Scaling up Anticipatory Action in the Eastern Africa Region: What are we doing?

Actors in Eastern Africa are generating ideas and solutions to support the scaling of up AA in the region. The knowledge sharing session was facilitated by Brenda Lazarus, FAO, Emergency Needs Assessment and Early Warning Advisor, Sergio Innocente, FAO, Regional EarlyWarning-EarlyAction, Preparedness and Response Advisor, Maurine Ambani, WFP, Eastern Africa FbF Regional Coordinator, and Sheila Chemjor, Netherlands Red Cross, Response Preparedness Advisor.

To address AA, three pertinent questions were discussed:

1. What are organisations doing in the areas of hazard focus, coordination structures, capacity building, financing, implementation and any other intervention?
The kinds of hazards being addressed are floods, drought, desert locusts and coastal erosion. In terms of coordination structures, there are national, regional and global platforms as coordination is on-going at different levels. There is also community capacity building on focused based action which is critical in ensuring that local communities are involved in AA. There are also several financing instruments being implemented in the region.

2. What has been achieved so far and what challenges are encountered?
An FbF decision making tool (Maproom) is used in the Somali Region in Ethiopia, WFO reached 14,625 beneficiaries in the Somali Region with anticipatory cash while identification of AA at subnational level and being able to differentiate them from early response challenges is happening as well as cash interventions. Challenges encountered include financing especially when actual disasters are happening, there is limited understanding of AA while implementation of activities was hindered by the restrictions of the COVID 19 pandemic.

3. What future plans do you have on Anticipatory Humanitarian Action and potential areas of collaboration?
These include scaling AA to involve more vulnerable locations, integrate AA systems into government systems especially financing, build capacity to implement AAs and also test them against regular humanitarian response to determine efficacy of AA. Areas of collaboration include involving universities in the documentation of AA, investing more in co-production of forecast products, strengthening information sharing among the wide spectrum of actors.