Has Kenya’s disaster anticipatory action progressed from policy to protection?

Key reasons to read this article:

• Kenya can predict the floods, but can it act in time?
• Warnings can reach millions, but will they trigger action?
• A key flood-financing mechanism is about to expire. What comes next?
• When the water rises, will funding move fast enough to protect people?

Kenya has in place a disaster anticipatory-action roadmap, flood-risk mapping, large-scale early-warning systems and mechanisms that have been designed to enable funding to be released before a flood occurs. But as the country currently prepares for potentially severe rainfall between October and December, a more difficult question is emerging: can these systems work together quickly enough to protect people before the water arrives?

Kenya’s anticipatory action systems have been developed around recurring droughts, with early warning systems, cash transfer schemes and agricultural support being used to help communities to prepare for a lack of rain. The forthcoming rainy season will test whether these systems will also work when the danger arises from too much water rather than too little.

A forecast with a track record

Kenya’s Meteorological Department has estimated an 81% likelihood of a very strong El Niño this year, with a 97% probability that the effects will continue into early 2027. It has also predicted above-average rainfall over more than 80% of the country throughout October, November and December.

The National Disaster Operations Centre in Kenya is currently preparing for the worst-case scenario, which would mean 1.5 million people could be affected and another 500,000 displaced.

This is not a hypothetical stress test. Kenya has already had a preview this year of what may lie ahead. According to the Kenya Red Cross’s 2026 flood tracking, flooding between March and May affected 41 counties, more than 85,000 households and left over 18,500 people homeless. The society sent more than 26 million early-warning SMS messages to the communities at risk and, together with county governments, established 66 camps for displaced people.

These figures show that although Kenya can disseminate warnings at significant scale, being able to alert millions of people is not the same as enabling them to take protective action.

What Kenya’s roadmap is designed to change

In 2024, Kenya adopted its first National Anticipatory Action Roadmap, a five-year plan that aims to focus disaster management on preventative activities. The document, produced jointly by government agencies, humanitarian organizations and researchers, sets out a framework to incorporate anticipatory action into disaster-risk management rather than treating it as an ad hoc response.

However, turning early warnings into early action appears to remain a challenge. Kitui County Meteorological Officer, Daniel Mbithi, explained that early warnings should trigger action by county authorities, including positioning emergency supplies, identifying those households at risk, reviewing evacuation plans and ensuring response teams are ready to act.

“Warnings should not be given and then end there. They should lead to action before the floods happen,” he commented.

An early warning can only reduce risk when institutions have the capacity and commitment to take appropriate action before the hazard strikes. So far, Mbithi suggests there has been little progress in this respect. The authorities requested the Kenya National Highways Authority to identify those roads where there were unstable trees that could fall and restrict access during heavy rains, but this work has yet to begin. This example illustrates the gap between identifying the risks and putting preventive measures in place.

The challenge, therefore, is not simply to produce more accurate forecasts, but to turn those forecasts into prompt decision-making and concrete action – a shift that is at the core of Kenya’s anticipatory-action roadmap.

The financing test

Early action also depends on whether funding is made available before a disaster strikes. Internationally, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Food Programme (WFP) have significantly expanded their anticipatory-action programs since the 2023–2024 El Niño, when the two organizations reported activating preventive measures to support over three million people.

Their latest anticipatory action appeal, covering June 2026 to March 2027 and including Kenya, aims to protect almost nine million people in 22 countries, roughly three times the number reached during the previous El Niño response. Although capacity has since increased, the FAO and WFP acknowledge that the total level of assistance still falls well short of the identified needs.

Kenya’s own experience illustrates the challenge. The Kenya Red Cross Society has an Early Action Protocol for riverine floods, under which funding is released when pre-defined flood-risk triggers are reached rather than having to wait until after the damage has occurred. When the protocol was activated in 2023, about US$214,000 was released for measures targeting around 150,000 people.

However, this mechanism is due to expire in October 2026 and there has been no public confirmation that it will be either renewed or replaced. This raises a practical question: when the next flood-risk threshold is reached, what mechanism will release funding automatically and predictably?

Early warnings can identify where and when risks are likely to occur, but without funding that can be deployed in advance, these warnings may still only trigger a response after the damage has been done.

The cost of waiting

The question extends to Kenya’s wider disaster financing system. The country’s Disaster Risk Financing Strategy 2026–2030 indicates that the national budget intended for disaster-risk reduction averaged about US$680 million a year between 2021-2022 and 2023-2024. However, only about US$7.5 million of this amount was specifically channeled towards prevention activities under the companion National Disaster Risk Management Strategy. The Treasury also notes that Kenya lacks a fully costed national plan covering all the investment required for risk reduction.

The consequences of underinvestment become clearer when compared to the cost of recent disasters. The same strategy indicates there was about US$1.45 billion in damages and losses in the October–December 2023 and March–May 2024 flood seasons alone.

Kenya does have mechanisms designed to release money rapidly with its Contingency Fund capped at about US15 million in initial capital. At county level, however, only 19 of Kenya’s 47 counties had an operational Emergency Fund as of 2025, each capped at 2% of county revenue.

Kenya is not an outlier

A look at Somalia provides a regional comparison. In August, an alliance of Save the Children, Plan International, SOS Children’s Villages and World Vision warned that the US$7 million pre-approved by the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund for flood preparedness ahead of the same El Niño was “a start against a far larger requirement”.

With roughly eight weeks remaining before the rains at the time of that August statement, the agencies urged donors and Somalia’s government to release anticipatory funding immediately rather than wait for the flooding to begin, which would enable less to be spent but more people to be protected.

The test ahead

Compared to a decade ago, the evidence gathered here points to there having been a measurable shift. Kenya has a national anticipatory roadmap, county-level early warning dissemination that can reach millions of phones, mapped hotspots down to the sub-county level, and a Red Cross protocol that has, in the past, released funding within days of a forecast rather than weeks following a disaster. These are the important building blocks of a successful anticipatory action system.

The stronger test, however, will be whether these components can operate together. It will be whether a forecast reaches the right people, triggers a decision, unlocks funding and results in concrete protective action before flooding actually occurs.

What has not yet caught up is scale and reliability. The number of people identified as potentially at risk remains far greater than the number current funding mechanisms are designed to reach. Kenya’s roadmap acknowledges this gap, while the expanded FAO-WFP appeal indicates the same problem is being experienced at regional level.

As the short rains have yet to peak, the next few months will test the effectiveness of Kenya’s anticipatory action model: not whether it can forecast a flood, but whether that forecast can move through the system quickly enough to release money, trigger decisions and protect people before the water arrives.