Time to act: how Mozambique’s government and WFP are turning early warnings into life-saving action

Time to act: how Mozambique’s government and WFP are turning early warnings into life-saving action

In flood-prone parts of Mozambique, one text message can buy a family the time they need to leave and to save their most precious belongings. Working with the government of Mozambique, WFP is helping to scale up anticipatory action through PRISM, a WFP-developed app, so that forecasts lead to faster decisions, clearer and earlier warnings for communities, and safer evacuations.

“Acting early saves lives”

Joana, a farmer from Chókwè, Gaza Province, is a member of her community’s disaster management committee, a network of community volunteers supported by Mozambique’s National Institute for Disaster Risk Management and Reduction (INGD). She knows floods only too well; rising waters forced her from her home in 2000, 2013, 2024 and again in early 2026. “Each flood takes something from you,” she says. “Your food, your house, your peace”.

When a WFP team met Joana, she was staying at the Chiaquelane accommodation centre, a couple of hours from her home. She had arrived there before the floods thanks to an early warning message she received in January. As part of the disaster management committee, Joana spread this alert. “On 15 January, the warning came,” she recalls. “I told my family and my neighbours: we must leave now.”

The next day, Chókwè was underwater and it remained flooded for 40 days. Joana’s house was submerged. Her bean and maize crops, her primary source of food and income, were gone. But the warning gave her something many people never get before disasters: time. Her family grabbed what mattered most: documents, a little food, phones and clothing. They also lifted other belongings out of reach before the water arrived.

PRISM: turning warnings into action

Mozambique faces recurrent extreme weather shocks. WFP is working closely with the government to ensure that forecasts do not stay on paper, but are transformed into timely decisions that protect communities. Central to this effort is PRISM, a digital platform that helps national authorities monitor risks, track alerts and act before disasters strike.

For government officials, PRISM is not just a dashboard, but a decision-making tool. “We use data from the PRISM platform to monitor forecasting trends and track the evolving hydrological situation,” explains Isac Filimone, water resources management officer at the National Directorate of Water Resources Management (Direcção Nacional de Gestão de Recursos Hídricos/DNGRH). “This technical collaboration with WFP helps transform data into practical information that can help people to better prepare for disasters.”

WFP’s Geospatial & Intelligence Unit worked side by side with DNGRH to build the technical foundation that makes anticipatory action possible. This began with a rigorous evaluation of global flood-forecasting models against years of historical river-gauge records collected by the Mozambican authorities; this identified where and when forecasts are reliable enough to trust as a basis for action. Together, DNGRH and WFP then defined specific trigger thresholds: the points at which forecast data signals a high enough probability of flooding to begin anticipatory actions.  

The result is an automated monitoring pipeline that continuously integrates the latest forecasts, calculates flood probabilities across river stations, and sends alerts to decision-makers the moment a trigger is reached. This gives authorities the critical window they need to act before a crisis unfolds.

The 2025–2026 rainy season: a system put to the test

Between December 2025 and March 2026, heavy rainfall and upstream river surges threatened five river basins: Buzi, Licungo, Limpopo, Messalo and Save. Using PRISM, the government activated anticipatory actions several times, including twice in the Limpopo and Licungo basins within the same season. This reflects the intensity and recurrence of the flood risk during that period.

Each activation unlocked a short but vital period – three to five days – in which to act. Led by INGD and supported by partners including the IFRC and the Mozambique Red Cross Society, authorities issued early warnings, coordinated evacuations and prepared accommodation centres in advance. Food rations, water, sanitation and health items and shelter materials were distributed to affected people.

Across all seven activations, more than 20,000 people were evacuated before floodwaters arrived, and 1.4 million people were reached with early warning messages, which included actionable guidance on how to protect lives and assets. “The alert I received gave me time,” says Joana, who was one of the recipients. “Time to think, to act and to help others”.

Building trust, year by year

These results did not happen overnight. Since 2019, WFP and the government of Mozambique have worked to strengthen systems for early warnings and anticipatory action, investing not only in technology, but also in trust, coordination and national ownership. By working closely with institutions such as DNGRH, INGD and the National Institute of Meteorology, WFP has supported the development of an anticipatory action system for floods that translates reliable forecasts into timely alerts, enabling the government, partners and at-risk communities to act with confidence ahead of potential floods.

Crucially, funding from donors including the European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations, the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation and the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office has made it possible to release resources as soon as risks intensify – and before lives and livelihoods are lost. This is precisely what long-term programmatic investment is designed to achieve: not just funding individual responses, but building the financing systems, early warning infrastructure and government preparedness required for anticipatory action.

A model for the region

Mozambique’s experience is now informing similar efforts in neighbouring countries. Because PRISM and its underlying tools and methods are open source, they are serving as digital public goods for the broader humanitarian and development community, for example in Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe. To ensure these tools continue to improve, WFP is working with researchers at Harvard University to better understand how data drives anticipatory action decisions, especially how complex probabilistic information is best communicated to implementers on the ground.

For Joana, what matters is simple. She has survived four floods and knows there will likely be more ahead. But she also knows she will no longer be caught off guard. “When the message arrives,” she says, holding her phone, “I know what to do.”

Behind that message is a system built over years, powered by forecasts, grounded in local knowledge, validated data, co-designed triggers, government ownership and pre-arranged actions – all working together to give families like Joana’s the chance to act in time. That is what anticipatory action looks like when it works.