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Early Warning Early Action: The First and Last Mile

Technical Report · January 2016

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.10789.09444

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EARLY WARNING EARLY ACTION: THE
FIRST AND LAST MILE
Early Warning Early Action messaging from a community perspective in the East Africa and Indian
Ocean Islands Region, with a focus on Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania.

Steve Powell, independent social researcher, steve@pogol.net

For IFRC EAIOI, October 2016

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Acknowledgements
Far too many people contributed to this report to mention them all by name. Those who contributed
as individual respondents are included in the lists of names annexed to this report; there were well
over a hundred more who contributed in focus group discussions. Special mention must be made of
Ida Okoth, Regional Disaster Risk Management Team, and John Mwalagho, Senior DM Officer, both
from IFRC EAIOI who accompanied me on the fieldwork and supported the evaluation from start to
finish.
The views expressed in this report are purely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
views of IFRC, or project stakeholders, including beneficiaries, who were consulted in the preparation
of this report. This report, or portions thereof, may not be reproduced without explicit written
reference to the source.

Acronyms
ASALs Arid and Semi-Arid Lands
AU African Union
DEWS Drought Early Warning Systems
DFID Department for international Development (United Kingdom)
DRR / DRM Disaster Risk Reduction / Disaster Risk Management
DRRAP ECHO-funded Drought Risk Reduction Action Plan
EAC East Africa Community
EAIOI East Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands
ENSO El-Niño Southern Oscillations
EW Early Warning
EW EA Early Warning Early Action
EWS Early Warning System
FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
FEWSNET Famine Early Warning System Network
FSNWG Food Security and Nutrition Working Group
HEA Household Economy Approach
HBM Health Belief Model
IFRC international Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
IGAD Inter-Governmental Agency on Development
IPC integrated Food Security Phase Classification
KRCS Kenya Red Cross Society
LEAP Index Livelihoods, Early Assessment and Protection index
NDMA National Drought Management Authority (Government of Kenya)
NGO Non-Governmental Organization
PSNP Productive Safety Nets Programme
PWD Person living with disabilities
RCRC the international Red Cross Red Crescent Movement (used also for Red Cross and for Red
Crescent societies irrespectively).
TRCS Tanzania Red Cross
USAID United States Agency for international Development
UNICEF United Nations Children’s Fund
VCA Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment
WFP United Nations World Food Programme

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Table of Contents
Executive Summary ................................................................................................................................. 5
Aim: what is this report for?.................................................................................................................... 7
About the fieldwork............................................................................................................................... 11
The final model: the “behaviour competition”...................................................................................... 12
Findings: How to help resilient behaviour win the behaviour competition. Steps to effective
messaging. ............................................................................................................................................. 15
Conclusions and Recommendations...................................................................................................... 40
References............................................................................................................................................. 45
Appendix: Differential vulnerability ....................................................................................................... 47
Appendix: About the fieldwork.............................................................................................................. 53
Appendix: Terms of Reference .............................................................................................................. 64

Table of Figures
Figure 1. Self-help group in Narok County, Kenya ................................................................................. 11
Figure 2: The four elements of people-centred Early Warning Systems (León & Bogardi, 2006) ......... 12
Figure 4. Simple model of behaviour change communication (IFRC, 2009) .......................................... 12
Figure 3. The final model of how external messaging can influence disaster outcomes....................... 12
Figure 6: traditional housing in flood-prone areas in Madagascar is built on stilts, but this is not
enough for present-day floods which can reach the roof. .................................................................... 16
Figure 7. General warning, listed warning, and contextualised warning ............................................... 29
Figure 8. Hazard map in Mlingotini Village, Tanzania ............................................................................ 30
Figure 9. Example of complex prediction with multiple scenarios: difficult to combine into simple
forecast ................................................................................................................................................. 30
Figure 5. A discussion with Scouts in Nairobi ........................................................................................ 37
Figure 10: The four elements of people-centred Early Warning Systems (León & Bogardi, 2006) ....... 52
Figure 11. Flood-prone area, Bagamoyo ............................................................................................... 56
Figure 12. Dar es Salaam, residents not involved in RCRC projects ....................................................... 56
Figure 13. Dwellings in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, vulnerable to flooding of the Dechatu river (river bed in
the foreground). .................................................................................................................................... 56
Figure 14. Road access to pastoral communities in Somali Region is quickly cut off in the rains.......... 57
Figure 15. Barthlolemy Rabarson, MRCS, points out the features of a traditional canoe ..................... 57
Figure 16. Rice fields in flood-prone area in Madagascar ..................................................................... 57

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Executive Summary
International Early Warning agencies didn’t invent warnings of future risks. People have been giving
and responding to warnings, well or badly, for millennia. But do we know how people in East Africa do
it? If we want to improve Early Warning Early Action (EWEA) better, we need to understand this.
In particular, how do people exposed to risks integrate any early warning / early action messages
which they receive from external agencies?
Rather than starting with formal EWEA systems and going down the chain to see what reaches
people, the approach followed in this research was as far as possible to start at the ground and just
ask people about future risks and warnings of risks and how they cope. Sometimes we explicitly asked
them about messages they receive from external agencies, but sometimes we waited to see if they
would mention such messages spontaneously (and indeed they did - sometimes).
We did not focus on formal or semi-formal “community early warning systems” such as those,
laudably, suggested and supported by IFRC (IFRC, 2012), perhaps involving civil society, though we
noted them where we found them. We wanted to get a sense of what people do anyway, system or
no system, before any projects came, or after the funding ran out.
In particular, we wanted to know what kind of warnings were most helpful. Our working hypothesis
was that effective warnings follow the IFRC "Characteristics of Early Warning Early Action systems"
IFRC (2014) and the IFRC’s Guidance For Community Early Warning Early Action Systems (IFRC, 2012).
One of the central findings is that although disabled people and other specific vulnerable groups such
as the elderly are much more likely to suffer in a disaster, most EWEA messaging seems to be directed
at mainstream end-users. Most messaging may not even reach such groups. RCRC societies could do
more to include these groups explicitly by reaching out to them and involving them, and implicitly e.g.
by including in their staff structure more people with disabilities and other issues like albinism. See
pp. 14 ff. and p. 16.

This report finds that successful early warning messaging starts not from a pre-identified messaging
task but by understanding the perspective of specific communities. The Findings chapter lists five
steps agencies can take to do this, to understand the way community members take early action by
adopting resilient or suboptimal behaviour from an array of different behavioural options (“the
behaviour competition”) in response to a threat. The first three steps help identify how people
choose specific behaviours in the context of the information available to them and their own values,
norms and desires. Understanding this process is the purpose of the first three steps. The fourth step
describes how messages can be targeted at gaps in this process in order to help resilient behaviour
win “the behaviour competition”, i.e., make it more likely that people, especially the most vulnerable,
will choose resilient behaviour in preparation and response to threats, rather than competing
behaviour and/or simply ignoring the threat or taking an overly fatalistic stance. This will often mean
investing both in some broad campaigns where specific generic messages can be useful to many, as
well as investing in deeper local-level communication mechanisms to help fill more context-specific
gaps.

The fifth step involves maintaining two-way communication even and especially after messages have
been sent.

1. Understand the information context and identify critical subgroups

2. Understand the motivational context (norms, values, feelings, priorities) and identify critical
subgroups

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 3. Understand the behaviour competition (the range of available behaviours and how likely each
one is, based on information and motivation)
4. Design messages which target specific gaps
5. Maintain follow-up contacts to promote accountability, sustainability

Successful messaging and adaptation of messages relies on a relationship in which someone in the
messaging chain actively listens to end users not only to improve contextualisation but also in order to
find out what is missing – what are people’s existing ideas, where are the gaps, how are they
changing, what else needs correcting. Early Warning Early Action “systems” succeed where they
manage to maintain these kinds of relationships and fail where they do not, especially at local level.
So the report recommends investing in local actors – with local RCRC branches and also by forming
partnerships with other existing community-based organisations – which should improve technical
capacity and also help shift the cultural centre of gravity of early warning closer to the community,
meaning early warning messages pass more of the challenges and thus improving responses.

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Aim: what is this report for?
Brief background
In contrast to disaster response mechanisms, early warning early action is one of many important
tools that contribute to the prevention of disasters and preparedness for hazards and threats, of any
kind.
Communities also have their own informal mechanisms to reduce losses and damages once they are
aware of the risk of a disaster or a “bad event”. But there have recently been some substantial
initiatives to improve early warning early action at regional, state and district level. On paper,
substantial numbers of vulnerable people in East Africa live in areas covered by early warning
systems. Formal early warning early action (EWEA) systems were addressed by IFRC EAIOI in “Early
Warning Early Action. Mechanisms For Rapid Decision Making” (Mountfield, 2014), and the fieldwork
would suggest that programmes are continuing to be deployed.
This research aims to build on the 2014 report to review the last and first mile in existing early
warning and early action mechanisms at community level in four countries of the East Africa and
Indian Ocean Islands (Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania), the enabling factors and the
constraints, and to give recommendations to guide disaster preparedness programming. It will
consider both rapid and slow onset disasters, in rural and urban settings.
The “last mile” in communication from early warning agencies to communities (which is also the first
mile going from communities to agencies) is often recognised as the weakest link in the early warning
early action chain (León & Bogardi, 2006) (Anne Nieuwenhuis, 2013).
“One challenge, which calls for improvement of the existing early warning systems in the Horn
of Africa, is the slow dissemination of warnings which do not reach the local level in some cases. If
they do, sometimes they are not understood by end users, and if understood, capacity to actually act
on them is weak.” (UNISDR, 2012)
Often, agency staff, including RCRC staff, can be heard complaining:
Why aren’t they following the early warning messages?
Informally and off-the-record, many frustrated staff including local staff express the hypothesis “it is
just too complicated for them, they don’t understand probabilities, they just don’t think straight” or “I
know our farmers, they will never plant a different crop”.
What can break down between the intention of external agencies and the behaviour of end users?

What makes this research different from what has gone before?
In order to produce a convincing report on the basis of a very modest number of days in the field, we
decided to focus on a relatively small number of specific and answerable questions.
One part of EWEA is warnings (official or traditional) directed at ordinary citizens, and these messages
are the main focus of this report. These messages may or may not contain suggestions or instructions
to households on how to act. These warnings, if present, may influence households' and individuals'
decisions on what action to take (if any). So we wanted to know, do these formal early warning
systems help people in their efforts to anticipate and prepare? What works and what goes wrong?

Research focus
 Time-based warning messages including suggested action, and especially early action, aimed
at individual communities and households, i.e. potentially affecting decisions taken by them

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  "From the bottom up" or "people-centred" - what actually reaches individuals and their
families. Formal systems are in the background, not the foreground of the research.
 Descriptive (what actually happens in communities) rather than normative (what should
happen).
 What goes wrong, what leads to delays in response, what works, and why
 Warning messages from formal systems as well as informal anticipation of danger by
communities and individuals.

What is not in focus?

 Formal Early Warning Early Action systems themselves

 Flow of warning information upwards from communities e.g. to regional or national weather
or emergency authorities.
 Agencies and government structures except insofar as they affect warning messages to end
users.
 Non-time-based intervention and activities e.g. resilience building.

Definition: Early warning, early action from a community perspective

Early warning early action …
The formal and informal provision of alerts to individuals about their (more or less
unexpected) exposure to a hazard (and/or opportunity e.g. heavier rain) with the aim of
increasing the likelihood that they will plan and respond resiliently -
… from a community perspective:
- seen from the perspective of all and any potential end-users in their roles as ordinary citizens
and as members of different groups (which may or may not be defined geographically, e.g.
“village”) with whom they may share, discuss and respond to alerts.
See also the Appendix on p. 49.
EWEA includes warnings on rapid-onset events like a particular fire as well as slow-onset events like
droughts. It does not (at least for the purposes of this research) specifically include warnings of
climate change seen as a generalised threat.
Formal EWEA systems might be set up by the government and centred on a distinct administrative
unit. Or it could be part of an initiative whose potential beneficiaries could be any clearly or less-
clearly defined group but which is intended to be partly self-organising in cooperation with, say, the
local NS Branch or other organisation. Or it could even imply the explicit involvement of what some
authors call “civil society” (Anne Nieuwenhuis, 2013).

Research questions and procedure

Q1. How does early warning early action work informally within
communities?
With the limited fieldwork time available, it will certainly not be possible to make any definitive
statements about all communities in the whole of East Africa. Rather, this question will be answered
through
 combining existing models from EWEA, Behaviour Change Communication and elsewhere,
beginning with ISDR’s four elements of people-centred EW.

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  reflecting on and incrementally improving the new model on the basis of evidence gathered
during the fieldwork (see p. 11), specifically to identify weaknesses and shortcomings
The resulting model will be used as a starting point for the most important question, question 2.

Q2. How can EWEA messaging help end users behave resiliently in the face
of a threat? – the main challenges, best practices and pitfalls
This question asks more specifically about external early warning messages: do they do any good? Do
they actually affect how people respond in a useful way? Where does messaging go wrong? This is
our central question. We also tried to look at cost-effectiveness and in particular the question of what
is better: broad but shallow messaging reaching a large population versus detailed, contextualised
messages reaching a small population.

How we tried to answer them

We already had two good sets of pointers to what makes good early warning systems.
1) The 2014 IFRC report (Mountfield 2014) gives some "Characteristics of effective early warning
systems",
This report suggests that effective early warning systems:
 are trusted
 are accountable and transparent
 are nationally owned, inclusive, and have a clear mandate
 produce appropriate products and communicate them effectively
 respect diversity
 are contextualised - season, livelihood, capacity
 explain degree, trend, timing, confidence
 use appropriate language and medium
Now these are key elements of the whole system, but it is easy to adapt them to the warnings
themselves.
2) We can also add the IFRC’s (2012) “Community early warning systems : guiding principles”.
This manual covers strategic principles for systems in communities rather than messaging for
communities, but there is still a considerable overlap.
 1: Integrate within DRR. EWS is not a stand-alone
 2: Aim for synergy across levels: community, national and regional/global
 3: Insist on multi-hazard EWS
 4: Systematically include vulnerability
 5: Design EWS components with multiple functions
 6: Accommodate multiple timescales
 7: Embrace multiple knowledge systems
 8: Account for evolving risk and rising uncertainty
 9: EWS without borders: target the full vulnerability and hazard-scape
 10: Demand appropriate technology
 11: Require redundancy in indicators and communication channels
 12: Target and reach disadvantaged and vulnerable groups
 13: Build partnership and individual engagement

So our initial hypothesis was:

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 Early warnings help produce effective response if they have roughly the characteristics set out
in IFRC 2012 & Mountfield 2014 (as listed above).
These characteristics were combined with the “components of a community-based EWEA system”
(UNISDR, 2006) to form a provisional model of EWEA messaging from a community perspective. This
model was incrementally adapted during the fieldwork on the basis of incoming findings; the final
version is presented in on p. 121.

1The characteristics were then converted into a set of about 30 lower-level research questions, along
with additional questions like, importantly, whether the end users are satisfied with the outcome of
any action they took. Armed with them, we could ask which features of messages and messaging
helped end users to respond resiliently.
Specifically, during the fieldwork (see p. 15) a spreadsheet was used to record examples of messaging.
Each row consists of information given by one source (e.g. a community focus group, or a government
official) on one example of messaging on one threat. The columns are the lower-level research
questions like “does the message contain localised predictions”, “how is a decision reached about
what to do”. The research questions and approach were refined continuously during the fieldwork in
a circular fashion (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), which meant adding more columns and adjusting existing
columns.

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About the fieldwork
More details of the fieldwork are given in an appendix.
Apart from literature review, the main body of the
research consisted of fieldwork in Ethiopia, Kenya and
Madagascar conducted between July and October 2015
and again in Kenya and Tanzania in June 2016.
For each research location, interviews were held with key
persons in the local government administrations
responsible for the chosen locations, as well as RCRC staff
and volunteers, see p. 47.
The selected hazard was in the foreground of the
interviews. Extra background information about additional
hazards and how they are interconnected was also
Figure 1. Self-help group in Narok County, Kenya
recorded.
Our main contact with local people was organised via
community focus group discussions (FGDs), mostly organised by the NS branches. We spoke to a
typical selection of people including men, women, religious leaders, youth, disabled people, the
elderly, etc. We asked not to have interviews only with neighbourhood leaders and RCRC volunteers
but also with ordinary people with no special role or connection to RCRC, local authorities etc. We
included some organisations of disabled people, of women with chronic illness and of young people.
Brief vignettes are presented in the appendix to give some background of each main location. The
main locations were as follows; codes for the main respondent groups are also given – these are used
in the Findings section below and also correspond to those in the list of interviews on p. 47.

