Facilitating enhanced coordination to harmonise triggers and align early action in Southern Africa

This session built upon the output of the Southern Africa Dialogue Platform and explained the four pillars of the inter-agency roadmap on Anticipatory Action for Southern Africa being developed by the Regional Technical Working Group:
1) alignment of anticipatory action,
2) harmonisation of triggers,
3) aligning financing mechanisms, and
4) advocacy.

 The RTWG is a multi-stakeholder group bringing together actors across the RCRC network, government actors, iNGOs, UN agencies and hydro-met agencies to exchange knowledge and coordinate on anticipatory action in Southern Africa.

The breakout group on trigger harmonisation reflected on the framework to characterise the hazards into lead time, trigger threshold, forecast source and the main early actions, focusing on Mozambique and Zimbabwe. University of Reading expressed better characterising the dry spells and FEWS-NET shared that they are releasing CHIRPS 3.0, which will significantly improve the reliability. The alignment of early actions breakout group discussed what alignment and coordination of early actions really looks like and how to achieve that. Zimbabwe demonstrated all the great coordination that is already happening but there are gaps in terms of reaching all communities at risk and proposed that different actors are leading in different phases of early action, are better distributed geographically and widen their scope of early actions to a broader range of sectoral impacts.
They suggested further exploring the OCHA pilot approach to coordination for AA in Malawi and further capitalizing on the regional working groups to strengthen links between national and regional level coordination.