This year, Ground Truth Solutions, CRASH and Fact Foundation spoke to people in disaster-prone areas of Chad and Nigeria to see what they thought about anticipatory action. Its proponents often tout massive efficiency and effectiveness gains when humanitarians act early enough, but what does this look like to people living in areas of overlapping, complex crises? Here’s what they told us:

Humanitarian response needs to shed ‘too little too late’ approaches in the climate crisis. Humanitarians need to get better at proactively communicating risks to affected communities and getting resources to people on the frontlines before crisis strikes. This can help people take actions that reduce losses, lessening impacts on livelihoods and speeding up recovery. Our latest research in Chad and Nigeria shows – unsurprisingly – that people in crisis strongly agree that ‘prevention is better than cure’ and that early warning is critical. People see many benefits to anticipatory action programs, especially where they strengthen existing community-led systems for protecting homes, fields, neighborhoods and villages.

However, evidence shows that anticipatory action works best in stabler contexts with predictable disasters – the more complex the context, with frequent and overlapping disasters, the less impact it can have. Ground Truth Solutions’ research with communities living in Hadjer Lamis, Chad with CRASH and in Adamawa, Nigeria with Fact Foundation confirms this. People told us that anticipatory action programs are insufficient to recover from shocks or to build their resilience to future risks. In both Chad and Nigeria, the communities we spoke with face multiple challenges, including recurrent heavy rains and floods, drought, rising food insecurity, inflation, failing crops, and health challenges - all with devastating consequences on lives and livelihoods. In Chad, unprecedented floods in 2022 and 2024 came on top of decades of political and institutional instability, linked to numerous armed conflicts. People in Adamawa, Nigeria also face daily threats linked to domestic conflict.  

People’s baseline situation is getting worse, and assistance that doesn’t build resilience to shocks traps people in a worsening spiral of crisis. People in Chad and Nigeria tell us crises are getting more frequent and more intense. Smaller disasters, which often fall under the threshold for humanitarians to trigger a response, are eroding people’s resources and ability to cope. People want the means to respond to repeated crises, and they want these before crises strike, but without longer term investments in resilience and adaptation people feel trapped in a cycle of repeated disaster response, each one less effective than the last. People told us three important things:

1) Anticipatory action is anticipating the wrong things.

In Chad, the high cost of living, declining incomes and growing food insecurity has left people increasingly unable to take their usual precautionary measures ahead of the rainy season. Even moderate rains and floods can have more devastating consequences on people’s lives than before. As one man in Hadjer Lamis explains, “in previous years, communities could recover quickly from floods because of abundant harvests. The consequences of this year’s floods will be insufferable because of the cost of living.  Finding food at the market is rare and products are expensive. Communities don’t have any food stocks in their attics or stores.” In this context, the scale of a predicted flood alone cannot determine the severity of its impacts. Socio-economic and agricultural challenges also play a significant role. These considerations are rarely included in the development of triggers, meaning support isn’t being activated when people need it the most. The limited humanitarian response to the 2022 and 2024 floods in Hadjer Lamis has left already impoverished communities struggling.

2) Anticipatory support is too small to have lasting impact.

Even when anticipatory action frameworks are activated, the small volumes of assistance aren’t enough to have a significant impact in areas where people are dealing with overlapping crises and resources already extremely stretched. In northeastern Nigeria people who received cash ahead of floods in 2023 said its impacts were extremely short-lived. They were dealing with one of the country’s worst financial crises, inflation reaching almost 30% by February 2024, and people said they were back in the same precarious situation soon after receiving the cash. With many families struggling to get by, cash was shared amongst family members, friends and neighbours. It was used to cover basic needs like food, with limited amounts left over to invest in preventative measures like early harvesting and evacuations. Overall, people felt larger amounts of cash, dispersed over a longer period of time would have been more useful in helping them ahead of floods and allowing them to adapt their farming practices to avoid crop losses.

3) In the absence of longer-term disaster preparedness measures, anticipatory action can only be a band aid.

In Chad, people shared frustration with the continued focus on short-term solutions to frequent challenges – they want long term investment in resilience and development, not cyclical disaster responses. People told us that increasing access to resilient housing, healthcare facilities, and constructing better roads and sustainable flood barriers (dykes, modern dams) needs to be a bigger priority. In northeast Nigeria, people voiced similar concerns. A man in Dasin Hausa explained that relocation is the only sustainable solution to his challenges: “there’s a need for more cash support to enable us to get alternative farmlands, so we don’t have to be solely dependent on areas we all know are very prone to disasters and keep us relying on cash assistance to recover from damages due to floods.” When anticipatory action isn’t embedded in broader investment in adaptation, development and disaster risk reduction, its impacts are extremely limited.

What is the takeaway for humanitarian actors? In complex situations, it’s critical to work with people in advance of shocks and understand what they need to survive – or more optimistically, to thrive – through multiple and overlapping crises. Anticipatory action should be more community-centred, including marginalised people, and taking into account locally led solutions. It should consider not only the scale but also the projected impact of climate shocks in each area, taking into account the other risks and stressors at play to ensure an appropriate response. Where people tell us they need long term solutions this will mean working harder to crowd in the development and adaptation support that’s really needed, building resilient systems and institutions in the most complex contexts and giving people a broader, better set of options for early action. Early response is better than late response,but helping people to escape a worsening cycle of crises should be our common ambition.

By Elisa Schmidt, Ground Truth Solutions; Neneck Allah-Kauis and Pascal Kouladoum Peurngar, CRASH; Emmanuel Atam and Talatu Adiwu, Fact Foundation