Traditional aid models have, often by necessity, relied on certainty. But in emergency contexts, this doesn’t always work. Waiting for the full picture of need and risk to develop can waste precious time, and leave civilians to pay the ultimate price. Breaking with tradition, Concern adopted an approach to emergencies called Early Warning, Early Action (EWEA). Instead of responding to an emergency based on certainty, we began responding (proportionately) to the probability of a disaster. In some cases, this meant that we responded early to the signs of a crisis that didn’t come to pass. But, in the long term, EWEA still saves money: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
This is especially true when a potential emergency could also lead to increasing hunger and malnutrition rates. In January of 2017, Somalia’s leading source on food security indicated the possibility of a famine. By that time, Building Resilient Communities in Somalia — a Concern program with EWEA as its foundation — had been active for seven months. Somalia avoided a famine that year, in part due to the early responses to these warning signs.