 Kenya, urban Nairobi, Informal settlements (fires, floods, violence. Code: NairobiUrban1,2,3)
 Kenya, Narok County (flooding. Code: KenyaCounty1,2,3,4)
 Kenya, Case Study Review of El Niño seed intervention (Code: KenyaNational2)
 Kenya, Makuene County, Rural community, subsistence farmers (drought, food insecurity.
Code: KenyaRural1)
 Kenya, Machakos County, Yatta farm growers & Processors Association, Kenya (food
insecurity. Code: KenyaRural13)
 Kenya, Activists in Albinism Society of Kenya (Code: KenyaNational5)
 Tanzania, Bagamoyo, Mlingotini Village (flooding, cholera, food insecurity. Code:
TanzaniaRural1,2,3,4,5,6)
 Tanzania, Dar es Salaam Municipality, Manzese Ward – informal settlement (cholera,
flooding. Code: TanzaniaUrban1,2,3,4)
 Ethiopia, Dire Dawa, Residents in a flood-prone area (Code: EthiopiaUrban5)
 Ethiopia, Somali Region, Pastoralist community (Code: EthiopiaRural1)
 Ethiopia, Somali Region, Agro-Pastoralist community (drought; food scarcity. Code:
EthiopiaRural2)
 Ethiopia, NCD project, Ethiopia Red Cross, Dire Dawa Branch (Code: EthiopiaUrban3)
 Madagascar, communities in flood-prone Vatovavy-Fitovinany and Atsimo-Atsinanana
Regions (Code: MadagascarRural1, 2, 3, 4)

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The final model: the “behaviour competition”
The initial model of EWEA from a community perspective, based originally on the two key documents
(Mountfield 2014 and IFRC 2012) with their lists
of characteristics of good messaging, as well as
the “components of a community-based EWEA
system” (UNISDR, 2006), see the smaller box on
this page, was incrementally adapted during the
fieldwork on the basis of incoming findings; the
final version is presented on the next page.
We added features to the model to incorporate
modern theories of communication in
emergency and public health contexts which
are mostly based on behavioural sciences. The
dominant model for decades has been the
Health Beliefs Model (HBM (Rosenstock,
Figure 2: The four elements of people-centred Early Warning Strecher, & Becker, 1988) which has more
Systems (León & Bogardi, 2006) recently been updated with cognitive factors, in
particular self-efficacy: an individual’s or
group’s confidence that they will be successful in carrying out some activity.
… for behavioral change to succeed, people must (as the HBM theorizes) have an incentive to
take action, feel threatened by their current behavioral patterns and believe that change of a
specific kind will be beneficial by resulting in a valued outcome at acceptable cost, but they
must also feel themselves competent (self-efficacious) to implement that change (Ejeta,
Ardalan, & Paton, 2015).

WHO’s COMBI model is a very good if elaborate example

(WHO, 2012) of how to apply these insights in practice.
IFRC uses a simpler model, see box (IFRC, 2009) which also
mentions factors called barriers and helpers which
influence how successful a message is. The same
publication also discusses how to tailor messages to
specific audiences.

Figure 3. Simple model of behaviour change

communication (IFRC, 2009)

Figure 4. The final model of how external messaging can influence disaster outcomes

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The four green boxes in our model correspond to the UNISDR elements, with the UNISDR titles in
brackets.
At the left of the diagram, external messages are produced by external agencies often as part of
various early warning and early action systems and combine with other sources of information,
including a community’s own sources, to make up the information context. Messages can affect this
context and may also affect the motivational context – for example by associating a particular
behaviour with important traditional values.
Ideally, delivery is also accompanied by what we have called “on-the-spot contextualisation”:
someone who can explain, discuss, and help define what this information actually means to end
users.
The largest of these boxes, in the centre, we have renamed “the behaviour competition”: what
predisposes people to choose behaviours in preparation and response to a threat which lead to
different outcomes for them. Ideally they will choose behaviour most likely to lead to optimal outcomes
for them – what we can call “resilient behaviour”. The various possible behaviours available to people
are likely to be adopted if the information they have tells them that this behaviour is likely to bring
outcomes in accord with their values, norms and priorities (the motivational context). Messages have
to win over not only people’s heads but also their hearts. For example, for most people survival is not
the only priority; it is also important, for example to respect one’s ancestors and maintain one’s
dignity. See p. 18. (A third factor in the behaviour competition is the availability of resources, which
are not directly covered in this report). So, in order to contribute to good outcomes, messages should
contribute to increasing the likelihood of resilient behaviour and reducing the likelihood of any
alternative or competing behaviours (blue arrows) such as doing nothing or continuing as usual.
Messages may also of course need not stick to the old choices but may also suggest new forms of
resilient behaviour such as planting new crops.
This (paraphrased) quote is from a householder we interviewed in Tanzania who was explaining
various different reasons for moving into and living in a house which, the RCRC and government told
him, was in a flood-prone area. It illustrates well the different factors which might be involved in a
complex decision like relocating a family, including realistic and probably non-realistic assessments.
TanzaniaRural6: I won't move from here because: the weather is going to do whatever it will do
anyway and there is nothing we can do; even if something does happen, the government will give us
aid; anyway, I have no choice because this is the only place I can afford; also, the soil is more fertile
here … in any case, the rains drain quickly around here because of the soil; in any case I'm not in
danger because the river doesn't flow this way, it flows past us over there; in any case, I couldn't leave
because people would steal my possessions from the house.
Our question framed his choice as a simple “relocate / don’t relocate”; probably the behaviour
competition is for him actually more complex than that, with a larger range of different choices.

As presented so far, this is a very message-focussed model. One starts from the message and sees
how it is or is not disseminated and adopted. One of the main conclusions of the fieldwork was to
turn this model inside-out; rather than starting from the message, start from the information and
motivational context in order to understand the behaviour competition as it is before even thinking
about designing additional messages. We found that outside agencies were not aware how much
their own messages were sometimes just a drop in a constantly-shifting river of existing information.
So, starting not from the message but from the context of people exposed to risks, the findings
chapter is structured into five steps which can help in designing effective messaging

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 1. Understand the information context and identify critical subgroups
2. Understand the motivational context (norms, values, feelings, priorities) and identify
critical subgroups
3. Understand the behaviour competition (the range of available behaviours and how likely
each one is, based on information and motivation)
4. Design messages which target specific gaps
5. Maintain follow-up contacts to promote accountability, sustainability

So during the research the focus shifted from the characteristics of effective messages identified in the
previous chapter to good practices in designing effective messages from a community perspective.
We noticed that the most successful messaging was good at filling in gaps. Filling gaps means that it is
of course not necessary for each message to include many separate components – predictions,
interpretations, motivation and suggested plans for action. Perhaps, for example some simple
forecast is so powerful and clear that it is all end users need to generate the necessary motivation and
plans for action on their own. Sometimes the most cost-effective messaging might combine a very
simple and general message for a whole population with a more detailed message targeted at one
vulnerable sub-group.
In summary, while agencies tend to think just in terms of one message and perhaps one or two
recommended behaviours which people are supposed to follow, in reality there is often a whole array
of different kinds of information about relevant risks and opportunities, overlapping and partly
conflicting, along with another array of values, needs and desires; and there may be many different
possible behaviours with which people may respond; and the situation may be different for the most
vulnerable. The best messages are those which identify gaps in this complex background of contexts,
information, messages, and choices: those which help the most resilient behaviour win against
competing behaviours and lead to the best outcomes especially for the most vulnerable.

Differential vulnerability
It might sound like a truism: Vulnerable groups of people are in particular much more vulnerable to
disasters. This issue was well highlighted in the international disaster literature as long ago as a UN
report from 1982 (Office of the UN Disaster Relief Coordinator, 1982). But we were surprised to find
little mention of such groups in EWEA activities and planning in the countries we visited: vulnerable
populations are identified mostly via geographical location, but within these areas, in most cases only
mainstream populations are addressed.
Differential vulnerability is hidden. It is very difficult to get any data on how specific groups of people
are likely to be particularly vulnerable to disasters (though see p. 48).
KenyaCounty22: disabled people who are victims of disasters may not be reported. There will be a
tendency not to report what they have suffered. Basically nobody will know except family. And if the
person dies, families may think it's better that this person has passed on…
The Appendix on p. 47 outlines some factors which can make people vulnerable – physical disabilities,
albinism and sight impairment and simply being different; economic factors, with chronic illnesses like
HIV; being a women or very young or very old; and people with drug addiction. The related question
of whether these kinds of groups are reached by EWEA messages is addressed on p. 28.
On top of this, exclusion and vulnerability is often multiple and the effects are compounded.

2 This code refers to the main respondent groups as listed on p. 72

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Findings: How to help resilient behaviour win the behaviour competition. Steps
to effective messaging.
About the examples and quotes in the text boxes in this section:
In this Findings chapter, we use selected quotes (actually paraphrases, because audio recording was
not used) and examples from the “data matrix” spreadsheet (see p. 8) to illustrate the findings. Codes
for the main respondent groups as listed on p. 47 are also given alongside. However where any
controversial quote might be associated with some particular person, the codes are not used and the
description of the respondent has been correspondingly obscured.
These sand-coloured boxes are used for quotes and paraphrases.
These grey boxes are used for examples which are not quotes.

 This symbol is used to highlight good or noteworthy practices.

 This symbol is used to mark possible pitfalls.
Often the difference between good practices and pitfalls is not so important; we certainly cannot offer
generic “tips” because everything depends on context. These examples are intended more to illustrate
the complexity of different situations and the importance of understanding the context. The “pitfalls”
should certainly not be taken as criticism of the agencies involved.

Step 1: understand the information context and identify critical subgroups

Before we can think about designing messages, we need to understand thoroughly what information
a community already have and how they process it. The research highlighted some key elements of
the information context which should be understood before designing EWEA messaging. We will also
need to understand if there are any particularly vulnerable sub-groups in terms of disaster risk and/or
access to information. Familiar RCRC tools like VCA can be used to facilitate this understanding.

Local observation, knowledge, expertise and messages

Western observers see (Teshome, 2012), have
been very interested in the idea that traditional Leaders of Indonesia’s Simeulue community
received a prestigious U.N. award for saving tens
communities have indigenous means of short and
of thousands of lives during the tsunami. Thanks
longer term weather forecasting, based on many to faith in their own knowledge of how the sea
different sources such as the behaviour of frogs or behaves and the reaction of buffaloes ahead of
ants, or on interpreting the entrails of an animal. the tsunami, this community of some 80,500
One famous example is referenced in the box3. people fled the shore for nearby hills on that
However, beyond predictions it is important also to fateful Sunday morning. Consequently, only
consider implicit knowledge on how to cope given seven people died from the tsunami in this
various predictions and actual situations – this is island community, while 163,795 died across the
probably even more important, as detailed in an rest of Indonesia’s northern Aceh province.
important study by (Mavhura, Manyena, Collins, &
Manatsa, 2013). There is a wealth of detailed if implicit knowledge (which can perhaps be understood
as social learning in communities (UNISDR, 2011)) about how to respond to a given prediction. The

3UN/ISDR, 2005, UN Sasakawa Award for Disaster Reduction: http://www.unisdr.org/eng/sasakawa/

2005/sk-2005-description-eng.htm

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publication “Indigenous Knowledge for Disaster Risk Reduction” (UNISDR, 2008) has many interesting
examples from Asia.
As far as predictions are concerned, all the rural communities were able to tell us about various
indigenous means to make long-term weather forecasts, but
the respondents we spoke to were themselves sceptical about
their validity. Many communities certainly still use signs like
winds, clouds and animal behaviour to make short-term
predictions; however respondents themselves said that they
tended to be too short-term to be much use. In speaking with
us, our respondents were noticeably sceptical and even
laughed about traditional forecasting techniques; perhaps
they would have spoken differently and been less disparaging
in a different context and without international interviewers.
Figure 5: traditional housing in flood-prone areas in Rainmakers are certainly still active in some areas but people
Madagascar is built on stilts, but this is not enough
for present-day floods which can reach the roof.
say they are less listened to than ten years ago.
Many respondents say this indigenous knowledge too is
challenged by climate change.
TanzaniaRural3: these healers are right just about a quarter of the time, but that is only as good as
guessing.
TanzaniaRural1: A group of women interviewed by a woman were perhaps more candid: Despite
getting the weather forecasts, they admited theat they would rather follow traditional weather
forecasting (such as the flowering of a certain tree predicting the onset of the rains) because it is what
they are used to. They rely on old weather patterns and signs even when they think these are
probably wrong, because they think at least that is better than the weather forecasts. A separate
group of younger women from the same area were much more sceptical of traditional forecasting.
The following example (from flood prone areas in Dire Dawa) illustrates well how end users often
have a variety of different sources of information. Incoming messages from agencies have to make
sense against this background:
EthiopiaUrban4: We spoke to a farmer in a flood prone area how he used his mobile phone to gather
advance warning of possible floods. He has a loose network of relatives and acquaintances he can call
when the weather looks bad, and they may or may not phone him. They also of course may phone
each other and other farmers like him. But, not surprisingly, he had not really ever thought about
exactly how this system works. On one occasion he might get several either similar or conflicting
messages from informants further up the valley; on other occasions he might get nothing and might
not even be able to reach people when he tries to call them. The farmer said he is much more likely to
trust the kind of information he gets directly from these contacts than any other source of
information except his own eyes. However, he treats each source a little differently and might for
example ask a relative to double check the information given by an acquaintance.

Assessments of impact in context

When a household makes or hears a prediction, they want to know what this means in terms of
potential impact. A rainfall of 100mm needs to be interpreted as a rise of 20cm in my local river, and
this needs to be interpreted as “almost as big as last January’s flood”, and this means the river will
probably burst its banks, and this means fields downstream of the big hill will be flooded, and this
means a possible benefit for those who have prepared their crops and a possible risk to those who
haven’t secured their property (and a big risk for anyone who might be, say, drunk and careless that
night). Raw rainfall predictions are very unlikely to convert directly to motivation and a household

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contingency plan. This conversion of predictions into impact may not be a problem for those with
local knowledge; in fact at local level predictions may directly be expressed in terms of potential
impact (“I think there is going to be a bigger flood than last year”). However it is an enormous
challenge for external agencies, as it involves contextualising and differentiating messages in terms of
detailed local knowledge. The information people receive is usually a mix of interpreted and raw
information.

 EthiopiaUrban4: this farmer found it easier to interpret telephone messages from relatives and
friends upstream about an oncoming flood than from the weather forecast, because the former
could tell him directly „It looks like it is going to be worse than last year“ rather than just „rainfall
of one hundred millimetres“.

Changing baselines
Increasingly, end users are confronted with an increasing rate of societal change and are not sure
what is going to happen to them. While rural respondents are quite adamant that their current
difficulties are due to climate change and that traditionally it was much easier to farm, some issues
are not so clear. Change is happening in every country and local knowledge is not always as useful as
it was.

Critical subgroups and the most vulnerable

Standard RCRC techniques like Vulnerability and Capacity Assessment (VCA) can be used to identify
how specific subgroups have different views of a situation and different information as well as being
exposed to different risks.
Some kinds of vulnerability make it harder to process information even if it is received.
 TanzaniaNational3: We [popular TV and radio broadcaster] do not have news or warnings with
sign language or subtitles and there is no legal requirement to do so.
Gender is often part of the dynamic behind different kinds of vulnerability. Anyone who wants to do
appropriate messaging needs to understand the situation from a gender point of view.
 Female respondents in one focus group in Madagascar indicated that while women have a clear
responsibility to look after younger children during relocation, that this was very difficult for them
and they were aware of the danger to children.
NairobiUrban3: All these emergencies, they come from social problems. So fires happen partly
because the men resell the electricity that they take from the power lines. We women have sources of
income now, so they don't need to resell the electricity, but they do it anyway because they want the
extra money, we can tell them not to but you end up with violence and family. If it was just left to the
women, fires wouldn't happen. People are very stubborn, you have to tell them again and again.
Information does not disseminate itself indiscriminately across a whole group. For example, women
are usually much more involved with instructing children and exchanging information with them;
sometimes the men do not even know what the children are being told.
Different groups may have different relevant knowledge. For example, in most cases women were
better informed about cholera and how to avoid it and how to deal with waste.
 TanzaniaRural2: Women mentioned the need to dispose of sanitary towels and also diapers. This
was not addressed in the latrine designs or suggested behaviour.
The usual focus-group type format through which RCRC and other organisations commonly get to
know “communities” is very vulnerable to an observational bias which can make the community seem

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 more homogenous than it is and is most likely to exclude those very people, the most vulnerable, who
should be in the focus of Red Cross Red Crescent interest. So RCRC staff may not be fully informed
about the extent of different kinds of vulnerability and information poverty.

Step 2: understand the motivation context (Feelings, norms, values, priorities) and
identify critical subgroups
Now, having completed step 1, we have understood the information context, but before we can think
about designing messages, we still need to understand thoroughly the motivational context of the
community – what are their priorities, desires, and how do they respond to the emotional and
associative aspects of different risks and messages. We will also need to understand if there are any
particularly vulnerable sub-groups in terms of motivation.

Relevant norms, desires, values

A household’s motivation and plans are influenced by its assessment of potential impact but also a
whole range of other things such as its value system, often shared with others in the communities to
which it belongs. So for example, although they might have assessed risks of livestock loss as very
high, they might be still reluctant to sell because having a large herd is an important end in itself and
is highly valued in the community. Disabled or elderly people might not be considered to have the
same rights as able-bodied adults.
KenyaCounty2: many of our tribal cultures are not very open to mainstreaming disabled rights
In many cases, remaining in ancestral lands is a top-level priority, leaving little or no desire to relocate
permanently. However, people are often interested in information and resources to help to cope
better in their current situation.
MadagascarRural2: People say they are not interested in relocating from this severely and
permanently flood-prone area because this is the land of their ancestors.
Shame and the motive to avoid disgrace can lead to a whole community isolating itself e.g. in the case
of a disease like Marburg disease which affects a large percentage of people with a disease which is
seen as shameful.
Many different communities in EAIOI can have a different attitude to death and the importance of
saving life than might seem rational from a Western or Anglo-Saxon perspective. So if people think
they probably won’t survive an unpleasant illness, why not stay at home and die close to one’s loved
ones?

