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Climbing out of the check box
Climbing out of the check box

It’s not a lack of will that keeps many communities in a cycle of crisis → response → rebuilding → the next crisis. It’s also the habits of thought that shape how action is designed. We classify and categorize because boxes make complexity feel contained.

Humanitarian and anticipatory action actors need creative ways to climb out of those boxes, to breathe in a living, adaptive system. Imagine if the same time and energy spent filling donor forms, proposals, and report pages went into listening to local stories, being with students in schools, and walking with people on the move?

One interviewee said, “We would have to restart the past eighty years: unbuild the member state, the UN system, all of it.” Radical, yes. But maybe that’s what courage looks like now: re-defining  what “act early” can look like, saying the upsetting idea, and creating altogether unexpected partnerships that can actually enable radically different forms of community support. 

About Dialogue Platforms 

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), and the Danish Refugee Council served 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 about the previous Global and Regional Dialogue Platforms, please 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 support them to jointly work with at-risk communities to collectively achieve anticipatory action.  The power of the Anticipation Hub lies in its dedicated and diverse group of over 170 partners across the key sectors and policy domains needed to scale up and mainstream anticipatory action.  

Aligned with the Anticipation Hub’s 2021-2024 Strategy, the Dialogue Platforms are grounded in 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