Anticipatory Action offers the potential to address humanitarian crises in a way that is proactive rather than reactive, to save lives and reduce the impact of hazards on education infrastructure, education personnel, learners and their communities. Anticipatory Action leverages a window of opportunity: using the time between when an early warning or forecast is available and before the full-blown crisis to use pre-positioned resources and plans to take protective action for children; acting on the basis of risk rather than needs.

Building on the innovative EiE Day 1 approach to technical and operational preparedness, Save the Children is leading at the sector-level to define what child-focused AA in Education looks like in practice through the Global Education Cluster’s Task Team on Preparedness and Anticipatory Action. Save the Children is building on learning from contexts like Madagascar, where this year the Education team there took anticipatory action to mitigate the impact of Cyclone Freddy on children, reducing the damaged to school buildings, preserving teaching and learning materials and sharing lifesaving information in classrooms in at risk areas in the days before the cyclone made landfall. Children were able to return to learning quickly after the storm and education losses were minimized.