Associative as well as rational thinking

Daniel Kahneman’s best-seller “Thinking, fast and slow” (Kahnemann, 2011) summarises a wealth of
psychological findings from the last three decades on how people make judgements about
probabilities and risk. He says we make judgements using two systems, an associative system and a
rational system. The fast or associative system4, works all the time in the background, and makes
rapid judgements on the basis of association. So for example if the contents of a warning message
reminds me – perhaps because of the images it contains, perhaps because of banal features like the
font - of other things which are a threat to me, the associative system is more likely to judge that
action is necessary. The associative system is completely incapable of understanding probabilities.

4 Kahneman actually calls these systems “System One” and “System Two”

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However, humans also possess a second, more rational system is good at “slow thinking”, which
switches in from time to time and may be able to use concepts like probability, if it has learned to do
so. This rational system is lazy but can to some extent direct the attention of the associative system.
For example, people tend to respond to flood warnings (using the associative system) in a way
appropriate to the impact of a recent flood because of the many memories and images associated
with it. Even if a warning is given that the flood will be higher, people tend to get prepared for the one
they remember.
“… protective actions, whether by individuals or governments, are usually designed to be adequate to
the worst disaster actually experienced. As long ago as pharaonic Egypt, societies have tracked
the high-water mark of rivers that periodically flood—and have always prepared accordingly,
apparently assuming that floods will not rise higher than the existing high-water mark.” (Kahnemann,
2011, p. 136)
We learned that in flood-prone areas in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, people light a fire on the hills to warn of
high water levels and the danger of an impending flood. The lit fire was a very powerful message
because it was dramatically associated with previous warnings and the ensuing floods quite separate
from any calculation of likelihood of loss. This is an example of what Collins calls “closely sensed
information” (IFRC, n.d., p. 56).
Images and direct experience nearly always bring more powerful associations than mere words.

 TanzaniaRural4: they say the most important factor in encouraging them to comply with cholera
messages is what they can see on the television. "If you see a cholera ward, that's shocking"
TanzaniaUrban3: the biggest thing which says whether people listen to information or not is whether
you've been affected before. If you been affected before, you'll believe it.
On p. Error! Bookmark not defined. we looked at how agencies should take into account the whole
range of information facing end users, and identify niches which can be cost-effectively addressed. In
just the same way, it should take into account the whole range of non-rational associations which
end-users have around an issue. Messages should not be focussed just on motivating but on
understanding people’s existing motivation and making a useful contribution to optimising it, e.g. by
reinforcing, correcting or filling in gaps.

 NairobiUrban1: It is really important that messages are consistent. With cholera we had the same
information on TV, SMS and from RCRC. This was really good.

Percep tion of salient threats

End users are confronted with messages about various threats which may or may not correspond to
their own assessment of what is most important.
TanzaniaUrban1: For another older lady [who sells things in the street and is a cholera survivor], the
biggest hazard she is faced with is ruffians in the street, children under 15 years old, who bother her
when she is trying to sell things.

L egal and other sanctions

TanzaniaUrban1: Here [Tanzania, rural settlement], the local government is strong and you have to
obey what they say. If not, you are arrested.
Legal sanctions such as a fine for failing to keep waterways clear, where they exist, are powerful
motivators. Clear messages backed up by consistent sanctions from State bodies can be very

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effective. Sanctions change the behaviour competition in favour of the suggested behaviour.
However, it is important that the rules and sanctions are realistic and reasonably fair.
TanzaniaUrban4: There is quite tight government control which extends quite well even into the
informal settlements but still there are many issues with compliance. There are fines and other
punishments for non-compliance.

Responsibility, fatalism, self-efficacy

In the literature, a strong influence of fatalism on EWEA is often reported. Sometimes there is an
active resistance to preparation for disasters because it is seen as being working against God’s will.

 EthiopiaRural1: We were told that in general people had quite strong reservations about making
any kind of prediction of or preparation for extreme weather, because such events are just the
expression of the will of Allah.
But in other cases Fate or God’s will is perhaps more just a way of saying that “nobody knows” or an
expression of a feeling of powerlessness.
(Religious leader): [when a predicted threat does not materialise] we say “oh so God intervened to
save us”.
In the literature on behavioural messaging (Ejeta et al., 2015; WHO, 2012), self-efficacy, an
individual’s conviction that he or she is able to successfully influence an event, is seen as a strong
predictor of the success of messaging. So good messaging either takes this into account or directly
tries to influence feelings of self-efficacy.
The communities and individuals we spoke to differed quite strongly in their perceptions of their own
ability to do much to prepare and respond (“self-efficacy”), and this also differs strongly from event
type to event type.
KenyaRural9: We do get weather forecasts on the local radio but we don't really believe them. We
heard about El Niño that we prepared this year same as every year. Out of maybe a hundred people
maybe one person prepared differently because of the warnings. In our village.
Sometimes a whole community decides together what to do. But it often happens that when they are
not sure as a group how seriously to take a warning, it is left to individual households to decide how
to respond.
TanzaniaRural3: We didn't really do anything to prepare for floods. Well, a few of us dug trenches.
Communications theory (Ejeta et al., 2015) would suggest that addressing and where possible
reinforcing feelings of self-efficacy can be effective in increasing the likelihood that end-users will
choose resilient behaviours.
NairobiUrban2: People wait until the last moment. They are influenced by what others do, but mostly
just they are influenced by the oncoming waters.
It is possible to view the quote above as being an expression of hopeless fatalism. Certainly it is an
expression of a situation in which people have had no persuasive experience of better sources of
information or courses of action; in particular, they may well have had repeated experiences that they
themselves are not really able to make much difference to their own lives, i.e. they have not been
able to build up much feeling of self-efficacy.
Sometimes respondents say that the reason they do not do more to prepare is that this is really the
Government’s job.

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TanzaniaUrban1: If there is a flood warning and we are told to move somewhere safe, we would like to
be told which area to go to. We think it is the local government job, or it should be. But in the end who
is responsible for preparations? We are.
In these cases it is useful when messaging clarifies what is indeed the Government’s responsibility and
where the responsibility of the individual lies. This delineation seemed to us to be clearest in
Tanzania:

 TanzaniaRural1: Respondents said that there was a range of behaviour which fell under the
responsibility of individual people, families and neighbourhoods, and that the Government is
responsible for ensuring the behaviour by enforcing the law e.g. the fines for people who did not
build a latrine was TSH 50,000.
Communities differ a lot in the extent to which there is a mutual responsibility to help one another.
The rural communities we spoke to mostly presented themselves as being highly coherent and
cohesive, i.e. they say they take care of each other so that the most vulnerable are well looked after.
They were also much more likely to defer to the opinions and decisions of the leader. The situation
was different with the urban settlements, where individual households are more independent of one
another. In the pastoralist and agro-pastoralist communities each family is relatively autonomous and
seek out pastures for their livestock relatively independently but in coordination with others. So for
example, we were told that in one agro-pastoralist community, members of the early warning action
committee monitor the different pastures and make suggestions to other families where they could
move to.
Sometimes, especially in rural areas, people feel there is little they can do and simply refer to the fact
that after a disaster, they will still look after one another. So the prospect of mutual support reduces
the motivation to take preventive action.
TanzaniaRural4: They respond to the disease of cassava roots basically by sharing food with one
another because some people have nothing as cassava is a staple.

Aid depend en cy
RCRC volunteers in some communities told us that their biggest challenge in motivating citizens to
take preventive action was the expectation that international agencies would help anyway so it was in
their interests to do nothing and wait for help to come. This is well documented in (Woldia, 2013).
 TanzaniaRural6: There isn’t much point in me moving from here because even if the house gets
flooded, the government or some organisation will help me.
This kind of dependency is real and needs to be taken into account when designing messages.

Sender characteristics
All our respondents were adamant that the way a message is received depends very strongly on
whether it comes from a trusted and authoritative sender; this finding is backed up by the literature
and by common sense.
KenyaNational4 (Society for the Blind): Red Cross messages are good but they are for mainstream
people. They and the government should have sent the El Niño information to us, then we could have
helped adapt it for our clients. Blind people will only listen if the information comes via their own
organisations.
In some areas, the government is seen as the most authoritative sender of all.

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TanzaniaRural4: End users say that basically they listen to the government, it is local government
officers who tell them what to do, in particular with reference to disease outbreaks.
TanzaniaRural4: Even if we were told in the mosque, it's the government that's most important.
Once again, people told us that face-to-face communication is key.
KenyaCounty2: If the source and context of the message is not clear, people think it might be a scam.
They will only understand it if it has been introduced to them with a face-to-face conversation.
In all the locations we visited, including those in which the RCRC was not active, the RCRC has a big
trust advantage.
But early warning messages even from the RCRC or from governments are never merely accepted but
are always subject to checking and comparison with other sources both within and between
individuals.
NairobiUrban2: “Before we accept the RCRC information, we ask lots of questions”
Traditional authorities may be less listened to in the city.
NairobiUrban3: Mosques and churches spread a lot of information but people here [in the city] do not
always believe them. It is different in up-country.
A sender can have general credibility, but expertise in the relevant area is also important.
KenyaRural13: even if someone did come with information from a Twitter message, we would say
“what does he know?” - it would depend on his credibility as a farmer.
If the sender of the message is a member of a similar group to the recipients, they are more likely to
be listened to, and this is especially important with vulnerable groups.

 NRC: Narok County Red Cross has two volunteers with disabilities out of 40. This can make it
easier to start a conversation about disability and with other disabled people.
One sure way to discredit oneself as a sender is to give out information which turns out to be
incorrect.
 TanzaniaNational3: Often, when we talk to local people about short range forecasts they know
more than the experts and can give better predictions over a short timescale. The fishermen say
to us "do tell us about a tsunami, because we couldn't know about that, but don't bother us with
normal storms of the sea [or reports of current local weather which we can see to be inaccurate]“.
In a way the forecasters are discrediting themselves.

Community decision-making
Households will often not act on their own – although households might differ in the timing of a
decision e.g. to relocate. Often the action will be a collective one and would not even be possible
without mutual support.
Values are often shared within a community; another big influence on motivation and plan to act is
peers and leaders.
MadagascarRural6: “I am just one, not two” [i.e., individuals are less important than the group]
Responses to particular illnesses can depend on the way the rest of the community responds.
Illnesses may be associated with shame which can provide a motive to hide. So messaging around
illnesses like cholera should take this into account. The simple act of talking about feelings of shame

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makes it easier to address and deal with them – but this happens best face-to-face with a trusted
person.

Critical sub-groups
Families in flood prone areas do report that relocation is more difficult for elderly people but they say
it is the responsibility of other family members to look after them. We did ask if there were other
disabled people who were not elderly but we were told there were none. Quite possibly there is a
stigma associated with disabled people which does not apply to the elderly.
In every location, volunteers told us that there are some residents who are much “harder” to
persuade about taking mitigating action. In most cases, these are vulnerable people. For example,
they might have the most limited resources and be therefore unable to act on any of the suggestions.
Or drug users might lack some basic coping skills. In general, volunteers were unsure of their skills to
persuade these “difficult” kinds of people.
 Quote from Red Cross volunteer: people who are really in less danger are easier to persuade,
which doesn't really make sense. But some other people just don’t want to receive information.
We tell them “people die if they don’t listen”. But we can’t force them. Vulnerable people are less
trusting.

Gender differences
We heard some strong arguments that overall women and men generate, share and act on
information in ways which overlap but show some typical differences, and that in many cases
women’s groups can make unique contributions to changing long-held beliefs and behaviours.

 NairobiUrban3: HIV is a good example of how information and persistent campaigning can
gradually change attitudes and behaviour as long as you involve women and youth, and know how
to address the men leaders. Men are sometimes sceptical listening to women, for them it is very
important what their leaders say. So if we as activists want to change the man, we work with the
leaders.
Men and women may respond to messages in different ways.
 TanzaniaRural3: There are other messages about personal hygiene which most people do think
are accurate, but sometimes people [i.e., we men] are into much of a rush to follow them.
Men and women also have different strengths as messengers.

 NairobiUrban2: the best way to get people out of the houses [when the flood is coming] is to
persuade the women. And the best person to do that is another woman. But there are fewer
women volunteers, most are married and can’t leave the children, some even need permission. But
single women are more effective volunteers. And women are good for crowd control.
So while the message from a male and a female volunteer might be the same, recipients have
different associations and respond to different styles of communication.
Women and men may also see different strengths and weaknesses of different behaviour
suggestions.
 TanzaniaRural1: One suggestion for cholera prevention was modernisation of latrines from drop
holes to sink latrines but the latter expose the women to UTIs.

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Step 3: understand the behaviour competition (the range of available responses and
how likely each one is, based on information and motivation)
So as we have seen, communication theory (Ejeta et al., 2015; UNICEF, 2006; WHO, 2012) explains
that the behaviour end users actually adopt depends on assessments of how different courses of
action (based on information about different risks) can satisfy important norms, needs and values,
(whether or not the end users are fully conscious of all of these factors). The chosen behaviour takes
into account implicit assessments of how likely different scenarios are and the likelihood of good
outcomes.
Respondents described a whole range of different decisions and choices they need to make based on
warnings and forecasts. The more one knows about the context, the more factors come to light. For
example, researchers into pastoralism uncovered a whole range of complicated decisions facing
pastoralists, like when to use which pasture, how much milk to take from livestock when their
offspring are still young, how much milk to convert to milk products, how much to lend to other
families in need, etc. (Sadler, Mitchard, Abdi, & Shiferaw, 2012).
Often, the behaviour suggested by external agencies is not adopted. The end users do nothing, or do
something different. One very frequent reason is that the behaviour is just not possible for the end
users of the information.
 TanzaniaRural3: The farmers are troubled by a new cassava pest which first appeared for them
last year. The local agriculture extension officer said to remove all cassava and burn it and replace
with new seed. However this would be both very expensive and would mean doing without one
whole harvest. So none of them actually did it.
Sometimes people manage to adapt the behaviour suggestions to make them more achievable:

 TanzaniaRural2: We built latrines but with more cost effective material e.g. used tyres for those
who could not afford to use bricks .
One really common reason for “not following” advice is when the suggested behaviour results in a
loss of income which is especially problematic when people have few or no savings and have to live
from day to day.
 TanzaniaUrban1: It is a problem when some of the messages are hard to carry out, for example
you are not allowed to sell food in the street [during a cholera outbreak] many of us are street
vendors and that is how we make a living.
Complex preventive actions suggested by agencies can be frustrating when they do not fit local
realities, especially when people simply cannot afford what is suggested.
 KenyaRural1: The biggest problem in terms of available responses to suggestions on rain-scarce
farming seems to be that in a nutshell, the most important piece of agricultural advice is “use
commercial varieties” and poorer farmers cannot afford these; yet traditional seeds are
increasingly difficult to come by, and their productivity is reducing due to cross-pollination with
commercial varieties5.

5 Commercial varieties are hybrids between drought-resistant strains and traditional strains. The
problem is that if their seeds are kept and used for another season, they tend to revert to the
traditional genetic makeup of the traditional varieties but these are not local but generic, so yields are
even lower than with local traditional varieties so it is necessary to buy new seeds each season.

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Relocation mostly brings worries about if their property will be stolen. Even when the floods are
imminent, people are very reluctant to leave their accommodation, partly because they are afraid
that possessions will be stolen. Security fears are a big factor in many decisions.

Probability / confidence

How the end users weigh up information and motivation and decide6 for a particular behavioural
option depends also on their assessment and understanding of accuracy, probability and confidence
in predictions. Do they understand these subtleties in predictions, do they understand them as they
are intended and how do they use this information? Being able to respond to probabilities effectively
would mean better outcomes.

Example: In the flood-prone Madagascar communities we spoke to, a yes no decision is taken about
whether to evacuate the whole community or not. There is no partial response – they either all stay
or all evacuate. In theory, there is a big potential here to make smarter decisions based on a more
accurate prediction of how high the floods are going to be. However, it would be a big challenge to
integrate more sophisticated or differentiated decision-making into a communal decision-making
process which has been tried and tested over many decades.
These kinds of issues have led Mountfield (2014) and others to underline the importance of including
estimates of probability in messaging as it comes down the messaging chain towards the end-user.
However many are sceptical that end-users in EAIOI are even capable of properly understanding
probability estimates. Psychologists such as Kahneman (Kahnemann, 2011), see p. 18, remind us that
people all over the world are “not good at probabilities”.
On the other hand we find that end-users are indeed making decisions taking into account
probabilistic evidence even if they would call it something different. When asked, many respondents
said at first that they only want information which is hundred percent certain. However, when
discussing the issue with them further it becomes clear that nearly everyone is in fact involved every
day in some kind of implicit reasoning about probabilities when making decisions, balancing
information from different sources and making allowances for how certain and/or reliable each
source is. So, similar to most other people the world over, they might not be familiar with the
“official” language of probability, but they certainly – consciously and unconsciously – make decisions
based on (more or less accurate) assessments of probability every day.
Kahneman also shows that we are especially poor in making decisions involving small probabilities.
From a macro-level, say from the perspective of a government, it is rational to persuade large
numbers of people to worry about small risks – even if the risk is very small, maybe a few lives can be
saved.
NairobiUrban1 & NairobiUrban2: In the Nairobi informal settlements, we asked respondents if they
use early warning information to gather up their small children before the flood comes. We were told
quite uniformly “no, the small children will know to get back to their parents, parents always know
roughly where the kids are7. Although, apparently, no children have been lost to the floods recently,
we believe that small children are indeed exposed to a risk. The trouble is that parents have a strong
impression of how well their children have found their way home in perhaps dozens of cases and

6Using the word „decide“ loosely: certainly not all of this selection of options is conscious or
deliberate.

