Madagascar is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, experiencing frequent droughts, floods, and increasingly severe tropical cyclones. Between 2000 and 2024, more than 50 cyclones affected the country, impacting over six million people, including large numbers of children. During the pilot phase of the Today & Tomorrow Initiative, cyclones Freddy and Cheneso in early 2023 alone left more than one million children in need of humanitarian assistance and displaced tens of thousands of families. Widespread poverty, high rates of child malnutrition, dependence on rain-fed agriculture, and limited investment in infrastructure further heighten children’s exposure to climate-related risks and constrain household capacity to adapt.
Children in Madagascar face overlapping economic and non-economic losses as climate shocks often occur alongside slow-onset stresses such as drought. Damage to water, sanitation, and hygiene systems increases disease risks, while crop losses and restricted access to natural resources undermine livelihoods, deepen food insecurity, and intensify poverty. In many affected households, negative coping strategies have emerged, including withdrawing children from school and early marriage of girls, leading to heightened risks of exploitation, violence, and long-term loss of educational opportunity. Displacement and destruction of school infrastructure have driven rising dropout rates since 2021, while repeated shocks have caused lasting psychological harm and weakened children’s future resilience.
The country’s disaster response framework is guided by national contingency planning and sector-specific mechanisms, but existing assessment and financing approaches struggle to capture non-economic losses such as child protection risks. Short, inflexible funding cycles and siloed sectoral allocations limit the ability to respond to complex, interconnected impacts across education, health, nutrition, and protection. As a result, sustained and integrated responses that prioritize children’s needs remain difficult to implement, particularly in the aftermath of repeated climate shocks.
To address these challenges, Madagascar became one of eight countries piloting the Today & Tomorrow Initiative between 2023 and 2025. Developed by UNICEF and partners, the initiative is designed to bridge humanitarian response and long-term development through a flexible, integrated financing model. It combines grant-based funding for preparedness and resilience-building with parametric insurance that enables rapid response to cyclone impacts. This approach allows for timely support to children and families while also addressing structural drivers of vulnerability.
Under the initiative, parametric insurance provides fast-disbursing funds triggered by predefined cyclone intensity thresholds, enabling resources to reach affected communities within days rather than weeks or months. Since the pilot began, multiple qualifying cyclones have resulted in rapid payouts, supporting immediate recovery and reducing delays that often exacerbate harm to children. This mechanism complements traditional humanitarian assistance and reduces reliance on lengthy post-disaster assessments.
A central feature of the initiative is its strong child-responsive focus, including investments in community- and child-led resilience-building. School-based disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation activities have equipped children, adolescents, and educators with skills to anticipate, prepare for, and respond to climate hazards. By engaging children directly, the initiative strengthens local ownership, builds psychosocial resilience, and reinforces protective systems at the community level.
Results from the Madagascar pilot show that flexible, integrated financing can effectively address both immediate needs and longer-term resilience. The initiative supported continuity of education, health, and nutrition services, strengthened preparedness at community and school levels, and enabled thousands of children to return to learning after disasters. Its cross-sectoral design allowed responses to reflect the cascading nature of climate impacts rather than treating losses in isolation.
The Madagascar experience demonstrates that innovative finance, including the combination of parametric insurance and grant-based funding, can play a critical role in child-responsive disaster risk management. While parametric insurance alone cannot address slow-onset climate stresses or underlying vulnerability, its integration with longer-term resilience investments offers a more comprehensive approach to loss and damage. By centering children in both rapid response and preparedness efforts, the Today & Tomorrow Initiative provides valuable lessons for designing climate finance mechanisms that protect vulnerable populations and strengthen resilience in high-risk settings.
