Acting early, but to what end? Clarifying the promise of anticipatory action

As the humanitarian sector races to scale up anticipatory action, evidence warns us to be precise about what it can and cannot deliver. At the heart of this is a persistent question: when does anticipatory action mainly improve short-term welfare, and when can it protect livelihoods that can contribute to longer-term resilience?

Among the growing number of impact evaluations for this approach, evidence from Bangladesh, Mongolia, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria and Somalia sheds light on these distinctions. The findings show that the effects of anticipatory action – mainly in the form anticipatory cash transfers – vary widely by context. Impacts are primarily shaped by the severity of the shock, the design and scale of the intervention, and the opportunities households have to act early.

This blog summarizes our synthesis of the evidence on what rigorous impact evaluations actually show to date, and what these insights mean for designing anticipatory action that is realistic and fit for purpose.

When is anticipatory action just earlier aid?

Some of the clearest evidence comes from rapid-onset floods in Bangladesh and Nepal, which compared anticipatory cash transfers with post-shock transfers. Anticipatory cash improved people’s food security and well-being right after the shock. Yet once the post-shock group received support of the same value (41 US dollars in Bangladesh; 115 US dollars in Nepal), the outcomes quickly converged.

In these cases, anticipatory action is best understood as earlier aid rather than different aid. The timing matters in so far as receiving pre-shock support reduces short-term hardship, for instance before markets tighten or households take on high-interest debt. But it does not appear to enable livelihood protection that can support quicker recovery or longer-term resilience.

This is not a failure of anticipatory action per se; rather, it reflects the nature of moderate, rapid-onset shocks and the modest transfer sizes involved. In these contexts, the primary value of anticipatory action is accelerating welfare gains and preventing acute suffering earlier, not enabling fundamentally different livelihood outcomes.

When does anticipatory action protect assets and livelihoods?

A different pattern emerges when households face more significant risks of losing productive assets. In Mongolia, anticipatory cash (of 236 US dollars), paired with veterinary kits, helped herders prevent large livestock losses during extreme winters, thus protecting a critical asset base that underpins their future income. In Nigeria, a substantially larger anticipatory transfer (400 US dollars) enabled households to reinforce shelters, safeguard assets, and prepare for possible displacement ahead of severe flooding that was layered on top of conflict risks. Households could not have taken these actions once the flood was fully under way.

In such settings, the value of anticipatory action lies less in reducing short-term hardship and more in preserving people’s future options. Early assistance expands the decisions households can make before losses accumulate, enabling livelihood protection in ways that reactive aid cannot replicate.

What influences whether anticipatory action delivers welfare gains or livelihood protection?

Across the available evidence, three factors consistently shape which type of outcome anticipatory action is likely to deliver.

1. Severity of the forecast shock

Moderate floods in Bangladesh and Nepal severely disrupted daily life but did not threaten widespread livelihood collapse. Anticipatory assistance helped households cope, but there were few opportunities or incentives for recipients to take major protective actions.

In contrast, extreme winters in Mongolia and combined flooding and conflict risks in Nigeria created immediate dangers to people’s livestock, housing and income. In those settings, households had both the motivation and need to use anticipatory cash for forward-looking, risk-reducing actions.

2. Design and scale of the anticipatory intervention

The size and delivery structure of anticipatory cash transfers shape what households can do with their assistance. Relatively large lump-sum payments appear more likely to allow protective actions that require larger expenditures, while smaller instalments appear better suited to helping households cover food and basic needs.

Research in Somalia illustrates this starkly: lump-sum transfers reduced livestock losses ahead of a drought, while multiple tranches did not. Assistance must be structured to match the cost and timing of protective actions.

3. Presence of clear, actionable windows for anticipatory action

In some crises, there are obvious, time-bound actions households can take if they have sufficient resources early on. This can include reinforcing shelters, moving livestock, stockpiling fodder or preparing for displacement.

In slow-onset or multi-hazard environments, options are often far less clear. During the 2021 drought in the Horn of Africa, for example, Somali pastoralists faced simultaneous threats – including conflict, flash flooding and market disruptions – that made many actions high risk or potentially counterproductive. Cash transfers alone, however timed or structured, could not have overcome these constraints.

What does this mean for practitioners?

Evidence suggests that anticipatory action, like any other approach, must be used strategically. In some contexts, it is an effective welfare intervention that reduces people’s suffering earlier. In others, it can protect assets, preserve livelihoods and potentially reduce future vulnerability. But these two functions rarely occur in the same place or under the same design.

Where shocks are moderate and transfer sizes are modest, anticipatory action should be understood – and perhaps valued – as a way to deliver welfare benefits earlier. The convergence of consumption smoothing and other outcomes with reactive assistance is to be expected. In these cases, the key question becomes whether the cost of acting early is justified by the value of reducing hardship sooner. This is an area where more and better cost-effectiveness analysis is clearly needed.

Where shocks threaten major losses and create clear opportunities for acting early, anticipatory action should be designed with these objectives in mind. For example, anticipatory cash transfers need to be large enough, and delivered in ways that provide sufficient liquidity upfront, to allow households to take preventive steps before losses occur.

Across the evidence, the core lesson is to match the design of anticipatory interventions with the outcomes they can realistically deliver. Overextending the model, for example by expecting livelihood protection where it is unlikely, is both costly and counterproductive.  As the humanitarian system faces tightening resources and escalating climate-related risks, it is more important than ever to use anticipatory action deliberately: by designing and deploying it where it can deliver the outcomes we expect and need.