7 Sometimes, schools do tell smaller children to go home before the floods come.

25 | P a g e
these strong impression totally outweigh any theoretical information they might receive about a small
probability of a terrible loss.
Ordinary people, who have difficulty distinguishing between small and very small probabilities, may
simply disregard many unlikely risks. But this is a real difference between cultures and between
people. Some cultures simply take small probabilities more seriously than others. If you leave a ten-
year old alone in a house for an hour and they start a fire, is that your fault or bad luck? In some
countries you might be prosecuted, in others, not.
TanzaniaRural4: A threat which is only going to affect a few people is not considered worthy of a
response plan. "We say, it is just a few people killed out of very many people, that's like a wedding".
Small probabilities are, of course, more real if one of them has happened to you.
MadagascarRural2: People say, if we haven’t seen it happen, it isn’t going to happen.

Percep tion of accuracy

The most common source of disaster warnings are weather forecasts. We heard many criticisms of
their accuracy. In particular, we sometimes heard complaints about the accuracy of the current
weather status during weather forecasts. So respondents said “if they can’t get it right about what the
weather is like now, why should we believe their predictions?”

TanzaniaRural1: yes we listen to the forecast but when they talk about current weather conditions it
contradicts what we see on the ground, so we tend not to trust the actual forecast either.

It seems likely that there is a considerable inertia in people’s faith in weather forecasting which can
take even a generation to change. For example, Red Cross informants told us that the national
weather forecasting service in Ethiopia has improved considerably in recent years, but we found
people on the ground to still be very sceptical about its accuracy. Some respondents especially in
Kenya and Tanzania were somewhat more positive and said that the forecasts were improving.

KenyaCounty2: We don't get a good example from the politicians either. Recently, a member of
Parliament want to sue the Met office for incorrect information.

Of course accuracy all depends on the nature of the forecast; it is easier to predict the advent of a
cyclone to within a margin of error of a day or two than it is to predict the onset and extent of a rainy
season. This may not be obvious to end users.

In their assessment of the accuracy of hazard forecasts, people are not likely to distinguish between
the accuracy of long, medium or short range forecasts. Nor do they have much time for the argument
that a long-range forecast with even a few percentage points with better accuracy than simple
guesswork could still save money and lives. A spectacularly inaccurate forecast is likely to be
remembered longer than a spectacularly accurate one. This all raises the barrier to acceptance of
forecasts.

None of the communities we spoke to were ever likely to take any preparatory or mitigating actions
which were a major cost to them purely on the basis of a weather forecast, even one with a direct
behavioural recommendation, through whatever channel it was transmitted.

26 | P a g e
In the face of uncertainly, people all over the world tend to rely on their own accumulated
experience, and trust pre-existing habits and behaviours unless there is overwhelming, recent,
personal and emotionally vivid evidence to the contrary. Familiar coping behaviour is more likely to be
preferred.
TanzaniaRural3: In 2015 the community was severely affected by floods. They said there was no
warning on the radio or from local government or any other sources at all and they were just woken
up one night to see the oncoming water. The previous flood of any significance was decades ago, so
they were not prepared. However it seems that the same area will be more prone to floods in the
future and they are warned about this. Nevertheless, this single event was not enough to persuade
them to change their risk calculations. People are building homes again in the same area where many
homes were washed away last year.
Time and again we heard that people didn’t really change their behaviour (in less familiar and
predictable situations) until they or friends or relatives had some direct experience of the threat.
TanzaniaRural1: People (in a cholera-prone area) were somewhat inclined to follow the behaviours in
the hygiene promotion messages because they were aware of the effects of cholera but their
behaviour really changed when they heard about the outbreak in the neighbouring village and that
some people died.

So how can we engage with end-users to enable to make nuanced

judgements involving probability of predictions and reliability of sources?
We suggest it would be more helpful to talk in terms of certainty and reliability than probability.
Probability is impersonal. Certainty and reliability are personal. People are more or less reliable as
sources and those sources can be more or less certain about an event. We pay most attention to
reliable sources who say they are quite certain.
We asked various respondents explicitly what they would think if weather forecasters explicitly
addressed probability in terms of how sure they were. For example, a news item could say “the Met
Office have given us this information and they have been right the last few times. Also they tell us
they are very sure”. Alternatively an announcer could say “The Met Office say that they are pretty
sure there will be some heavy rains in the South in the next month but they can’t yet say when or
where. So farmers might want to look at their seed stocks”. Phone-in formats are a good way to
present probability in a conversational format. Some respondents said that on reflection they would
like information about probability to be presented as long as it was done in this kind of way.
 TanzaniaRural4: It would be better if the forecasters said something like „It looks like there might
be high winds coming up along the shore, we know you fishermen are experts but do keep a look
out“.
But others disagreed.
KenyaRural9: No, we wouldn't like it if the Met office said that some predictions were more certain
than others. We only want to know what they're sure about. Weather information makes a big
difference to us. If you have a piece of land, you want to know whether you will be grazing your
livestock there or whether you should plough it. Yes or no.
Two more ways to start a conversation about probability is via schools and via encouraging
experiments. Sometimes agricultural extension officers will encourage farmers to experiment a little
with different crops or techniques in small plots, just to see what happens.

27 | P a g e
 MadagascarRural7: (RCRC volunteer): the agricultural extension officers do tell people what to grow
but they usually won’t listen because they are very tied to their traditional methods. They need to see
demonstrations over a period of time before they will adopt new practices.
Here is an example where both (schools and experiments) were combined:

 GP, KRCS/BRCS: Some schools use the demonstration plots to, amongst other things, help
students to think about different scenarios and probabilities with regards to weather;

Step 4: target specific gaps and designing the message(s)

In every case we studied, external messages always arrive into a context which is full of competing
information, motivations, needs, traditions and behavioural suggestions. So the question for external
agencies is: which messages could we most cost-effectively target to fill which particular gaps or
niches? A gap could be a group of people not covered, a risk or response or resource which is possible
in one community but not in most others, some specific misinformation which needs addressing, or
some combination of these. Is it more effective to, say, fight disinformation about cholera or to help
women’s groups try out different ways of instructing their families in preventive behaviour? In
particular, how can messages help by reinforcing, correcting or filling in gaps in existing messaging?
It is difficult for formal systems to take account of these kinds of gaps, which could only really be
recognised and overcome with a system which includes face-to-face contact with end users.
As suggested above, effective messaging has to weigh up where to use a more generic message
aimed at a large population and/or more specific messages aimed at particular gaps and/or some
combination of these.
In many cases we saw in the fieldwork, users were able to make sense of a generic behaviour
suggestion and adapt it for their specific situation. For example, one frequent successful response to
flood warnings was when people identified and contacted specific friends or relatives where they
could go to stay for a short while if needed, even though the messages did not suggest this particular
preparation but simply said “relocate”.

Targeting vulnerable groups

Vulnerability and information poverty often go together: vulnerable groups are often left “out of the
loop” for a variety of reasons.
These groups often need specific or additional messages or have a different range of difficulties and
perhaps resources.

 TanzaniaUrban4: You can also divide people up according to how much they understand and
follow the messages. Some understand and follow them. But that is only the begining of our work,
because there is another group who understand but disregard the messages and a third group
who get the messages and don't understand. The last two groups are in danger of getting
cholera. So you have to target them differently.
One way to get these vulnerable groups back “into the loop” is quite simple: mapping, listing and
contacting.

 NCPWD: An important part of our work is to encourage people with disabilities to register with
hospitals. This kind of mapping is very important because it gets people on the map. We have
around 8000 people registered, we think the real number should be 20 to 30,000 in our county.

28 | P a g e
Messaging to help the most vulnerable be better prepared should consider advocating for probably
the most effective step apart from legislative change: promoting the formation, recognition and
inclusion of self-help groups.

 KenyaNational5: We have to educate each other how to take care of ourselves and how to get
involved in organisations. It's about empowerment really. ... I will not be quiet and I will not be
silent. Our slogan is „we are the problem! We are the solution!“

Addressing misinformation
Sometimes it can be effective to directly address misinformation.
 TanzaniaRural3: People do listen to the messages but they do not agree with all of them, for
example some people think that if you boil water it does not taste good any more. We can correct
this misinformation.

Amount of detail (contextualisation, downscaling)?

This is one of the most important challenges to designing messages and is already quite widely
discussed in the literature, for example, in Mountfield (2014).
Contextualisation and downscaling can involve many different dimensions, probably the most
important being these:
• Time (long – medium – short range)
• Location (regional national – district – local)
• Individual and group livelihoods, circumstances, resources, vulnerability status
When an external agency has the knowledge to translate general forecasts into more specific ones, it
can deliver this information as a list going out to the whole population, and/or or it can target specific
forecasts for specific groups or locations.

A-town: It will probably rain

It will probably rain in A-
town,
it will probably rain in B-
It will probably rain B-town: It will probably rain
town,
& it probably won't rain in
C-town
C-town: It probably won't rain

Figure 6. General warning, listed warning, and contextualised warning

In Madagascar for example, in cyclone season, the national meteorological office sends district level
forecasts and cyclone warnings to all the districts with a frequency of up to every two hours. This is in
the form of a list; the district offices are comfortable with finding the message relevant for them.
However the district offices then transmit a warning which is not further broken down but applies to
the whole district. The cyclone warning level (see p. 37) can differ from district to district but is the
same within each district.

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 Radio is also the best-known channel for carrying what we are
calling here “listed” predictions, i.e. when a forecast is given for a
list of different geographical areas such as districts one after the
other. Sometimes predictions are broken down according to
administrative areas and sometimes according to meteorological
reality, e.g. “rain moving in from the west”. Especially when the
format of this listing changes from broadcast to broadcast,
respondents found it difficult to be sure which part of the listing
applied to them. They would have preferred a more rigid format
so that they knew to expect to hear predictions for their own
ward or district consistently in, say, the third slot in the list.


KenyaRural10, 11: The Kenyan NDMA produces two key
products, a monthly bulletin at county level and a seasonal
Figure 7. Hazard map in Mlingotini
weather-based agro-advisory at sub-county level. The seasonal
Village, Tanzania
agro-advisory is produced after each rainy season and contains
compact and very detailed information about what to plant and
when. The format is very dense; it is useful for Extension Officers working in the community, but
is not very suited for use by end-users.
There is a tension between keeping messages simple and activating yes/no directions based on simple
and agreed triggers, and on the other hand giving people the detail they need. Often the messages
are complex or multi-dimensional.
Quote (RCRC staff member): if there is a 50% chance of a major El Niño event, even if we know this will
mostly mean heavy rain, it isn’t possible to average out the different scenarios. It is very difficult to find
the right message.

An extreme example of lack of detail

comes from Dire Dawa, Ethiopia: There
is a central railway siren which
announces time for change of shift
three times daily, but has also been
used for air attacks during war and for
other warnings like fire. It is not clear
how citizens are supposed to know
what it means in any given instance.

Respondents repeatedly expressed

Figure 8. Example of complex prediction with multiple scenarios: difficult to combine
into simple forecast
preference for localised information
especially via local radio stations, in the
local language or dialect and relevant to their livelihoods, where this was available.

Vague or generalised messages can reduce the credibility of the sender.

 (Two respondents in Narok County): The Kenyan Red Cross's TERA campaign sent out many SMSs
in high-risk areas throughout Kenya to warn about El Niño weather. The NS adapted the

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 messages, but it is difficult to do the necessary downscaling from an office in Nairobi. The
messages which were sent were not localised enough so sometimes the information was confusing
because it was not specific enough or didn't have enough „local flavour“ to make sense to local
people. The messaging and targeting would have been better carried out at county level. Also,
they should have been in local languages like Maasai.
El Niño was a particularly big challenge, not only because there was such a variety of different,
overlapping information available.
 KenyaNational3: around August 2015, although the Kenyan Met Office was already giving
forecasts downscaled to Ward level, the media often picked up only very general messages,
which in the case of El Niño was very frustrating as the messages were hard to interpret at the
national level.

Fitting the message to culture and literacy

Tailoring messages does not just mean adapting them to concrete circumstances. It is also about
whether the style and format of the message fits to the cultural and individual psychology and values
of the receiver.
 Quote (pastoralist in Gorsum woreda, Ethiopia): yes there are forecasts [on the radio] but they are
not really meant for us.
 Example (Madagascar flood prone areas). One RCRC branch has produced a musical jingle which
is broadcast on local radio and includes general preparedness information about cyclones and
floods featuring a local music star. Most of the respondents we spoke to had heard it and were
enthusiastic particularly because of the use of local dialect and references.
There are many challenges to ensuring that messages are in an appropriate and targeted format
which is easy to understand. Face-to-face and house-to-house dissemination and discussion was most
often mentioned as the best way to ensure that messages are best adapted to local culture.
Concerning written information, literacy is still likely to be a big barrier for the most vulnerable
populations in many countries in East Africa (Teshome, 2012). This can seriously affect the usefulness
of SMS messaging. While respondents told us that most people have at least one family member who
can read and understand an SMS, it is not always clear that this will apply to every member of the
most vulnerable populations.

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Framing the issues in a way that makes sense to end users

Avoiding disaster: Framing is a concept associated with systems

the drought theory which concerns differences not only
is coming! between how people see the content of a
problem (such as threat or opportunity) but how
people formulate the boundaries of the problem.

For example, an agency can see a future event as

a threat whereas the local people see it as an
opportunity, or vice versa. Knowing how the
community sees it can be a big help in
communication.

Exploiting opportunities:  KenyaRural1: while early warning services

tell me when it will rain
frame the problem in these areas as in terms of
when will the drought come, how low will the rainfall be, how many people will be affected. But
we found that many farmers frame the challenge rather differently, namely, when are the rains
going to come, how heavy will they be and how long will they last, so that the farmer can know
when to plant which crops to make best use of whatever water is available. These farmers tend to
think less in terms of avoiding risk and more in terms of optimising outcomes.

While there is certainly overlap between the way agencies and end users frame “the problem”, in
virtually every case we found differences too.

Framing can also be a problem with forecasts. For example, if a rainy season normally peaks rapidly
and drops off slowly and is also a couple of weeks late this year, should the onset be reported as very
heavy rains (much heavier than usual for this week of the year) or perhaps medium rains (because the
rains are likely to be no heavier than usual)? Even these kind of relatively simple challenges can be a
challenge to understanding, and it seems that this challenge is getting worse due to climate change.

There are many big issues with the way that El Niño as a “brand” frames weather forecasting before
and during El Nino events. For some farmers, it could mean average or satisfactory rainfall, others it
may be excessive, early or late rains. The El Niño “frame” was seen as overall very unhelpful because
an El Niño event can have different and even contradictory (e.g. dry vs wet) implications across areas
and timescales.
Directly reframing an event as an opportunity rather than / as well as a threat can potentially reap
large benefits.

 KenyaNational2: This intervention [delivery of high-yield seeds to farmers] took advantage of El

Niño as an opportunity as well as a threat and may have helped farmers to reap a harvest with a
value dozens, or even according to some calculations, hundreds of times the value of the seeds
delivered.

Using local/interactive/face-to-face channels

During the fieldwork we repeatedly heard that face-to-face, two-way communication with a trusted
person is essential at least at some point if EWEA messages are to work.

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 TanzaniaUrban1: [An elderly lady] Yes I know about cholera, the young people are always talking
about it, so I hear that. But some people ignore me if I say anything because I am old.
The point of this comment was not so much that this elderly person was less likely to receive
information; it was that, for her, she was not really included, the information had not really “arrived”
if she did not have the opportunity for feedback.
The Municipal Disaster Coordinator in Dar es Salaam explained to us how important face-to-face
communication and work at street level are in order to ensure that the right messages are getting to
the right people.

 TanzaniaUrban4: You have to talk to the grassroots because only then you realise what the
problem is. For example, during the cholera in 2011 our reporting system said that everything was
okay, but people were scared to report cases, so when we went down to the grassroots we found
cases which were hidden and were late getting medicine.
We were frequently told that people want to have the opportunity to respond, to feedback, to ask
questions.

 KI2: we paint the Red Cross hotline number on the wall so really everyone can see it.

