Project Description
Anticipatory action (AA) is a set of normally pre-financed tools designed to act on early warning and mitigate crises before they escalate, protecting lives and livelihoods. While highly effective for rapid-onset disasters like floods and hurricanes, AA has struggled to demonstrate value for prolonged emergencies, such as drought. With climate-related events becoming more frequent, aid organizations may need to adapt AA to be more effective in these contexts.
In 2023, Save the Children commissioned IRMA to explore how AA can support households facing long-term food crises in East Africa. This research, funded by the Jameel Observatory for Food Security Early Action and the Hau’oli Mau Loa Foundation, focused on Kenya and Somalia, where prolonged droughts frequently cause hunger. Pastoral communities are especially vulnerable to prolonged drought.
The research sought to answer a central question:
- How and when can development, climate change adaptation, anticipation, and humanitarian actors best support households to further protect their livelihoods in the face of repeated or on-going food crises forecasted to worsen?
With the emphasis on anticipatory action, it was supported by the following question sets:
- What actions did households engage in independently to cope with food crises?
- What other actions could households or communities engage in with additional support?
- For each of the above actions: How should they be triggered, timed, managed, and monitored?
- How well do the key actions align with and contribute to the integrated risk management strands?
The study was informed by integrated risk management strands (i.e., disaster prevention—climate change adaptation and risk reduction, preparedness, response, and recovery) and a pastoral pathways concept (which assigns pastoral ‘success’ to four pathways ordered by decreasing household wealth: ‘Moving Up’, ‘Moving Out’, ‘Hanging In’, or ‘Dropping Out’ of pastoralism). The study captured the voices of individuals and households living through the 2021-2023 drought crisis (37 key informant interviews, 20 focus group discussions, and 33 household visits/interviews). Following field data collection, the team anonymized, translated, transcribed, and qualitatively coded the data. Trends were examined across age, gender, location, instrument, and household pastoral pathway.
Communities employed various strategies, such as migrating for water and pasture, purchasing feed, and, in Somalia, growing fodder. However, many households had to resort to harmful coping mechanisms, such as reducing nutritious meals or pulling children out of school. External support, like livestock vaccinations and water deliveries, helped but was often insufficient. Critical elements of AA—decentralized disaster risk management and trust in early warning systems—were largely missing. As a result, many households were not well-positioned to benefit from AA. Despite these challenges, the study highlighted the potential of AA to protect livelihoods, especially for households that are managing to sustain their pastoral practices.
IRMA team was composed of Lezlie C. Moriniere, Arielle Tozier de la Poterie, and Kitakaya Loisa Luyiana.
The publication can be found here: https://jameelobservatory.org/aa-in-a-crisis/