From last mile to lasting systems: a dialogue in Dakar discusses the future of anticipatory action

From last mile to lasting systems: a dialogue in Dakar discusses the future of anticipatory action

“Early warning is not enough. To save lives and livelihoods, we need to make a step forward”.

This provocation opened a side event, held on 8 June 2026 at the World Bank Office in Dakar, Senegal, to explore a deceptively simple question: how does anticipatory action move from promising pilots to a durable government-led system? The answers that emerged pointed to anticipatory action being part of a fast-maturing regional agenda, while setting out shared priorities that deserve attention from donors and institutional partners alike.

The entire chain needs to hold

Anticipatory action works when the entire chain holds: from forecast to dissemination to decision; from decision to financing; and from financing to action at the community level – and before a shock becomes a crisis.

The Senegalese Red Cross Society illustrated what this looks like on the ground. Operating across 46 departments and in more than 550 communities, it has built a model that links vulnerability assessments, contingency planning and early-warning information to anticipatory action protocols for floods, with community disaster-response teams in five communes along the Senegal River. The link is clear: anticipatory action is already embedded at the community level.

There is a cross-border dimension too, since the Senegal River forms the border with Mauritania, while its waters come largely Guinea and Mali. “Hazards do not respect borders – and neither does the preparedness architecture being built to address them,” noted Gianluca Brusco, Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS).

Community preparedness, however strong, cannot remain isolated; it must connect upwards to national institutions, for example from local contingency plans to national systems for civil protection and emergency preparedness. This determines whether anticipatory action remains an isolated project or becomes standard practice.

Financial partners such as Italy and Norway align well with this approach, supporting the entire early-warning chain, including in its most technical components such as the Early Warnings for All initiative and the Systematic Observation Financing Facility.

From experience to policy: the evidence is there

The IFRC’s experience across Mauritania, Republic of the Gambia and Senegal demonstrates that early action protocols can be more than operational tools. They can also become platforms for national dialogue, institutional ownership and the gradual transfer of leadership from humanitarian agencies to governments.

Mauritania offers a striking example. Here, the recently approved national decree embedding anticipatory action in the mandate of the Food Security Commissariat, alongside the formalizing of the Anticipatory Action Expert Group, has created an opening for public financing that a few years ago would have seemed ambitious. This was made possible not by a single intervention, but a layered process: pilot projects that gradually introduced the concept, catalytic humanitarian funding that planted the seed, technical accompaniments that built government capacity, and the regional transfer of knowledge – all of which helped the Mauritanian authorities to see their own efforts reflected in broader practice.

This is not the only example in the region. Burkina Faso and Mali approved national plans for anticipating floods in 2025; Burkina Faso and Niger are finalizing national strategies for anticipatory action; and Chad is currently undergoing one of the biggest activations in the region ahead of forecast dry periods.

The regional layer: coherence without duplication

Individual country experiences across West and Central Africa are proving that anticipatory action works. The challenge now is avoiding fragmentation and connecting these experiences into a coherent regional architecture that supports, rather than substitutes, national systems.

This is the role of the Regional Anticipatory Action Task Force (TFAA). After convening the 1st Regional Dialogue Platform on Anticipatory Action for West and Central Africa in 2025, its work in 2026 includes the roll-out of harmonized training tools in Chad, Mauritania and Senegal; developing operational workplans with national working groups; and joint projects that offer partners cost-efficient ways to pool resources and approaches.

The TFAA’s value proposition is not coordination for its own sake. Instead, it is to design regional-level tools that can help countries benefit from shared methodologies, peer learning and technical alignment, while preserving the national ownership and contextual specificity that makes anticipatory action work. In this way, anticipatory action becomes a harmonized language within and across countries.

Financing: the sustainability test

The most important signal from the Dakar dialogue was political will. Governments in West and Central Africa are not looking to integrate anticipatory action into their contingency plans because funding is guaranteed, but because they see its value and know they can mobilize resources around a solid plan. In Senegal in 2025, the government asked the humanitarian community to support an update of national contingency plans, and anticipatory action was integrated into that process. Similar dynamics are visible in a growing number of countries, including Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau and the Republic of the Gambia, as well as in those with more experience, such as Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Niger and Nigeria.

This is a paradigm shift. When governments ask for anticipatory action frameworks before financing is secured, the relationship between humanitarian innovation and national systems has fundamentally changed. Crucially, financial partners recognize that the process is robust and growing, and this attracts resources to keep moving forward. Catalytic investment, when it is well designed and well accompanied, does not substitute for government commitment; it enables it.

Sustaining this momentum requires a financing architecture that matches the ambition: predictable, multi-year resources; better alignment between national budgets, pooled humanitarian funds, development instruments and risk-financing tools; and a move away from project-by-project logic towards costed, assigned, sector-spanning preparedness plans.

One opportunity highlighted was the Contingency Emergency Response Component mechanism, which is supported by the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR). This allows governments to allocate up to 10 per cent of unspent annual project budgets for emergency response – and can be applied to anticipatory action, at the government's request. More bridges of this kind – which link development investment and anticipatory financing – are needed.

What comes next

The dialogue in Dakar produced a shared review of where anticipatory action stands today in the region, as well as a set of next steps.

Anticipatory action doesn’t work alone; it succeeds when it is fully embedded in national structures and creates synergies with what exists. Synergies with investments in adaptive social protection provide a clear pathway and straightforward examples, demonstrating how anticipatory action can be faster and more appropriate by using consolidated mechanisms (e.g., social registries); at the same time, social protection systems can be strengthened by anticipatory action investments that require it to expand and be kept up to date. Win-win solutions can be found when processes can mutually reinforce each other acting in synergy, even more in the current context of scares resources.

The TFAA needs to ensure that national working groups engage systematically with the disaster risk management process in each country. This includes efforts supported by the GFDRR and World Bank country operations, so that development financing can increasingly support the institutionalization of anticipatory action alongside humanitarian investment.

Disaster risk preparedness and anticipatory action are converging. They share the aims and objectives of strengthening country preparedness and operational capacity to prepare, anticipate, face and response to hazards. Platforms such as the GFDRR Partnership Council are the right space to accelerate this convergence.