Getting the timing right

One of the most frequent comments about television and to a lesser extent radio was that although it
was highly appreciated as a source of information, the warnings often came too late.
Predictions and assessments of impact do not happen just once before an event. Rather, there may
be a continuing sequence of predictions and reassessments which may lead to more action to
decrease vulnerability and improve capacity; this may also be influenced by additional external
messages. In practice, many of the most important or perhaps the only actions taken are “just-in-
time” actions, taken at the last possible moment at which they can still be effective.
In general, end users thought that, when agencies succeeded in sending relevant information in
advance, it usually came too early and there was a danger of becoming inured to it.
 TanzaniaRural1: The messages on the radio become a kind of overload – the weather forecasts
don't really fit our area so we do not really take any notice of them.
 NairobiUrban1 & NairobiUrban2: In the Nairobi informal settlements, general warnings of the
possibility of flooding and flash flooding are made available even months in advance, but we were
told that this is of little use to the residents; even 24 hours’ warning would be too long. There is
little that individual householders can do to prepare though a minority might be involved in
cleaning trenches, and all they want to know is when the water is actually coming and perhaps
how high will it be. Red Cross volunteers say it is a mistake to try to sensitise people more than a
day in advance because residents only get bored of the warnings; what people really want is an
unambiguous warning an hour or so in advance of a flood.
However people were more tolerant of repeated and early messaging if a) the accuracy was felt to be
high, b) the threat was very serious or c) there were concrete and effective steps which could be
taken in advance.

 TanzaniaRural2: There were a lot of messages about cholera but we didn't mind this because we
know it is so important and we agree with the messages.

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Some common message channels
In this section we list some typical channels for sending external messages we saw on the fieldwork
with some associated best practices and pitfalls. It is not intended to be comprehensive. It is not
possible to give any overall recommendations for “the best” channel: we saw advantages and
disadvantages in every case, depending on context.

Implicit messages
We heard many examples in which ordinary programming and policy may unintentionally send
implicit messages. Implicit messages probably represent one of the most important communication
channels. Message design should take them into account.

 NCPWD: Now in Kenya the government has introduced a quota of 5% persons with disabilities in
government employment. This sends messages directly - that disabled people are visible and
valuable – and indirectly, because it leads to the experience that people with and without
disabilities have when working together. It means disabled people are more likely to get warning
information and are less likely to be forgotten if disaster strikes. These messages are enormously
important, better than any information campaign.
 KenyaNational4: Kenyan Red Cross does not have a disability friendly website. This seems to send
the message that our operations are not adapted to be inclusive.

Spreading and sharing of messages by end users – including face-to-face and private phone
and SMS messages
We were impressed by the variety, reach and frequency of message sharing especially within urban
informal settlements.
A messaging strategy needs to understand which messages get passed on and how, and support this
process.
Information shared at street or neighbourhood level is seen, overall, as being the most immediate and
usually the fastest, though not always the most reliable.
NairobiUrban3: When we spread word of mouth information, we only do it if it is a reliable source. So
if a friend tells us, that is not reliable enough. We wait until we see it on television or the radio.
There also seems to be typically quite a strong difference between how men and women share
information, especially within groups.

 NairobiUrban3: this group of women living positively (with HIV) organise many activities and
working groups, from economic activities and savings clubs to screening and treatment, and use
telephones and SMS to keep in touch with one another. For example, they share information
about political violence and demonstrations which are increasingly frequent in this area.
Information flow within households is also very important but, perhaps surprisingly, men can
sometimes be left out. Information flow within families, especially about health and hygiene, often
seems to be women's work.
 Me, I am out fishing all day. I don't really know about the kids or what my wife tells them.
Different groups such as self-help groups can also be a good way to share information.

34 | P a g e
 SHN: We do have our own self-help meetings [for people with disabilities] but we never shared
information about weather or other warnings during the meetings. Yes, it could be useful and a
good idea.

Radio
Radio is still the main source of early warning information across East Africa. See also p.17.
Nevertheless, radios are still an expensive item for some
households.
A big problem in some areas is the variety of stations on
offer. While most stations do carry some form of early
warning information, the quality and amount of information
can vary. So even where the government or the Red Cross
has acted to improve early warning information with a single
station, there is no guarantee that many people will be
listening to just that station.
Radio is valued because it covers such a wide area. However,
there are still some parts of the region without consistent
radio coverage.
 MadagascarRural6 (Madagascar flood prone areas). The most important sources of information
are local radio stations and these tend to have weaker signals and may not work at all during
floods due to lack of power. Also, rural communities have no mains (fixed) electricity source and
so rely on battery-powered radios. We were told that many solar radios had been distributed but
we were unable to find any in use in the communities. So these communities are sometimes
lacking even the mainstay of EAIOI warning systems, radio.
Radio is valued because it is frequently available in local languages.

 SHN: All of us have mobile phones but few of us have television. We do listen to radio, always
local radio stations which are in the Maasai language.
Radio phone-in shows offer an opportunity for feedback and discussion which most respondents say
they welcome.

Television
Access to television varies quite widely. In some regions, even the poorest sometimes see television
at least at a neighbour’s house, in other places it is still something of a luxury.
Communities and households with access to television do use it or try to use it as a source of warning
information, however this information mostly comes too late. The radio seems to be seen as a more
useful source of actual warnings.
 NairobiUrban1: Yes, we see about the floods on TV - after they have happened.
However, in areas where TV was available to many, we were surprised how often respondents
mentioned it as decisive in changing behaviour because the images are so immediate.

 TanzaniaUrban1: Radio is good but TV is better because you can see what is happening .... When
you have seen a cholera ward, well then you understand.
TV is mostly seen as being more reliable and authoritative than newspapers or even radio in EAIOI and
is sometimes more strongly associated with government information, especially in Tanzania.

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Public officers and government representatives
Local government representatives, especially at the lowest (sub-ward) level, are generally seen as
being credible in conveying instructions, information and advice from local and national government.
Of course this varies from region to region and from country to country.

 Health clinics and visits from health professionals are generally seen as very authoritative and
relevant, especially in interacting with women.
Agricultural Extension Officers have the potential for being a substantial and credible source of EWEA
communication, and in some places they live up to this promise. They can not only transmit early
warnings, in particular rain forecasts, but, even more importantly, can translate this into behavioural
messages: what to plant and when. In one county in Kenya, the villagers seemed to be in very good
contact with the local AEO; in another, not. Some people said that the AEO asks to be paid back-
handers and transport to come to the village. In some places they do hold “field days” which can be
useful.

Neighbourhood-level meetings

 These may be organised by local government, for example in Tanzania, where they are seen as
being a key element because it is not only a sharing of information but also reaching consensus or
at least agreement on how much credence to given the information and how (if at all) to respond
to it.
Nyumba Kumi is a new system of local organisation in Kenya based on groups of approximately 10
households, primarily set up for security purposes. Though as yet untested, it has some potential for
dissemination for information and organising response to hazards.

Barazzas and similar kinds of meetings play a role in early warning in some locations but not in others,
where we were told the meetings have become less important. All Kenyan chiefs are required by law
to convene at least two barazzas in a month. Access is problematic for the most vulnerable who might
not attend because of stigma.

RCRC branches and volunteers

This research was not designed to evaluate RCRC interventions in EWEA. However, in some but not all
cases our access to local communities was facilitated through the RCRC. Even in areas where this was
not the case, the RCRC was generally known and recognised as a source of credible EWEA information
and support.
The RCRC Regional Coordinator for Dar es Salaam Municipality explained to what extent the RCRC
manages to reach into every neighbourhood:
TanzaniaNational1: Some Red Cross branches do take early action but the main limitation is resources,
human resources and leadership especially. From 130 districts in the country we have about 100
active branches.
This means that in most cases, the availability of RCRC volunteers to help disseminate and
contextualise messages depends very much on whether or not there is a current project in that area.
In active areas, RCRC branches and volunteers play various useful roles and often really help to fill the
most important gap in EWEA: a trusted messenger who knows how to listen and explain. House-to-
house visits are a bastion of RCRC work and are highly valued by end users.
In some places, RCRC at least at national and district level has found a very useful niche in
disseminating messages more quickly than the government. In Tanzania the information

36 | P a g e
dissemination from the government follows a clear system but it can still take some days to get down
the chain, and the RCRC national structure has helped as a parallel but integrated system to get
messages to the ground.

 TanzaniaNational1: This new dual system (government and RCRC working in parallel to
disseminate from national to local level) began in 2004 and the Red Cross was usually much
quicker. Because of our network of volunteers.

Schools and youth groups

Authorities sometimes send messages to and via school children in schools, and where we heard
about this it seemed to be accepted as a useful and economical channel.

 TanzaniaUrban1: Information via schools is good because the children come home and tell their
families.
BP: Sometimes Tanzanian Scouts will be
included in spreading early warning
messages and also in responses, for
example when there are large crowds
and in times of severe flooding.

 TanzaniaRural2: Children were also

educated on cholera in school and were
given directives to pass on to their
parents for them to be carrying boiled
Figure 9. A discussion with Scouts in Nairobi water to school and not buy snacks from
people selling on the road side.
So this was a good example of messages directed primarily at the special context and vulnerability of
children, also converted into a direct behavioural recommendation to the parents, which moreover
was suitable for stimulating family discussion about the wider implications of the outbreak.

Faith-based organisations

Faith-based organisations can, and often do, play an important role in relaying messages. They have a
quite unique potential to help explain and reflect on quite deep problems like the role of fate,
responsibilities to vulnerable people, and so on. In practice though they also give their own warnings
and messages and interpretations which may be quite removed from what the government or
agencies would like. We heard of one example in which climate change was interpreted as a
punishment like Sodom and Gomorrah. A messaging strategy which engages these groups should be
aware of their strengths but also be aware of idiosyncratic interpretations.

Traditional signals and channels

Some communities still use traditional signals and channels. In Madagascar, we saw a double multi-
hazard warning system with whistles (or horns) which are used by traditional leaders as well as bells
which are used by government representatives. Both these systems are well recognised but suffer the
disadvantage of having limited reach and also cannot carry differentiated information such as what
the danger is or when it is coming.

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 Megaphones

 NairobiUrban1: (RCRC volunteer) The best way to get people moving [when a flood or fire is
coming] is with the megaphone.
Some megaphones have also been distributed to communities by the Red Cross and Red Crescent
societies. However, as with the solar radios, they did not always seem to be available on the ground.

Newer technologies
While mobile phone and SMS are relatively established in many parts of East Africa, we also found
evidence of isolated use of many other technologies, from Twitter to cell broadcast and applications
for mobile phones. However we have not yet come across evidence of very widespread use of newer
technologies, with the exception of TERA in Kenya. In some places that it is a perception that new
technologies are somehow too new for East Africa and could never reach widespread adoption due to
financial and infrastructure limitations - in spite of East Africa having led the world with innovations in
mobile banking which are even used by the very poor.
 TanzaniaUrban3: Social media can be effective but it can also be very confusing because there are
many different messages to make sense of.
Many radio and TV stations in the region, especially those targeting youth, are well practiced using
social media, SMS etc. to gather feedback from their audience and engage them. And younger people
are more familiar with these channels and have come to expect a degree of interaction with
information sources.

Commercial providers
Various mobile telecommunication companies provide SMS information services, particularly to
farmers. None of the respondents would ever change any behaviour just as a result of such an SMS
message, but some said the service was useful to back up or reinforce what they had already heard.

Step 5: Follow-up contacts, accountability, sustainability

Agencies should want to maintain follow-up contacts after message campaigns. These contacts would
help assess the effectiveness of the messaging and contribute to accountability, transparency and
sustainability. We did find a few examples in which agencies conducted follow-up contacts with the
end users. This seems to occur most often where there is anyway a more or less continuous and face-
to-face relationship between sending agency and end-users.
Follow-up can also happen in the context of government monitoring to see if behaviour is being
implemented, which may also be followed by fines.
One interesting example of feedback is provided by television stations in Tanzania8.

 TanzaniaNational3: Our national media policy says that every citizen has the right to speak back.
It's in the constitution. It comes under the Tanzania communications agency. The TMA is
interested in the results of our interviews. Every government institution has a communications
officer and the media reports back to them with feedback from citizens. So when there is an
extreme weather warning, part of our work is to see if people know about it and how they digest
the message. Mostly it's negative perceptions.

8 And probably in other countries in EAIOI

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 TanzaniaNational1: The feedback sessions on television are good because they help to create a
dialogue about early warning.
People often told us they would like warning information to be embedded in a conversation, a
relationship with the sending agency.
KenyaRural1: radio forecasts are useful but you can’t answer back or ask questions.
Different kinds of listening and contact between agency and end-users can help recipients feel
ownership of messaging.
KenyaRural9: We are only physically challenged, mentally we can make suggestions just like everybody
else. We never before had this kind of conversation [i.e. the group discussion for the present research]
to be able to contribute.

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Conclusions and Recommendations
Evidence from the fieldwork confirms the suspicion that that formal Early Warning Early Action
systems, where present, often break down in East Africa and the Indian Ocean Islands (EAIOI) in the
“first and last mile”: the local and context-specific level. They will only succeed in better protecting
the most vulnerable if considerably more effort is spent on ensuring that messages including warnings
and advice fill the most significant gaps.

This report finds that successful messaging starts from not from a pre-identified messaging task but
by understanding the perspective of specific communities. The Findings chapter five steps messaging
agencies can take to do this, to understand the way community members adopt resilient or
suboptimal behaviour from an array of different behavioural options (“the behaviour competition”) in
response to a threat. The first three steps help identify how people choose specific behaviours in the
context of the information available to them and own values, norms and desires. Understanding this
process is the purpose of the first three steps. The fourth step describes how messages can be
targeted at gaps in this process in order to help resilient behaviour win “the behaviour competition”,
i.e., make it more likely that people, especially the most vulnerable, will choose resilient behaviour in
preparation and response to threats, rather than competing behaviour possibilities and/or simply
ignoring the threat or taking an overly fatalistic stance. This will often mean investing both in some
broad campaigns where specific generic messages can be useful to many, as well as investing in
deeper local-level communication mechanisms to help fill more context-specific gaps.

The fifth step involves maintaining two-way communication even and especially after messages have
been sent.

What do end-users really want?

Before making more detailed recommendations, mention should be made of some wishes which
respondents expressed in relation to risks and risk warnings
In a nutshell, what end-users seem to want most is a trusted and knowledgeable messenger who knows
how to listen, adapt and explain.
Other wishes and suggestions include:
In flood-prone areas, government representatives, volunteers and community representatives were
all very interested in concrete survival materials – life jackets, megaphones etc.
All areas: Help with livelihoods was mentioned as a main priority. People are just interested in any
way they can find productive and/or well-paid work to help them get out of a position of vulnerability.
Agricultural areas: Help with crops and techniques is a main priority. Early warning information is
most appreciated when embedded into this.
All areas: Nearly all respondents said they would like more easy-to-understand weather forecasts in
local language or dialect, focussing on accurate and localised forecasts, above all of events within the
next 1-3 days.
In areas with limited mobile phone, radio and/or electricity provision people desired improved access.

Raised vulnerability of disabled people and other specific vulnerable groups

Disabled people and other specific groups such as the elderly are probably much more likely to suffer
in a disaster, and yet most EWEA messaging seems to be directed at mainstream end-users. Most
messaging may not even reach such groups. RCRC societies could do more to include these groups

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 explicitly by reaching out to them and involving them, and implicitly e.g. by including in their staff
structure more people with disabilities and other issues like albinism. See pp. 14 ff. and p. 16.

Main recommendation: invest in local two-way communication and local actors 9

So what do we say to the frustrated staff member who says “Why aren’t they following the early
warning messages?” (p. Error! Bookmark not defined.)? The first response is: maybe “they” are right,
and the action you suggest doesn’t make sense on the ground, or maybe never even reaches the
ground. It could have failed any of the challenges. The second and bigger response is: ideally, agencies
shouldn’t have to ask these questions because there would be seamless communication and (cultural)
translation up and down between agency and household perspectives. The fact that you have to ask
the question shows that your agency isn’t able to listen at the level of the communities in question.
If your program is constantly trying to persuade a target population to behave in a certain way and
you're getting frustrated because they don't seem to be doing what from your perspective would be
rational, here are two suggestions: a) on the one hand, you probably need to get closer to the
communities, close enough that you too understand how their response is natural; and b) on the
other hand it could be useful to reflect on how and why you yourself sometimes prepare or fail to
prepare for likely and unlikely negative events, and how much this could be judged rational or
irrational by an outsider.
Almost all of the challenges highlighted in this document require local and context-specific
knowledge, in particular for identifying gaps. In practice, the fieldwork showed that this can never be
just a question of whether some external or local agency has the necessary local knowledge. It seems
that successful messaging and adaptation of messages relies on a relationship in which someone in the
messaging chain actively listens to end users not only to improve contextualisation but also in order to
find out what is missing – what are people’s existing ideas, where are the gaps, how are they
changing, what else needs correcting.
Early Warning Early Action “systems” succeed where they manage to maintain these kinds of
relationships and fail where they do not. Large agencies are not good at actively listening to end users
because they tend to be top-heavy and do not invest enough at the local level. EWEA doesn’t “put its
money where its mouth is”. The cultural and financial “centre of gravity” of the system is still largely
at national and international levels. The World Disasters Report 2015 (IFRC, 2015) laments the tiny
percentage of funds for humanitarian and DRR / DRM action which are actually spent at local or even
national level, a figure usually given at around 1%. According to the 2015 Global Humanitarian
Assistance Report10, national and local NGOs received just 0.2 percent of global humanitarian funding,
half the 0.4 percent they received in 2012. This is in keeping with a wider and burgeoning criticism of
the general practice in international relief and development to spend nearly all the money at
international and national level.
Two-way communication does not need to be permanently present. So a RCRC VCA can be a useful
step in a conversation about risk and preparing for it, even where the volunteers conducting it do not
live in the same area.
Newer communications technologies (like mass SMS) have considerable potential to shorten and
speed up communication as well as to localise information and provide two-way communication. But
to work well, a) someone still needs to help introduce these systems and integrate them into people’s
lives, and at least initially this still means face-to-face interaction with trusted messengers and b)

9 This is the subtitle of (IFRC, 2015).

10 Development Initiatives, June 2015

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 someone still needs to understand the local context well enough and listen to end users actively
enough to adapt the system’s structure and content when necessary.
“Helping resilient behaviour win the behaviour competition” is a collection of difficult tasks in which
many different kinds of EWEA messaging can make useful inputs. Some of those tasks can be
provided economically by standardised messaging, even undifferentiated and nationwide; but a level
of investment in two-way relationships between receiver and agencies at local level is unavoidable.
So our most important recommendation is investing in local actors – with local RCRC branches and
also by forming partnerships with other existing community-based organisations – which should
improve technical capacity and also help shift the cultural centre of gravity of early warning closer to
the community, meaning early warning messages pass more of the challenges and thus improving
responses.
Totally in keeping with this criticism, we saw many examples of dedicated RCRC and community
health volunteers who are the backbone of community preparation and response who still need more
training and have very little in the way of basic equipment. Some also say they need support battling
with corruption and lack of interest at the level of sub-national and national institutions. RCRC
National Societies themselves acknowledge messages sometimes only get down to branch level and
some say they sometimes do not even know exactly what their branches are doing on EWEA.

