About

The craft of the community quilt
The craft of the community quilt

Family quilts are pieced together with heatmap and rainfall data, folkloric iconography, and children’s drawings. Don’t the best quilts feel so cozy and protective because the squares are sourced from a diversity of textiles, colors, and memories? One small piece of fabric could never make something large or warm enough for all.

Extending this idea to the anticipatory action story, the quilt demonstrates how the best protection is made from many forms of knowledge. In southern Africa, small cooperatives are being reimagined in this way: webs of support and wisdom spanning all the corners of communities, displacing the Western-knowledge hierarchy. This becomes a kind of resilience, one that can wrap around all of us. 

Formerly called the Dialogue Platform on Forecast-based Financing, the Dialogue Platform on Anticipatory Humanitarian Action began as a bi-annual global workshop in 2015, organized by the German Red Cross in collaboration with the IFRC and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate, with funding from the German Federal Foreign Office. The Dialogue Platforms provide an interactive, engaging space for the anticipatory action community to share knowledge, best practices, and lessons learned to bring about a fundamental change within the humanitarian system: from reaction to anticipation. 

Participants from the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement, governments, NGOs, academia and the private sector come together to discuss how to drive anticipatory action forward; increase the reach of this approach; improve its quality; engage new stakeholders in its implementation and development; and to determine the next steps as we collectively scale up anticipatory action across science, policy, and practice.

Between 2017 and 2025, the World Food Programme (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the Start Network, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Welthungerhilfe (WHH), the Danish Refugee Council, and the Gargaar Relief and Development Organization (GREDO) joined as organizing partners. This is replicated at the annual Regional Dialogue Platforms on Anticipatory Humanitarian Action in the Americas, Africa, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), where regional and national partners also join the organizing committee for each event. 

For more details on the previous Global and Regional Dialogue Platforms, we invite you to visit this link.

About the Anticipation Hub

Building on the experience of the Dialogue Platform, commitments to scale up anticipatory action and the increased demand for more collaboration and guidance on the topic, the Anticipation Hub was launched in December 2020 as an initiative of the IFRC, the German Red Cross, and the Climate Centre to provide a more permanent space for learning and exchange beyond the annual Dialogue Platforms. Since its launch, the Hub has acted as the host and convenor of the Dialogue Platforms.

The mission of the Anticipation Hub is to facilitate knowledge exchange, learning, guidance and advocacy for practitioners, scientists and policymakers that supports them to jointly work with at-risk communities to collectively achieve anticipatory action. The Anticipation Hub aims to support practitioners, scientists, and policymakers, to do more anticipatory action, do it better and do it together, to jointly embed a culture of anticipatory action inside and beyond the humanitarian sector.

Aligned with the Anticipation Hub’s 2021-2024 Strategy, the Dialogue Platform embraces the following values:

  • Embracing a people-centred approach

  • Creating shared ownership and inclusiveness

  • Promoting and encouraging diversity

  • Bridging knowledge across science, policy, and practice

  • Stimulating creative and interactive exchange

  • Ensuring accountability