Bangladesh | Striking before disaster does

As floods threaten the nation, FAO teams up with UN allies in anticipatory action

“Wherever you look, there is water. You see people wading through knee-deep floods in search of shelter, carrying small livestock in their arms to find some place for them to feed – but often there is none,” says Robert Simpson, head of FAO’s office in Bangladesh.

He is describing the floods that have recently ravaged a third of the country – the worst in ten years. Such events can leave farming families’ lives and livelihoods in tatters, with hard-to-replace assets washed away or destroyed and their animals hungry and sick.

But even when flooding takes place at this magnitude, it is possible to help people prepare and withstand the water’s onslaught. This year, FAO and partners in Bangladesh used state-of-the-art data collection and predictive analytics to anticipate when the flooding would peak. They could thus intervene ahead of time, helping farming families secure their livestock and essential assets before the waters struck.

The intervention was made possible by an extraordinarily swift release of funds from the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF), which took only four hours to make USD 5.2 million available – the fastest such funds have ever been disbursed in UN history.  As well as to FAO, funding went to the World Food Programme (WFP) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to support a variety of protective interventions.