Main recommendation: follow the five steps

The reader might be disappointed that there are no overall recommendations for “the best”
communication channel or technique. The research revealed advantages and disadvantages in every
case, depending on context. There is no best messaging channel. Every specific context is already full
of information, experiences and different traditions, motives and feelings. The task of EWEA
messaging is to identify one or two things that can be done most cost-effectively – perhaps to counter
incorrect information, or to enable children to explain a large weather event to their parents, or make
sure people know how to forward an SMS message.
So it can be difficult for agencies to decide whether to invest in deep communication with a few or
shallow communication with many. The answer seems to be not either/or. The question is where the
behaviour competition is similar enough across large groups of people to make cheaper mass
communication effective, and where gaps have to be filled with more context-sensitive methods.
So rather than recommend specific techniques, Steps 1-3 identified in the Findings section should
help to understand the “behaviour competition” with its informational and motivational background,
in order, in Step 4, to identify and target gaps. These steps should be easy to carry out for someone
who comes or has good contacts with the community in question (see previous recommendation).
Step 5 suggests maintaining two-way contact to promote transparency, accountability and ownership
as well as gather knowledge about what works.

Some specific recommendations

Recommendation: Be aware of implicit messages

Agencies should be aware that the way they communicate can also send a message as well as the
message itself. So a message about including people with disabilities is different if it is communicated
by someone with a disability.

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Recommendation: Use existing structures
RCRC branches and sub-branches sometimes have to stop doing house-to-house messaging when
project funding runs out. But sometimes it is possible to work with another existing group targeting
vulnerable people to provide messaging in a sustainable way.

Recommendation: Work more closely with faith based organisations

Mosques, churches and other faith-based organisations in the region have massively important and
respected influence on what people know and how they respond to threats, in particular in the way
they interpret and explain issues like fate and luck. External messages which contradict what faith-
based organisations are saying, or which are not adapted to them, may fail to be adopted.
RCRC should increase its engagement with these organisations wherever possible and try to reach
mutually acceptable positions on messaging, perhaps sharing best practices of how religious leaders
have successfully reconciled issues around disaster preparation – fatalism, punishment, explaining
false alarms etc. - with religious world views.

Recommendation: Understanding slow and fast thinking

There was much evidence from the fieldwork to support the idea (see p. 18) that people have
difficulty processing information about probabilities and often respond to the associations attached
to a message (“fast thinking”) rather than the rational content of the message itself. Three possible
responses are outlined here.

Recommendation: Teach people to do slow thinking

Two approaches, Participatory Scenario Planning (Anne Nieuwenhuis, 2013) and the IFRC Climate
Centre’s various games11 were mentioned during the field work as good ways to help people from
international experts to local farmers to improve their understanding of risk and probability in
context.

Recommendation: adapt messages to fast (associative) thinking

Messages need to be presented in a way which helps recipients link the information to relevant
memories and other associations. So, for example, a flood marker which shows the current level of
water next to previous high water marks is more likely to evoke strong and relevant associations than
merely the information that the river is at a certain height. Similarly, live television or radio coverage
showing that flood water has already, now, reached neighbouring locations upstream is more likely to
be effective than a prediction that water levels will rise. These kinds of linkages need to be made in an
ethical and transparent way and should not be reduced to, say, just presenting horrific images
alongside information.

Recommendation: Conduct gap chats

“Gap chat” is a very informal protocol for use with vulnerable end-users of Early Warning12. The idea
arose spontaneously from informal chats which were conducted during the research and which were
then deliberately included in the later phases. It is one way to help and encourage busy regional and

11 http://www.climatecentre.org/resources-games/games-overview

12 A two-page document giving more details of “gap chats” is attached to this report.

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 national staff to take a few minutes trying to view risks and warnings from the eyes of the most
vulnerable end users. It is really just a light formalisation of something many staff do spontaneously –
if and when they find the time.

Why: Most would agree that there are big gaps between the best intentions of Early Warning Early
Action (EWEA) systems and the reality for end users – beneficiaries and other citizens, especially the
most vulnerable. It can be difficult to cross the “last mile” between “systems” and end users. This
little “method” can help:

• Find out how end users actually organise their own early warning and early action
• Find out how end users actually understand messages (predictions, warnings and advisories)
• Identify gaps in systems
Anyone can do this – volunteers, local or national RCRC staff, IFRC, other agencies. It costs nothing to
do and can be easily, say, tagged on in a spare half hour before or after any community visit.

Our suggestion: is to simply approach typical individuals who are particularly vulnerable to one or
more threats (in ones and twos, not in pre-organised interviews or focus groups), and discuss what
early warning and early action mean to them. They might be people you meet in the local market or
near their homes. We don’t think it is important to approach specific individuals who you know
“should” be targeted by some specific EWEA system. (Though it is useful for you to know which
systems might be operating in their area, so you can ask follow-up questions like “what about sirens,
are sirens used in your area?”) It is more important to target people who are particularly vulnerable
to threats. This way you are more likely to find people who are perhaps missed by formal EWEA
systems and are most likely to know about gaps in them.

“Analysing” the information from these chats is very simple. 1: what did we learn about how this
person does or doesn’t prepare for the risk, and why? 2: What could change to help resilient
behaviour “win the behaviour competition”? 3: Of those things, which can we most cost-effectively
do?

Internet technologies
We were surprised to find a quite widespread perception that new technologies in early warning are
somehow too new for East Africa and could never reach widespread adoption due to financial and
infrastructure limitations - in spite of East Africa having led the world with innovations in mobile
banking which are even used by the very poor. New technologies can potentially combine real time
sources of data with at least some of the contextualisation which is so important for early warning.
For example, American Red Cross already has useful hurricane app for smartphones, providing
localised hurricane alerts across the Americas, with 100-500 thousand downloads. Just as the
percentage of adults in Kenya owning a mobile telephone exploded from less than 10% to over 80% in
the ten years from 2002-2013, it seems inevitable that new technologies in early warning, while
negligible now, will reach critical mass in East Africa within the next ten years.

Recommendation: RCRC needs to get ahead of the curve

NSs in East Africa should experiment with partnerships to exploit and promote new technologies in
early warning in order to gain a lead position and remain ahead of the inevitable adoption curve.

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Appendix: Differential vulnerability
Some vulnerability factors
As in the main Findings chapter, we use here selected quotes (actually paraphrases, because audio
recording was not used) and examples from the field. The codes given alongside refer to the main
respondent groups as listed on p. 47.

Being different
Simply being different from the mainstream can present a particular risk in EAIOI.
Regional13: in EAIOI it is common to find a strong need for harmony especially in the family, especially
around issues like disability which are not well understood, and this can make it more difficult to
accept people who are different in any way. Traditionally, individuals who are different and their
families are seen as being cursed. Traditional healers may also play a negative role here because they
have a vested interest in maintaining magical explanations of disability and different-ness – after all
they “earn their living” through magic.
In many regions, some groups such as people with disabilities are unlikely to be a priority for families
and neighbours when disaster strikes.
KenyaNational5: At best, when an emergency comes, a sibling might get told "look after your
[disabled] brother". Or they might not.

Physical disabilities
It is very hard to get convincing data even about the prevalence of disabilities. For Kenya, a 2008
survey in Kenya arrived at a 5% total disability prevalence, whereas a 2016 survey of younger people
(VSO / Republic of Kenya, 2016) found a rate of 13.5%. The 2009 census arrived at 3.5%.
Everyone we asked agreed that people with disabilities are worse affected by most threats, with
landslides and floods most often mentioned.
KenyaNational4: When you are in danger, you run, but what do you do if you can't run?
SHN: Most of us [people with physical disabilities] are pastoralists and it is very difficult to move our
livestock to better places when there is a drought. We have to ask someone and trust someone to
take our livestock with them.
TanzaniaUrban1: I had to escape from some flood water and it is very difficult in a wheelchair.

Economic vulnerability
One of the most obvious, and best recognised, forms of vulnerability is poverty. RCRC and
government agencies were mostly aware that poorer people can be forced into more precarious
living arrangements and usually took this into account in their targeting.
NairobiUrban1,2,3: The lower parts of each of these informal settlements are very prone to flooding
to a depth of several metres. Accommodation is constructed from makeshift materials. Newcomers
and the poorest are forced to live in the worst places which are nearest to the river. Simply telling
them to live elsewhere is pointless because their present accommodation is all that is available to
them.

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Sight impairment
Again there was agreement that sight impairment leads to differential vulnerability but the problem
was not so widely recognised or so often mentioned.
KenyaNational4: For blind people, noise [in the confusion during a disaster] is the worst disaster.
KenyaNational5: When there is political violence we might know about it from television. But it is
difficult if you actually get involved in a disturbance and people are running in different directions. This
is hard when you are shortsighted13, it makes it harder to understand the situation.

Albinism

KenyaNational5: Basically the mainstream has the wrong information about disability. To make us
less vulnerable, you have to change that information. We are vulnerable because of things like
witchcraft, and we are much more vulnerable during the chaos of a disaster. Recently in Nairobi there
was a case where someone was beaten until they bled because the aggressor had some belief about
the blood of albino people.

Elderly
One rare statistic about differentially worse outcomes for vulnerable groups during disasters is the
Japanese earthquake in which a disproportionate number of elderly people were affected (56.1
percent of victims were aged 65 or over)14.
The fieldwork confirmed this differential vulnerability, at least anecdotally. Widows are likely to be
particularly vulnerable.
KenyaCounty2: around elderly people, the families may be of the opinion that it is not so important to
care for them because they are waiting to die anyway.

Women
Many factors may make women in general more vulnerable and differently vulnerable to disasters
(Enarson, 2002), such as gender-based violence (Enarson, 1999), increased difficulty of escape due to
responsibility for children and the elderly, increased vulnerability to earthquakes and tsumani
because of domestic duties, lower likelihood of being able to swim, differing needs of pregnant and
women and women with infants, lower influence on community decisions, and so on, as is already
well covered in the literature, alongside culture- and regional-specific issues like the fact that in
Muslim countries is more difficult for women to respond to emergencies if they are forbidden to
leave the house without the company of men.

Children and young people

Again there are many well-documented factors (Silverman & La Greca, 2002) which may make
children more and differently vulnerable such as lower ability to defend themselves physically, as well
as, from vulnerability in the aftermath, for example to sex and labour abuse and illegal adoption.
Street children and children living without parental care are of course particularly vulnerable.

13 Most xx people with albinism are also shortsighted xx

14 https://www.unisdr.org/archive/25598

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 People living with HIV
Millions of people live with HIV in EAIOI, with prevalences ranging from 0.5% (Somalia) to around 5%
(Kenya and Tanzania). In most cases their situation is quite precarious, mainly for those not receiving
anti-retroviral treatment.

People with drug addiction / abuse

Drug abuse is a massive and increasing problem15 in East Africa. This group is often off the radar of
EWEA plans and systems.

Differential vulnerability
Solid data on differential vulnerability of specific vulnerable groups to disasters is rare. One piece of
revealing data comes from the tsunami in Japan on 11 March 2011, where the mortality rate among
the disabled registered with the government was double that of the rest of the population16.
An opinion survey conducted by the UN in 2013 of 5,450 people living with a disability outlines the
difficulties experienced by disabled people and highlight the reasons for their vulnerability. For
example, only 20% say that they are able to evacuate immediately without difficulty in the event of a
sudden disaster.

Appendix: Definitions

Definition/Discussion: Operational research

Applied research conducted for a practical purpose and designed to aid decision-making

Definition/Discussion: Early Warning

ISDR defines early warning as
"the provision of timely and effective information, through identified institutions, that allows
individuals exposed to a hazard to take action to avoid or reduce their risk and prepare for
effective response". (UNISDR, 2006)
IFRC’s “Early warning Early action” from 2008 does not include a definition; the IFRC website17 says
“The provision of timely information enabling people to take steps to reduce the impact of
hazards”. Perhaps realising that both definitions cover almost any alert about any hazard, IFRC (2012)
clarifies: “Early signifies prior to the arrival of a hazard or threat — while there is still time
to reduce potential harm or loss, or prevent a disaster” – although this document also does not define
Early Warning or EWEA per se.
So combining these, we can define an early warning as

1537,000 people in Africa die annually from diseases associated with the consumption of illegal drugs.
http://www.dw.com/en/illegal-drug-use-on-the-rise-in-africa/a-16614023

16 http://www.dinf.ne.jp/doc/english/twg/escap_121031/fujii.html

17http://www.ifrc.org/en/what-we-do/disaster-management/preparing-for-disaster/risk-
reduction/reducing-disaster-risk/

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 The provision of alerts to individuals about their (more or less unexpected) exposure to a
hazard while there is still time to take action to avoid or reduce their risk and prepare for
effective response.
Please note:

1. "Identified institutions" has been left out (there is no reason why warnings might not in fact
come from elsewhere).
2. We have left out "effective" in our definition of early warning, as of course you can have an
ineffective early warning.
3. We have left out “timely” from the ISDR definition because this is covered by “while there is
still time to” from the IFRC clarification.
4. We also changed “information” into “alerts”: a warning has an affective, not just
informational component which should make one’s heart beat at least a little faster. See page
Error! Bookmark not defined..
5. We have specified that the exposure is in some way a more or less unexpected event with a
more or less specific time. Without this, too many things would count as early warning, like
for example encouraging householders to lock their doors, or road safety training, or perhaps
even resilience messaging, which are related to a constant or perhaps gradually changing
threat. It is important for the purposes of this research to be able to distinguish early
warnings (time-based) from general encouragements to increase resilience (not time-based).
There are different ways of understanding what “unexpected” means here; obviously
seasonal changes are expected but we would usually consider warnings about climate change
to be early warnings, so we should probably still treat climate change as an unexpected event.
Equally, hazards are associated with unexpectedly high variability of factors like the weather
as well as only with high levels (de Perez, Monasso, van Aalst, & Suarez, 2014).
6. As with the ISDR definition, it is left open whether the message may focus only on an actual
prediction of a hazard or also set out the risk or even suggest a course of action.
7. We do not attempt to define what constitutes harm or loss, which may in fact differ according
to a given stakeholder’s perspective:

So given all of these changes, what is a drought impact? Is a good drought preparedness
action one which tries to maintain the world as it used to be or is it one which helps people in
the ASALs in this period of transition? (Rural Focus and Ridge Lane Associates, 2015)
It will be enough for our purposes to ask our respondents what counts as harm or loss from
their point of view.

Definition/Discussion: Community-centred

“Community centred“ means here that we are interested in:

1) the perspective of all and any potential end-users of EWEA systems in their roles as ordinary
citizens – not as health workers, RCRC staff etc18. We are not primarily interested in EWEA
from the perspective of specialised institutions like health centres, even “community-based”
health centres.

18Some use the phrase "people-centred" rather than "community-centred" (Juan Carlos Villagran de
León & Janos Bogardi, 2006). This captures what we mean by "bottom-up" but does not capture our
second sense, i.e. people are also members of different groups.

50 | P a g e
 2) how individuals discuss, share and organise their predictions of and responses to hazards with
other members of groups they belong to (like neighbourhoods, extended families and
livelihood groups) – spontaneously, without direction from external agencies.

In these two senses only, this research is “community-centred”.

