Eastern Africa Dialogue Platform on Anticipatory Action, Mombasa, 1-3 October 2024 [photo: George Tsitati]
A relatively recent advance in humanitarian programming, anticipatory action (AA) is a form of early action that aims to intervene before emergencies turn into disasters, thus protecting lives and livelihoods.
To understand what effective AA really looks like and whether it is a solution to the complex disaster risks that humanity faces in the coming decades, this post by Tahira Mohamed and George Tsitati reflects on the discussions in Mombasa, positioning AA as part of disaster risk management (DRM) to explore what can be learned from the past to guide future priorities.
Re-historicising disaster risk management
In the early 1980s, global disaster management followed the ‘continuum’ model, transitioning linearly from emergency response to long-term development. This model failed to account for the complexity of slow-onset and prolonged hazards so, in the 1990s, a ‘contiguum‘ model emerged, promoting simultaneous relief, rehabilitation, and development, with collaboration and contingency planning as core principles.
Following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, the Hyogo Framework of Action (HFA 2005-2015) was adopted to reduce disaster losses by enhancing national and community resilience. It was succeeded by the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR 2015-2030), which refined the HFA’s focus to address evolving risks and promote recovery and reconstruction. It was revised at the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, where leaders and humanitarian actors committed to the Agenda for Humanity. This Agenda aimed to “leave no-one behind” and “work differently to end humanitarian needs,” reinforcing local capacities, anticipating crises, and bridging the humanitarian-development nexus.
In 2022, the United Nations launched the Early Warning for All (EW4ALL) initiative to protect humans from weather and climate-related disasters by investing in robust early warning systems by 2027. In this initiative, early warning systems are considered as ‘proven’, ‘efficient’, and ‘cost-effective’ approaches to save lives, especially in stable systems. Their effectiveness in variable settings, however, remains debatable. Although prediction can help understand the future and prepare in advance, it must consider complex variabilities and uncertainties, including slow-onset hazards and sporadic conflict in drylands.
Following EW4ALL, Anticipatory Action emerged, complementing wider disaster risk reduction, primarily informed by early warning information. Regions like the Horn of Africa have developed AA roadmaps, and Kenya recently launched its national AA roadmap 2024-2029. AA proponents believe disasters can be managed more effectively by harmonizing early warning triggers and predefined actions with pre-agreed finance.
But have all these robust policies, frameworks, and roadmaps lived up to their promises? A snapshot of the Horn of Africa experience provides some insights.
DRM in the Horn of Africa
The Horn of Africa faces persistent humanitarian crises due to variable climatic conditions, leading to frequent droughts, floods, and disease epidemics. Since the early 1980s, the region has endured prolonged droughts, including the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s and the droughts of 1991, 2006, and the 2011 Somali famine. Severe droughts in 2017 and 2022 caused significant loss of lives and livelihoods, with nearly 11 million livestock lost in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia in 2022 alone. Floods following heavy rainfall, especially after severe droughts, exacerbate community vulnerability. Geopolitical conflicts and ethnic-based resource skirmishes further constrain the mobility of livestock and humans, leading to continuous disasters and food insecurity. This context has made the region a focal point for disaster risk management through various policies.
The Horn of Africa nations are signatories to HFA, SFDRR, the Agenda for Humanity, and EW4ALL, guiding disaster risk reduction. The IGAD Drought Disaster Resilience and Sustainability Initiatives (IDDIRSI), established after the 2011 Somali famine, committed IGAD member states to enhance resilience. Key priorities included investing in DRM and ending drought emergencies by 2022. Significant improvements in drought management have been achieved, with institutions like ICPAC and FEWSNET providing hazard and food security warnings. The establishment of Kenya’s National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) further institutionalized drought risk management in Kenya, coordinating drought interventions, providing early warning information, and managing the Hunger Safety Net Program (HSNP), a predictable national cash transfer mechanism for vulnerable communities. Despite progress, the “never again” goal to catastrophe remains unmet.
Kenya group discussions at the Eastern Africa Dialogue Platform on Anticipatory Action, Mombasa, 1-3 October 2024
Reconciling past and present DRM: Insights from the Mombasa discussions
The discussions at the EADP were promising, with agencies sharing pilot projects on drought and flood triggers and potential actions. Here we signal some key discussion threads that deserve more attention.
First, noting that participants were primarily from humanitarian and early warning institutions, with limited representation from development agencies, we are concerned that we miss opportunities to incorporate AA into broader DRM and development programming, closing important gaps along the humanitarian, development and peace nexus.
Second, the discussion on mainstreaming AA into social protection and disaster management needs more precision. It should focus on lessons and challenges encountered linking humanitarian interventions with social protection. For instance, anticipatory capacities can be embedded within existing social protection systems through forecast-based financing, ensuring guaranteed and scalable financing. Such efforts ensure early action and provide multiple options, including financing health, education, nutrition and elderly support. However, less evidence exists on linking AA with social protection. With only 0.2% of humanitarian funding allocated for AA, treating it as a standalone disaster response could be risky given limited resources.
