Dear Loop supporters,

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Sadly, the Loop Governing Board recently took the difficult decision to close the Loop charity and the Talk to Loop platform permanently, across all countries and channels, from this July 2026. Sadly, with the current environment it is not possible to continue to deliver the collective service in a financially sustainable way. Funding continues to decline, civic space is shrinking and there are serious questions about the future of Aid, its validity and approach.

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Over the last 6 and a half years, Talk to Loop worked to implement a vision of how, through an open, collective, crowd sourced feedback and safe reporting mechanism power could sit more closely to communities in crisis. Using technological innovations including translation services, AI and interactive voice, this could result in a systems change in accountability.  

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The Loop mission has always been open, collective and in the service of the public good. As such we commit to making the tool and its code, the learning and the data, available for others to adapt and adopt. We are currently in the process of finding the best way to do this.

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In the meantime, a reflection on the Loop model and what we have learnt:

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We will share a full report on our learning, impact, achievements and challenges but for now we remain very proud of what we built, tested, continually improved on and learnt from while bringing our vision to fruition. Here are some of the lessons we documented:  

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1. Communities want to use Loop and will share feedback that can inform projects and policies that they might not have otherwise done through other project or organisation specific available mechanisms. 

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- In 2025, in Somalia, Loop received 163,408 pieces of feedback from communities

- Communities fed back across multiple input channels and languages, including under served languages, resulted in more women reporting protection issues and significant use by rural, elderly and young people. 

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2. Survivors and at-risk communities want to raise their voice and find channels which are accessible, safe and inclusive to get the help they need.

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- 1,142 sensitive cases were handled safely and confidentially in Somalia in 2025 

- Loop became the primary channel for sensitive reporting in Somalia, accounting for - - 92% of all sensitive reports submitted to the inter-agency CFM aggregator in Q3 2025

- 99% of people we spoke to who were referred through Loop, reported satisfaction with how Loop handled their case and an 84% satisfaction rate for organisational responses to referrals through Loop.

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3. Communities fear reporting negative feedback directly to those who provide Aid. They fear retribution in many forms and this often stops them from sharing their personal information or reporting through project or organisational level systems. 

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- We saw a high number of people reporting due to word of mouth from places where no awareness raising had occurred.

- We heard from people who had tried other channels with no success, could not find any other functioning mechanism or who feared using other channels.

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4. Organisations are more responsive when donors/ upstream partners can see the aggregated trends in reports and responsiveness in a transparent manner.

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- An institutionally backed partnership in Somalia and Somaliland demonstrated that achieving a 100% response rate to sensitive reports requires shifting from technical onboarding to whole-organisation alignment, where leadership actively integrates feedback mechanisms into core safeguarding and programming workflows. For more information on this learning read this report. 

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5. There is no ongoing verifiable data on the effectiveness of existing feedback and safe reporting mechanisms, or organisational responsiveness, it is all based on self reporting.

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6. Organisations fear the workload and implications involved if a sensitive report does come in, due to a climate of Zero Tolerance of Abuse or Fraud from donors, instead of a policy of Zero tolerance to inaction. As a result there continues to be chronic under reporting of Sexual Exploitation, Sexual Abuse, and Harrassment as well as fraud. For Loop this resulted in stronger HQ push back to integrating Loop than field level engagements. 

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7. There is also a plethora of extracted data with little direct responses back to communities leaving gaps in information and a growing distrust of service providers from communities. 

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As can be seen we have learnt a lot, have resources to share and have proven that an independent, anonymous and accessible service can result in positive change for communities. The feedback, replies, referrals, data, reports and advocacy through Loop, has had an impact on program design, funding decisions and access to services for survivors and vulnerable or excluded groups. 

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What we have done together is a testament to what is possible and how things can and should be done differently. We hope that this learning will be useful to others imagining new ways of placing communities at the centre. 

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Thank you for all of your support throughout this journey and If you have any questions about the next steps, suggestions about the future or would like to stay in contact please email Alex Ross on info@talktoop.org

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