B-READY

B-READY (Building Resilient, Adaptive and Disaster Ready Communities) is a project that focuses on enabling a shift from humanitarian response after disasters to pre-emptive response through the following innovations:

1. Impact-based disaster forecasting
2. Pre-emptive cash transfer as part of early action
3. Aligning systems, policy and financing for better disaster response

B-Ready was first piloted in the Philippines from 2019-2021, in Salcedo, Eastern Samar. A first result was that due to the expected landfall of typhoon Phanfone in December 2019 the municipality evacuated 929 families from dangerous zones. These families received €32 as a multipurpose cash transfer, equivalent to five days of food. This pilot supports the idea that anticipatory action is necessary for the humanitarian system to be more effective.

Update: Currently, B-Ready is in its second phase (April 2021 – March 2022). In addition to the project’s continued presence and technical support to Salcedo, the scale-up project covers more villages in Salcedo and expanded to villages in Oras and Cotabato city. In the past months the project has worked on, among others, family profiling and registration, pre-paid card account opening, financial literacy of vulnerable families and organising inception meetings in the partner areas to introduce the project. Due to the current COVID-19 regulations in the Philippines, most project activities were largely conducted via digital platforms and constant communication with the local leaders was maintained to conduct the community-based activities.

The project was prepared to be ready in all the project areas in case pre-emptive cash disbursement and post-distribution monitoring would be needed, however, so far no thresholds for the activation of pre-emptive cash disbursement were met. There have been several tropical storms but they did not make landfall in the project areas. Other preparatory work has been undertaken with project participants such as Orientation on Safeguarding Children and Young People, Orientation on Data Privacy and Online Safety, Community Profiling and assessment of Protection risk and gender analysis.

See: A visual introduction to the B-Ready project