Third, discussions were overly optimistic in discussing coordination among AA actors with a simplistic assumption that it will always succeed, and that organizations can coordinate effectively. We need more robust definitions of coordination and who wants to be coordinated and in which ways. Although technical working groups are progressing, efforts must define how collaboration would enhance collective AA actions and responses. Communication and knowledge sharing among stakeholders were deemed fundamental for harmonized triggers and actions. Therefore, partners should be willing to share or use triggers from counterparts and share best practices for effective AA. Furthermore, previous DRM strategies, including the HFA, Agenda for Humanity and EA4ALL, emphasized collaboration and coordination of disaster risk management. Lessons need to be learnt about what forms of coordination work, including from pandemic lessons such as COVID-19 responses and how to improve overall AA coordination.
Fourth, linking AA to broader community practices in disaster management stood out firmly. While communities are often heterogeneous, meaning they cannot be treated as ‘typical’, early warnings are often translated uniformly, resulting in pre-defined actions that might not be desirable across the variable and complex systems. Community capacities to absorb, cope with, and transform in response to hazards varies based on individual vulnerability levels, geographical context and socioeconomic differentiation. This underscores that disasters are fundamentally local rather than national or regional phenomena. Central to this is recognizing that community knowledge plays a vital role in reducing risks. Approaches such as Community Managed Disaster Risk Reduction (CMDRR), which is demand-driven and owned by the communities themselves, are essential for reducing risks. This approach not only encourages community buy-in by fostering ownership of interventions but also ensures that AA initiatives are aligned with the realities of the communities, making them more responsive and contextually relevant.
Fifth, government leadership in institutionalizing AA actions into national planning was emphasized. As per the Sendai Framework, national governments are responsible for reducing disasters by developing and implementing policies and programs to mitigate hazard impacts, promote resilience, and ensure proactive and integrated disaster management efforts. To this end, collective and government-led AA should aim to save livelihoods as well as just dealing with immediate emergencies alone, as is overly defined in AA protocols.
Ways forward
Reflecting on the discussions, we propose three promising approaches to advance the impacts of anticipatory action in the drylands of East Africa:
Reconcile AA from above and below
In contrast to the predominantly top-down modus operandi that defines the regional outlook on AA, locally led anticipatory actions or “AA from below” can provide a more fertile epistemic foundation for learning and innovation. This bottom-up approach leverages local knowledge systems, contextual understanding, and community-driven solutions to address the complexities of disaster risk reduction (DRR) in ways that top-down strategies often overlook. The volatile and fragile regions of East Africa are characterised by dynamic, non-linear processes and emergent behaviours, which render the future inherently uncertain and unpredictable. In such contexts, communities have long drawn on indigenous knowledge and contextual insights to navigate the multifaceted risks posed by climatic fluctuations and intersecting challenges, such as conflicts.
Given these challenges, communities continuously develop coping strategies that embrace unpredictability within production, operational, and institutional arrangements rather than attempting to control these uncertainties. Rooted in local realities, these strategies are adaptive and flexible, enabling communities to navigate uncertainties while maintaining resilience in the face of evolving and converging complex threats. Strategies such as mobility exploit patchy and sparse vegetation through institutional and customary means, favouring negotiation, inclusivity, and interrogation over competition and exclusion. Reciprocity, shared values, norms, and social networks are essential for locally-led anticipatory actions. For example, research in Isiolo, Kenya, illustrates how the community’s moral economy – the collective sharing of information and technologies – enables members to address increasing drought threats. By harnessing these existing knowledge and practices, an effective AA can be enhanced to respond to climate risks and multiple intersecting shocks.
Break down silos
Tackling disasters is not entirely a humanitarian issue, and the importance of enhanced collaboration and collective action has been emphasized through earlier DRM strategies, including the ‘contiguum’ model, HFA and the Agenda for Humanity. Considering the complexity and dynamics of today’s crises and institutional diversities and priorities, the effort to enhance meaningful collaboration between humanitarian, development, and all stakeholders is overdue. Development as well as humanitarian agencies and national governments should incentivize ways of breaking down operational and policy silos and re-define ways of mainstreaming AA in their respective programs and interventions.
Re-design AA for multiple hazards
Notably, locally-led AA adopts a multi-hazard approach, unlike single-hazard mechanisms. Hydrometeorological hazards, such as droughts and floods, intersect with social hazards like conflicts, requiring communities to address multiple crises simultaneously despite limited resources. Consequently, AA from below does not follow a linear process in responding to these crises. As a recent SPARC report observed, communities do not simply replace one action with another in crises. Instead, they improvise continuously, making decisions with scarce resources while navigating uncertainties and variabilities. At the local level, uncertainty is not eliminated; instead, it is embraced as communities develop skilled strategies – such as mobility – to cope with unpredictable conditions.