Interview of Thuy-Binh NGUYEN

Forecast-based Financing is an initiative that has attracted a lot of attention in the humanitarian community recently. One of the reasons why is that in humanitarian response, very often we are late and with the climate change, with all the intensifications and also in the predictability of the disasters it is making our work more and more complicated.

At the same time we have already, with all the scientific information, we know the forecast, we know what we are going to do, we know which community we are going to help. So why can’t we act in advance with all the information that we have ?

Forecast-based Financing, to make it very simple, is an effort to shift part of the humanitarian response after disasters to before these disasters, based on the forecast. That is the reason why we can help to improve our humanitarian actions and also to make our disaster risk reduction activities more efficient.

So, where is the French Red Cross at in relation to this interesting Forecast-based Financing development? Recently we got funding from AFD for a project in Niger and in this project we are going to pilot, for the very first time within the Red Cross movement, the FBF for drought.

As you may know drought is one of the disasters that has worldwide impact. For example, in Sahel just last year there were 6 million people in food insecurity, including 1.6 million children. This food insecurity crisis was induced by the drought and that is the reason why in our project in Niger we will try to activate the FBF, especially in food security, livelihood and nutrition and you will hear more of this very interesting initiative in Cannes in our conference on health and climate change.