporting diseases, to better anticipate and respond to outbreaks.

When humanitarian disasters happen, aid needs to be rapidly brought to the centre of the crisis zone and concentrated there until the situation has stabilised. Surge capacity measures how quickly and effectively this surge of temporary aid can be brought to a disaster zone, and how smoothly it can be scaled down again afterwards.