Since the 1980s, Southern Africa has faced increasingly frequent and severe disasters, including droughts, cyclones, floods, and health crises. These repeated shocks have intensified displacement, food insecurity, and community vulnerability, highlighting the need for proactive, integrated, and locally anchored anticipatory action systems that respond to the realities of affected populations.
This approach has gained high-level political support. In May 2024, the SADC Summit of Heads of State and Government called for strengthening anticipatory action programs, while the African Regional Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction emphasized the importance of approaches that start from the risks communities actually face. The Early Warnings for All (EW4All) initiative further reinforces this momentum, underscoring that early warnings must translate into practical, life-saving actions rather than merely disseminating information.
In this context, a regional After Action Review Workshop on Anticipatory Action, titled “Anticipate, Integrate, Act: Building resilient systems for Southern Africa’s complex crises,” will take place from 25 to 27 November 2025 in Antananarivo. The workshop aims to extract lessons from the past decade, strengthen regional coordination, and improve the coherence and responsiveness of anticipatory systems at a time when crises are multiplying and intensifying across the region.
Major General Gabriel Ramanantsoa, Director General of the National Office for Disaster and Risk Management (BNGRC), emphasized that the workshop demonstrates the joint commitment of governments, humanitarian agencies, and regional actors to anticipate, integrate, and act to build a more resilient Southern Africa in the face of complex crises.
The workshop is organized under the Secretariat of the Regional Anticipatory Action Working Group (RAAWG), comprising the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), and the World Food Programme (WFP). It provides a platform to review anticipatory interventions implemented in recent years, analyze strengths and gaps, and identify solutions to make mechanisms more coherent, responsive, and better adapted to the needs of communities, particularly the most vulnerable.
Despite progress over the past decade, anticipatory action in Southern Africa must evolve to address increasingly complex and simultaneous crises that involve diverse risks, both slow-onset and sudden, with multi-sectoral impacts. Workshop discussions will focus on improving coordination between sectors, designing adaptive and precise triggers, integrating financing mechanisms, implementing impact-based activation, and involving communities and local actors more effectively in designing and implementing anticipatory systems.
Drawing on lessons from the 2024–2025 season, the initiative seeks to ensure that anticipatory action mechanisms are not only timely but also contextually relevant, inclusive, and capable of protecting the most vulnerable populations from the cascading impacts of climate and other crises across Southern Africa.