RCRC usually covers both these factors with the phrases like “community-based” or “community-
centred”. However there are some problems with the word “community”. As we all know, East Africa
is not made up of small, neat, discrete groups of people living together called “communities” defined
by shared interests and by shared location, livelihoods etc. IFRC (2012) points out that community
includes people “often, but not exclusively, related by place (i.e., village, neighbourhood, watershed,
etc.).”
Each person and household is a member of many different "communities" at the same time - in terms
of for example shared interests, livelihood, electoral ward, district, hazard exposure and response,
access to resources, tribal and religious affiliation, gender, exposure to EWEA systems. Each of these
are different but overlapping groups. In some parts of East Africa it is also important to take note of
wider kinship networks which may remain important even when people are geographically scattered
(Gitonga, McDowell, Bellali, & Jeffrey, 2013).
So while membership of each of these different "communities" is very important for people in the
region (and beyond it), our research should not assume that every household, and indeed every
person, is a member of just one community and that community is located in just one place.
Sometimes “meet the community” for the RCRC means little more than: meet with people (called
“community representatives”) engaged in our project which is called a “community-based project”.

Community-centred early warning, early action

There are almost no definitions of community-centred early warning per se, but there are many
definitions of community-centred EW and EWEA systems such as those discussed in (IFRC, 2012). So
these definitions of early warning community-centred can be combined to make a definition of
community-centred early warning early action:
The formal and informal provision of alerts to individuals about their (more or less
unexpected) exposure to a hazard (and/or opportunity e.g. heavier rain) while there is still
time to prepare for effective response – seen from the perspective of all and any potential end-
users in their roles as ordinary citizens and as members of different groups with whom they
may share, discuss and respond to the alerts.

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 Newer discussion of EWEA systems (UNISDR,
2006) use the phrase “people-centred” to
indicate that people’s responses have recently
been included as a fourth step in an
understanding of Early Warning Systems which
had previously ignored them (León & Bogardi,
2006). (Some authors also include
“governance” as another important element.)
While of course respecting this addition, we
should repeat that we are looking at how
people respond to early warning information
(whether it comes from inside or outside their
communities) even though most times these
spontaneous or traditional responses would not
be called “systems”.
Figure 10: The four elements of people-centred Early Warning
Systems (León & Bogardi, 2006) These formal systems might be set up by the
government and centred on a distinct
administrative unit called, say, “sub-ward” in
the local language. Or it could be part of RCRC initiative whose potential beneficiaries could be any
clearly or less-clearly defined group but which is intended to be partly self-organising in cooperation
with the local RCRC branch. Or it could even imply the explicit involvement of what some authors call
“civil society” (Anne Nieuwenhuis, 2013).
In this report we will avoid any definition of Community-based or -managed systems, because we are
looking at how early warning actually happens on the ground and to what extent formal EWEA
systems actually reach the ground, regardless of whether there is supposed to be a formal system or
not.

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Appendix: About the fieldwork
Apart from literature review, the main body of the research consisted of fieldwork in Ethiopia, Kenya
and Madagascar conducted between July and October 2015 and again in Kenya and Tanzania in June
2016.

Fieldwork locations
The selection of countries was more or less determined by practical considerations such as visa
availability etc.
We then asked the four National Societies to select locations for fieldwork for us as follows: for one or
two hazards most typical for the country, to select one or more locations particularly vulnerable to
that hazard and where possible from different districts or regions. We also took care to include some
urban as well as rural settings and some settings with no RCRC intervention.

The hazards we covered are reasonably representative for the main hazards in East Africa. Drought-
related conflict was not covered, though it is quite common in some pastoralist areas. Large-scale
migration was also not covered, although this is becoming ever more important (Collins, 2012).

Interviews in each location

For each research location, interviews were held with key persons in the local government
administrations responsible for the chosen locations, as well as RCRC staff and volunteers, see p. 47.
The selected hazard was in the foreground of the interviews. Extra background information about
additional hazards and how they are interconnected was also recorded.
In the 2015 phase of the research, our main contact with local people was organised via community
focus group discussions (FGDs), mostly organised by the NS branches. We asked for the FGDs
themselves to be a typical selection of people including men, women, religious leaders, youth,
disabled people, the elderly, etc. We asked not to have interviews only with neighbourhood leaders
and RCRC volunteers but also with ordinary people with no special role or connection to RCRC, local
authorities etc. This attempt was partly successful but it was notable that no person with any
disabilities were present at any meeting during this first phase of the research. Whenever we asked
e.g. “do some people who live here have trouble with walking or hearing or seeing” we were told that
no such people lived there. However in one group there happened to be a home-based care worker
who says there are 37 people with HIV in this one village. It is very unlikely we would have heard
about these people if he had not been present. The percentage of women participating, and their
spontaneous role in the discussions, varied a lot from place to place. We did not have time to conduct
separate interviews with women and with men, but we were successful in encouraging women to
speak up where necessary. This approach also did not cover well those “communities” and networks
which are not strongly associated with a particular place such as a village.
So in the 2016 stage of the fieldwork, we prioritised interviews with other groups of people, such as
an association of people with albinism and members of a Scout group, some of which we organised
ourselves while remaining in communication with the relevant NS branch.

Limitations and Challenges

Apart from the issues of respondent selection addressed above, many other issues threaten the
accuracy and validity of our results. Here are a few:

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  Selective memory - people are more likely to recall warnings which were clear and useful?
 Contexts, questions and answers vary radically between districts and countries.
 Very small selection of locations to be able to generalise to East Africa.
 Limited and brief contact between researchers and communities; mostly two or three hours.
 Use of international researchers who needed translators for language and culture.
 No explicit involvement of communities themselves in framing the research questions.

Vignettes of each main location

Brief vignettes are presented to give some background of each main location. Codes for the main
respondent groups are also mentioned – these correspond to those in the list of interviews on p. 47.

Kenya, urban Nairobi, Informal settlements (NairobiUrban1,2,3)

We visited three different informal settlements at three different locations in Nairobi. These are
somewhat fragmented but very lively communities with a constant influx of newcomers. People try to
find whatever work they can. Most would like to be able to find more permanent work which would
enable them to leave the settlements. They live in difficult circumstances with more limited access to
healthcare and other basic services. Violence including gender-based violence is a big problem. Other
hazards include fire and, most importantly, floods. In two of the locations, flash floods occur several
times a year when there are heavy rains in the Ngong Hills located about 25 km away. We also spoke
to 13 active members of Women Fighting Aids in Kenya (NairobiUrban3) who are residents of one of
the informal settlements.

Kenya, Narok County (KenyaCounty1,2,3,4)

This county is within the Rift Valley and is vulnerable to floods and landslides. Maasai are the largest
group. There is some good soil which supports crop farming. About 70% of livelihoods are pastoralism
and agriculture19; there is also some mining, and the area receives additional tourism income as a
gateway to the popular Maasai Mara safari park. We spoke to a self-help group of 14 persons living
with disabilities (KenyaRural9), a school teacher (telephone), the County Office for the State body for
PWDs (KenyaCounty2) and the County RCRC Branch (KenyaCounty1) as well as attending a flood
planning meeting.

Kenya, Case Study Review of El Niño seed intervention (KenyaNational2)

Kenya Red Cross, in conjunction with British Red Cross, supplied additional heavy-feeding maize seeds
to selected farmers some regions of Kenya to help them achieve good outcomes from the forecast El
Niño rains in the second half of 2015. Data from some of the interviews conducted during this
intervention were kindly made available .

Kenya, Makuene County, Rural community, subsistence farmers

(KenyaRural1)

The area is poor, with 40% child stunting. Young people mostly move to Nairobi to look for work, and
some send remittances. One could almost say that these farmers are leading a dying way of life.
Rainfall is lower, less predictable and sometimes the rains fail altogether. They mostly farm maize

19 Narok_County_Strategic_Plan_2012

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which is the traditional staple, although yields are getting worse all the time and experts advise other
crops for most areas.

Respondents are mostly key people from a number of small communities in the area.

Kenay, Machakos County, Yatta farm growers & Processors Association,

Kenya (KenyaRural13)

We spoke to members of a registered Self-Help Group. Poverty in the area is about 60%, i.e. living on
less than 1 USD/day. They say agriculture is getting more difficult because of climate change. The
stated aim of the association is to reduce poverty. They grow mangoes as a source of cash, and have
also tried producing cassava flour.

Kenya, Activists in Albinism Society of Kenya (KenyaNational5)

The situation of people with albinism in East Africa is challenging; apart from problems with vision and
(avoidable) other health problems, as well as muti or murder for ritual purposes. Albinism is less rare
in East African than elsewhere, reaching a prevalence of around 1 to 1-2 thousand in Tanzania20. The
Albinism Society of Kenya aims to create awareness on albinism in order to enhance inclusion of
people with albinism.

M
ara Region. Under the Same Sun

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Tanzania, Bagamoyo, Mlingotini Village (TanzaniaRural1,2,3,4,5,6)

Figure 11. Flood-prone area, Bagamoyo

The main livelihoods are fishing and farming, with

main crops being cassava and wheat for subsistence
along with coconut, cashew and greengrams for cash.
Threats include drowning and loss of subsistence in
floods, drowning of fishermen, cholera and also crop
diseases. Flooding 1998, 2015 & 2016. Rising of sea
water levels leading to filling of wells with sea water
and erosion.

Tanzania, Dar es Salaam Municipality,

Manzese Ward – informal settlemen t ( TanzaniaUrban1,2,3,4)

Figure 12. Dar es Salaam, residents not involved in RCRC projects

As many as 70%21 of the 4-5 million people who live in

Dar-es-Salaam live in informal settlements. The
government has tried to normalise the situation by
providing property deeds for some of the settlements
and municipal infrastructure is not as bad as in some
informal settlements. Most people live from petty
trade within the settlements. Major threats include
flooding and cholera.

Ethiopia, Dire Dawa, Residents in a flood-

prone area (EthiopiaUrban5)

This area is prone to seasonal and flash flooding. Rain

on the Ahmar mountains to the south can cause flash
floods which fill the Dechatu river bed, which is
otherwise dry. A major World Food Programme cash-
for-work project has had some substantial success in
terracing and reforesting these hills. In 2005 and
2006, at least 400 people were killed in floods. Since
then, a substantial wall has been built on both sides of
the river. The flood prone area is occupied by poorer
households. Some people who farm the area
alongside this river have tried to build diversion
channels which would help to irrigate their fields.

Figure 13. Dwellings in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia, vulnerable to

flooding of the Dechatu river (river bed in the foreground).

21 Original reference xx

56 | P a g e
Ethiopia, Somali Region, Pastoralist community (EthiopiaRural1)
This community is under water and food stress and
members are (September 2015) visibly concerned
about the next weeks and months. The livestock is in
poor state.

Ethiopia, Somali Region, Agro-Pastoralist

Figure 14. Road access to pastoral communities in Somali
Region is quickly cut off in the rains.
community (EthiopiaRural2)
This community is also very challenged by what they
see as climate change, which means increasing
frequency of droughts and floods. They find it’s
increasingly difficult to find adequate pastures for
their livestock. As in many parts of Ethiopia, excessive
use of khat is a problem, particularly amongst men.

Ethiopia, NCD project, Ethiopia Red Cross, Dire Dawa Branch

(EthiopiaUrban3)
This Red Cross branch has an interesting approach to non-communicable diseases. Their project
entitled “vital signs” targets persons in employment on the one hand and prisoners in state prisons on
the other hand. Both groups are seen as being at risk of NCD’s. Medical teams conduct free sessions
for employees and prisoners, taking basic measurements like blood pressure and issuing an on the
spot advisory. This project can be seen as early action in the sense of responding to a growing public
health threat, but can also be considered to be early warning early action on the individual level.

Madagascar, communities in Vatovavy-Fitovinany and Atsimo-Atsinanana

Regions (MadagascarRural1, 2, 3, 4)
These two communities are both situated in a large floodplain which is exposed to extreme flooding
seasonally and in particular following cyclones. Dwellings are regularly submerged to a level of 2 m
and more. Until recently, these communities were able to make a good living selling spices such as
vanilla on the open market, but since a global collapse in prices for these commodities they have had
to resort to subsistence farming, at which they are not so skilled. Excessive consumption of alcohol is
a problem, particularly amongst men.
As a consequence, they suffer food scarcity even
though the area seems to the outside observer to
offer very good agricultural opportunities. During
the floods, crocodiles are active. The communities
share two or three canoes which are used to take
the rest of the household, their livestock and
reserves of food to higher ground, while the head
of the household waits on the roof for the waters
to subside, which can be days or weeks.
They take with them all the food they have
available, however this usually does not amount to
very much. There are in general no improved water
Figure 16. Rice fields in flood-prone area in Madagascar sources on the higher ground, which means that
people drink from the floodwaters. These higher
Figure 15. Barthlolemy Rabarson, MRCS, points out the features of
a traditional canoe

57 | P a g e
 areas can also get very crowded. They are conscious of this as a risk for waterborne diseases but have
no alternative.
The communities say there has been little or no loss of life in recent years to the floods directly. On
the other hand, they report that there are no disabled people living with them, which seems
surprising. The possibility remains that there are in fact some disabled people who are presumably
particularly vulnerable to the dangers of floodwaters. Their core problem is food security rather than
flooding, and if they were going to move it would be to a place with better agricultural prospects.

List of interviews

Regional Key

Marjorie Senior Officer, Community 14-Jul-15 Skype

Sotofranco Based Preparedness, IFRC
Geneva Regional1

John Mwalagho Sr DM Officer 01-Jul-15 Nairobi Regional2

Vinay Sadavarte Regional WATSAN 01-Jul-15 Nairobi

Coordinator Regional3

Erin Coughlan RCRC Climate Centre 02-Jul-15 Skype Regional4

Julie Arrighi Resilience Advisor - Africa | 08-Jul-15 Skype

American Red Cross Regional5

Karimi Gitonga Save the Children 30-Jun- Nairobi

15 Regional6

Gerry McCarthy People First Methodology 03-Jul-15 Nairobi Regional7

Atta Durrani Country Representative 04-Jul-15 Skype

Murtazza Murtazza Regional8

Felix Musonye Regional DRR Manager 20-Jul-15 Skype Regional9

Ali Sheikh Ibrahim DM Coordinator, Puntland, 01-Oct- ICRC Nairobi

Somalia 15 Office Regional10

Ahmed Jama Branch Secretary Galkayo, 01-Oct- ICRC Nairobi

Somalia 15 Office Regional11

Karen Rono-Bett Analyst, Development 14-Jun- IFRC Nairobi

Initiatives 16 Regional12

Potiphar Nkoma IFRC Africa Region Gender 16-Jun- ICRC Nairobi

and Diversity Coordinator 16 Office
Delegate Regional13

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 Thierno Balde IFRC Africa Region Health 15-Jun- ICRC Nairobi
Delegate 16 Office Regional14

Kenya, National

Dr James Kisia Executive Director of the 2-Oct-15 Kenya Red KenyaNational1

International Centre for Cross
Humanitarian Affairs and
Deputy Secretary-General of
Kenya Red Cross

Caroline Zastiral DRR Advisor, British Red 15-Jun- BRCS Nairobi KenyaNational2
Borchard Cross 16

Case Study Review KRCS/BRCS 15-Jun- KRCS Nairobi KenyaNational3

of El Niño seed 16
intervention

Johnson Kitetu Resource Mobilisation and 24-Jun- Kenyan Soc. KenyaNational4

PR Manager, Kenyan Society 16 for the Blind
for the Blind

6 members and officers, Albinism Society of Kenya 24-Jun- Kenyan Soc. KenyaNational5
16 for the Blind
– Board
Room

Kenya, Makueni County

Focus Group with 20 people 7th July Wote District KenyaRural1

15

John Phase Muli Pastor 7th July Wote District KenyaRural2

Kieve 15

Beatrice Mwaniva Pastor 7th July Wote District KenyaRural3

Mucka 15

Joe Mbalu Branch Coordinator Makueni 7th July KRCS Branch KenyaRural4
Branch 15 Office

Kenya, Narok County

Ali Juma County Coordinator, Narok 22-Jun- Narok Town KenyaCounty1

County RCRC 16

Julius Ntayia National Council for Persons 23-Jun- Narok Town KenyaCounty2
Living with Disabilities – 16
Narok County Coordinator

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 Attendance at Narok County Water 23-Jun- Narok Town KenyaCounty3
Workshop Resources Management 16
Authority

Brenda Mbuge Manager, Narok County 23-Jun- Narok Town KenyaCounty4

RCRC 16

Self-help group of 14 persons living with disabilities 23-Jun- Rotian, Narok KenyaRural9
16 County

Kenya, Machakos County

Alice Mueni County Drought Response 06-Jul-15 Machakos KenyaRural10

Officer KRC

Fred Okaba County Data analyst 06-Jul-15 Machakos KenyaRural11

KRC

Boni Volunteer 08-Jul-15 Machakos KenyaRural12

KRC

Focus Group with about 12 farmers 8 July Yatta District KenyaRural13

Kenya, Nairobi informal

settlements

Focus group with 20 people 8-Jul-15 Nairobi Blue NairobiUrban1

Estate

Focus group with 14 people 9-Jul-15 Nairobi Land NairobiUrban2

Mawe

Focus group with 13 21-Jun- Nairobi NairobiUrban3

members of Women fighting 16 Kibera,
Aids in Kenya Karanja Road
(NairobiUrban3), women
living positively

Tanzania, national

Grace Mawalla Dar es Salaam Municipality – 30-Jun- TRCS TanzaniaNational

Regional Coordinator 16 1

Renatus Mkaruka Disaster Manager at 29-Jun- TRCS TanzaniaNational

Tanzania Red Cross Society 16 2

Rachel Chisoza, Reporter and Cameraman at 29-Jun- Clouds FM TanzaniaNational

Sale Masoud Clouds FM Radio / TV / 16 Office 3
Digital (Regional & National)

