This is now gaining ground in OCHA, the just released new CERF Life Saving Guidance details activities that are considered life saving under CERF, this now includes anticipatory action from these pilots. Looking back at thee Bangladesh activation, according to Daniel the success was that “we pulled it off at all in the year of Covid, we only started a few months before flood season”.
He also highlighted that once the money was on the table, this created an incentive structure for agencies to do the research on who is going to be most affected and where. With the guaranteed funding all the systems that had been established by Red Crescent and WFP could be scaled up. Not sufficient for the scale of needs in Bangladesh but enough to reach hundreds of thousands of people. He sees this as an example for future collaboration: “There is a need for these kinds of projects to plug into a wider inter-agency system, using a common set of triggers, a common set of agreements, where then each organization can help play its specialized role in delivering the kind of relief that we have heard. While having one central place for entities CERF and other donors, to put money in to reach people much faster and much more efficiently than in the old model where we wait for the bad thing to happen, go out to assess, then start filling out our paperwork.”