Forecast-based financing: community participation in monitoring, evaluation and learning

Abstract

Forecast-based financing (FbF) is a novel approach in anticipatory humanitarian assistance. It seeks to mitigate disaster impacts and reduce human suffering and losses (German Red Cross [GRC], n.d.). Monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) is important to generate evidence that FbF works and to enhance learning (Weingärtner et al., 2019). Critically, community participation in MEL is important to ensure sustainability of learning, ground-truth risk models, and uphold the fundamental rights of beneficiaries to be involved in decisions that directly affect them (Napier et al., 2020, O’Sullivan, 2020, UNDP, 2020). However, such a participatory MEL is absent from existing FbF projects. There is no formal guidance for how MEL in FbF can be participatory (Start Network and Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, 2020).

This project builds upon this gap by examining an ongoing UN-led FbF pilot for typhoon response to understand existing levels of participatory MEL and suggest key recommendations for how MEL in FbF can be more participatory. Through semi-structured interviews with stakeholders of the pilot and experts, I identified existing levels of participation in MEL in the pilot to be low. This is largely because the learning from the pilot is guided by top-down objectives – but this may also suggest that MEL can be more participatory once sufficient evidence has been collected. Additionally, participation tends to increase closer to the ground, between locally-based INGOs and beneficiaries. This finding supports the localization agenda and suggests that top-down coordination informed by ground-up voices may be the way forward to build more sustainable and accountable FbF systems.

Keywords: Forecast-based financing, anticipatory action, monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL), participatory approach, participatory MEL, anticipatory humanitarian assistance, typhoons