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 Tanzania, Dar es Salaam
Municipality

Focus group with community residents 28-Jun- Manzese TanzaniaUrban1

16 Ward,
informal
settlement

Focus group with RCRC volunteers (community 28-Jun- Manzese TanzaniaUrban2

residents) 16 Ward,
informal
settlement

Focus group with Scouts (girls and boys) 29-Jun- TRCS Office TanzaniaUrban3
16

Kagaraki Adelaide Disaster Coordinator, 29-Jun- Manzese TanzaniaUrban4

Joyce Municipal Council 16 Ward,
informal
settlement

Tanzania, Bagamoyo,
Mlingotini Village

Focus Group with 7 younger women 27-Jun- Village Hall TanzaniaRural1

16

Focus Group with 7 older women 27-Jun- Village Hall TanzaniaRural2

16

Focus Group with 7 younger men 27-Jun- Village Hall TanzaniaRural3

16

Focus Group with 7 older men 27-Jun- Village Hall TanzaniaRural4

16

Muhammed Chief of Village 27-Jun- Village Hall TanzaniaRural5

Mwiligogo 16

Individual resident 27-Jun- Mlingotini TanzaniaRural6

16 Ward/Village

Ethiopia, Addis Ababa

Jill Clement Country Representative 21-Aug- IFRC Office EthiopiaNational1

15 Addis Ababa

Dr. Mulugeta Head DRR Dept 21-Aug- Ethiopia RCRC EthiopiaNational2

Gashaw 15 Office

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 Azemeraw Bekele Coordinator Climate Change 21-Aug- IFRC Office EthiopiaNational3
15 Addis Ababa

Kassahun Team Leader, Disaster 21-Aug- Ethiopia RCRC EthiopiaNational4

H/Mariam Prevention and 15 Office
Preparedness

Ethiopia, Somali Region

Focus group with 16 people 22-Aug- (Gursum EthiopiaRural1

15 woreda
(Tikdem
kebele)

Focus group with 16 people 23-Aug- Ararso EthiopiaRural2

15 woreda
(Arenhari
Kebele)

Khadar Nur Government District Disaster 23-Aug- Gursum ERCS EthiopiaRural3

Prevention and 15 branch office
Preparedness Officer

Mohamud Ahmed Woreda Chairman 23-Aug- Gudiga EthiopiaRural4

15 District

ERCS Branch Secretary, Gursum ERCS EthiopiaRural5

Somali Region branch office

Ethiopia, Dire Dawa city

Fuad Mohamed Regional Branch Secretary 25-Aug- Dire Dawa EthiopiaUrban1

15 Branch Office

Gebregiogis Regional DM Coordinator 25-Aug- Dire Dawa EthiopiaUrban2

G/Michael 15 Branch Office

Staff of "Vital Signs" 25-Aug- Dire Dawa EthiopiaUrban3

NCD unit 15 Branch Office

Individual Farmer 25-Aug- Dire Dawa, EthiopiaUrban4

15 near Dechatu
river

Residents of flood- 25-Aug- Dire Dawa, EthiopiaUrban5

prone area 15 near Dechatu
river

Wondwoson Beri Regional Government, Early 25-Aug- Regional EthiopiaUrban6

Blelete Warning Expert 15 Government
offices

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 Madagascar, Antananarivo

Micheal Emergency and 09-Oct- NS HQ MadagascarNatio

Ratsimbafafy Preparedness Officer 15 Antanarivo nal1

Hans Janssen Head of Regional Office, 09-Oct- NS HQ MadagascarNatio

German Red Cross 15 Antanarivo nal2

Fanja Ratsimbazafy Secretary General, 09-Oct- NS HQ MadagascarNatio

Madagascar RCRC 15 Antanarivo nal3

Madagascar, Vatovavy-
Fitovinany Region

Focus group with 06-Oct- Nosiala MadagascarRural

18 people 15 Village 1
Manakara
MadagascarRural
Focus group with 8 branch volunteers 06-Oct- Sidi Hotel , 2
15 Manakara

Vonjy Tsivala DM Coordinator 06-Oct- Sidi Hotel , MadagascarRural

Hajanirina 15 Manakara 3

Fridolin Caleb Government Chief 06-Oct- Government MadagascarRural

Administrator 15 Offices 4

Madagascar, Atsimo-
Atsinanana region

Barthlolemy Community Mobiliser 07-Oct- Farafangana MadagascarRural

Rabarson 15 branch office 5

Focus group with 07-Oct- Farafangana MadagascarRural

22 people 15 village 6

Focus group with 07-Oct- Farafangana MadagascarRural

volunteers 15 branch office 7

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Appendix: Terms of Reference
Community Early Warning Early Action Operational Research
Background
In contrast to disaster response mechanisms, early warning is one of
many important tools that contribute to the prevention of disasters
and preparedness for hazards and threats, of any kind. It greatly
enhances disaster risk reduction (DRR).

Community based early warning systems (CBEWS) are increasingly

recognized as critical to saving lives and protecting livelihoods ahead
of a disaster. The fact that it is managed by the communities from the
areas at risk makes the system more timely and adapted to their needs.
Community based early warning systems require the commitment of
communities and government institutions to maintain and monitor the
functioning of the system. Communities use diverse coping strategies
based on local knowledge of their environment, their socio-economic
situation and livelihood strategies and opportunities. However, while
still important in today’s world, this indigenous knowledge needs to be
reinforced by modern methods of risk mapping and hazard monitoring. The
combination of local knowledge and modern methods, including making
better use of technology, is where the Red Cross and Red Crescent
National Societies and other partners play a role in helping the
communities establish and maintain efficient CBEWS.

Communities also have mechanisms to reduce losses once they are aware of
the risk of a disaster or a “bad event”. Working on community managed
early warning early actions means building on these existing mechanisms,
strengthening them to make it more efficient. This requires an approach
where the knowledge and experience of the communities can be capitalised
and maximised with additional external resources.

This research aims to review existing early warning and early action
mechanisms at community level in 3 countries of East Africa, the
enabling factors and the constraints, and to give recommendations to
guide disaster preparedness programming. It will consider both rapid and
slow onset disasters, in rural and urban settings.

Geographic Scope

Three countries in East Africa. To be confirmed

Purpose of the assignment

The study aims specifically to provide an in depth analysis of the

existing early warning early action mechanisms in selected communities
of the 3 countries. This includes a review of:

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  source and nature of early warning information and channels in use
(or existing but not in use) to deliver it to communities
 access to early warning information across different groups of the
community
 community access to and use of technology in relation to early
warning
 level of understanding of the early warning information across the
community, specifically in relation to their ability and motivation
to act on early warning information received
 the mechanisms in place to mobilize resources for implementation of
early action
 the triggers used by the communities, or specific groups within the
communities
 the type of actions implemented, and how successful they were
 the desired actions which are not implemented and the constraints
explaining why they are not implemented
 the involvement of the stakeholders in the activation and
implementation of early actions

An analysis of the state of the enabling systems will also lead to a

better understanding of the enabling factors.

The research will provide an evidence base to inform community managed

early warning early action programming, within the RC movement but also
outside, and strengthen community preparedness in the region and in
similar contexts. The outcomes of this research will be shared with the
National Societies, RC and non RC movement partners, and communities, in
order to improve the collective response and create a common agenda for
action.

Specific Objectives

The specific objectives of the study will be to:

 Review the use of traditional, indigenous and local knowledge and

practises for early warning, as well as the use of modern early
warning information, for early action at community level
 Using community experience, identify main indicators and triggers
used for early action
 Document the critical factors and actors to enable activation and
implementation of early action through perspectives of the National
societies and targeted communities
 Identify opportunities for the use of technology and for sharing
early warning information in an understandable, actionable and
motivating way
 Review of successful and efficient early actions based on proven
experience
 Development of a final report
 Present key findings at a one day regional workshop to be held in
Nairobi which will involve appropriate representatives from

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 international and local NGOs, donor organisations, and government
representatives.

The review of the existing EW in use by the communities will look at the
legal aspect of disseminating such information and will give specific
attention to this aspect when looking at the constraints.

The researcher will also consider the current IFRC tools available and
compare the findings from the communities consultation with those tools
(CEWS guiding principles, the CEWS key messages and the CEWS tool kit).

Key Research Questions

a. Mutual understanding of risks/threats, disasters and early action

The first part if the study will consist in understanding what the
communities (or group of individuals within the communities) means by
risks, threats and disasters . For example the communities might be
concerned about, or might perceive as “risk”, other things which they
see as a threat but which are not of RCRC concerns, or vice-versa.
Harmonizing our understanding of these concepts will be key for a
meaningful research.

A common understanding of what early action means, will also be needed

at the beginning of the research.

a. The meaning of “community” in different contexts

The second part of the study will consists in clarifying what a

community is, or what type of groups within a community need to be
considered when dealing with EW and EA, with a very practical point of
view, in the different contexts reviewed during the research (rural and
urban settlements, with different livelihood and culture).

a. Early Warning Indicators and Triggers

Using community experience of past alerts and disasters, what were the
indicators and triggers used to assess risks and activate actions?

Across the region various indicators and triggers are currently being
used by communities, however to date there has been no mapping
compilation. The research proposes to map these indicators and triggers
in the contexts of both slow and rapid onset disasters, in rural and
urban settings. Early warning indicators (traditional and modern) and
triggers used by the communities will be identified and mapped in each
of the target countries through working in conjunction with communities
and National Societies.

The identification of the indicators implies finding out:

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  To what extent the communities rely on traditional and/or modern
indicators
 What type of information they receive
 How they understand and analyse the information received
 How is this shared more widely with all members of the community

The identification of the triggers implies finding out what mechanisms

are in place within the communities to:

 Compile the information observed/shared/received

 Make common and/or individual decision to act upon this information

It also implies to identify the factors influencing the decision and the
constraint which prevent / slow down the activation of an action.

Lastly, the research will look at situations where warnings were

available to the communities and the communities knowingly chose not to
implement early actions, and will identify the reasons for not taking
actions.

a. Early Warning Early Action Enabling Systems

What are the critical factors to enable communities, or groups within

the communities, to implement early actions?

There is still very limited common understanding on what are the

communities able to implement and activate on their own, what they could
realistically and sustainably do in addition to that and how? The review
will therefore seek to identify the type of actions which are commonly
implemented by the communities and how it is happening. This will be
done in 3 steps:

 A mapping of the early actions put in place by the selected

communities in case of different type of warnings and in both rural
and urban settings
 A review of the actual success/failure/efficacy of identified
community early warning and response systems in actual disasters
 The identification of the mechanisms and factors which enable the
implementation of these early actions, including how these are
widely shared. This will include the role of the local government
and other partners (CBOs, NGOs, private sector etc.) by looking at
how did communities interact with government and NGO systems
before/during/after a disaster.
 The identification of the constraints faced which prevent and / or
slow down the implementation of early actions

a. Recommendations and way forward

How can disaster preparedness programming best support the communities

in being autonomous in the management of their own risks?

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 In light of the findings of the research questions above and in
conjunction with recent reflections on risk, climate change and adaptive
capacities, how can the existing information sharing and decision making
system at community level be reinforced to enhance community disaster
preparedness. Which approach has been proven efficient, what failed and
why? What are the main aspects of such programming which should not be
left out to ensure that the support provide to the communities answers
best their needs in terms of risk management and disaster preparedness?
How can we reinforce one or several steps of the systems to ensure a
smooth and timely flow of information and decision making? How can we
maximise the opportunities provided by developments in and access to
technology?

The level of generalisability of the case studies will also have to

be assessed before developing the recommendations. This will require to
look at how much do the findings from one area generalise to the rest of
the country / region, and to what extent the factors and issues
identified can be considered as common factors.

The final research question from this consultancy will be to highlight

the key recommendations that practitioners should consider in order to
realise improved community disaster preparedness in their areas of
intervention.

Outputs and methodology

The expected output of this consultancy are:

a) A mapping of the type of early warning information reaching the

selected communities

b) A mapping of the type of the indicators and triggers used, and early
actions put in place by the selected communities

c) A thorough analysis of the type and efficiency of the mechanisms put

in place by the communities to initiate and implement early actions,
including how information is shared within communities, and how
successful those mechanisms have been in protecting lives and
livelihood

d) Clear and concise recommendations that practitioners should consider

in order to realise improved community disaster preparedness in
their areas of intervention.

The selected reviewer will be required to propose a detailed methodology

for discussion and approval,.\
The study is expected to involve both desk-based review and primary
research, which will include key informant interviews drawing from a
wide and balanced range of sources and evidence. Applicants should

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 propose how interviewees are selected and the content of interviews
recorded and analysed.

Suggestions in terms of methodology include:

 Desk review of existing projects documents, previous

researches/studies/consultations/publications on the same topic from
in East Africa and Indian Ocean Islands, and also from other
regions/zones
 Interview / Consultation with key informants (PNSs representatives,
IFRC Regional and Zonal offices representatives from various
departments, members of other organisations involved in community
based EW EA,)
 Interview / Consultation with staff and volunteers from the National
Societies in the countries to be visited and anthropologist from the
3 selected countries
 Interview / Consultation with communities from several projects the
3 selected countries
 A consultative workshop involving RC and non RC movement actors to
share the findings of the consultations and receive suggestions
prior to writing the final report
 Consultative meetings with the steering committee at key stages of
the research (inception, post-consultation, pre final report)

Timeline

The consultancy will complete the Final Report by 23^rd^ July 2015. It
is proposed that the research meet the below deadlines.

Activities Deliverable Proposed timeline Duration (days)

Desk literature review and preparation of inception report (including presentation of the inception
report to the steering committee) Inception report June Week 4 5
Visit country 1 July Week 1 7
Visit country 2 and key informant interviews July Week 2 7
Visit country 3 July Week 3 7
Work on the findings and the structure of the report July Week 4 3
Present consultation findings and structure of report to the steering committee and adjust according
to input Report structure September Week 1 5
Present consultation findings and structure of report to external partners September Week 1
Prepare draft final report September Week 2 5
Review of the draft final report by IFRC and the steering committee members September Week 3 0
Adjust and finalize final report Final report September Week 4 5
TOTAL DAYS 44

Including 26 days in the field

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 Travel time is included

More detailed information on the deliverables:

 The inception report will be presented to the steering committee

and will be composed of the methodology, the work schedule and the
list of key informants to be interviewed. This report can be in form
of a power point presentation or written report. Comments from the
members of the steering committees should be considered and required
adjustment should be made.
 The report structure will explain how the findings and the
recommendations will be presented in the report and will give an
rapid overview of the findings and the recommendations.
 The final report should be clear, concise, well written, reader
friendly and consist of a maximum of 15 pages including an executive
summary. Annexes and a few photographs from the field visits can be
appended as needed.

The final report will be a reviewed version of the draft, after

integration of the comments and recommendations given by the
participants during the consultative meeting with the steering
committee.

All products arising from this consultancy will be owned by the IFRC.
The consultant will not be allowed, without prior authorization in
writing, to present any of the analytical results as his or her own work
or to make use of this consultancy results for private publication
purposes.

Management and Oversight

It is proposed that a core steering committee composed of Red Cross Red

Crescent National Societies, the RCRC Climate Center and IFRC country
representatives provides oversight to this project.

The contracting agency and focal point for the assignment will be the
IFRC East Africa and IOI regional representation.

The IFRC focal person for this consultancy will be: Malika NOISETTE
OGWANG, Regional Disaster Risk Management Coordinator for East Africa
and Indian Ocean Islands, IFRC.

Report and case studies Quality & Ethical Standards

The consultant (s) should take all reasonable steps to ensure:

 that the final products are designed and conducted to respect and
> protect the rights and welfare of the people and communities
> involved,

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View publication stats

 that the information is technically accurate and reliable, and

 that the analysis is conducted in a transparent and impartial
> manner, and contributes to organizational learning and
> accountability.

It is also expected that the consultant will respect the seven

Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross and Red Crescent: 1) humanity,
2) impartiality, 3) neutrality, 4) independence, 5) voluntary service,
6) unity, and 7) universality. Further information can be obtained about
these Principles at:
www.ifrc.org/what/values/principles/index.asp
and further guidance can be found in the IFC Evaluation Framework on
http://ifrc.org/Global/Publications/monitoring/IFRC-Framework-for-Evaluation.pdf

The IFRC report standards are:

1. Utility: Report must be useful and used.

2. Feasibility: Recommendations must be realistic, diplomatic, and
> managed in a sensible, cost effective manner.
3. Ethics & Legality: Consultancy must be conducted in an ethical
> and legal manner, with particular regard for the welfare of those
> involved in and affected by the evaluation.
4. Impartiality & Independence; Report content should be impartial,
> providing a comprehensive and unbiased assessment that takes into
> account the views of all stakeholders.
5. Transparency: Content of the report and case studies should
> reflect an attitude of openness and transparency.
6. Accuracy: Content of the report and case studies should be
> technical accurate, providing sufficient information about the
> data collection, analysis, and interpretation methods so that its
> worth or merit can be determined.
7. Participation: Stakeholders should be consulted and meaningfully
> involved in the process when feasible and appropriate.
8. Collaboration: Collaboration between key operating partners in
> the process to ensure the legitimacy and utility of the report and
> case studies.

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