Far from the bureaucracy of international finance, a seemingly simple solution is making headway to protect populations vulnerable to climatic hazards: transfer them a little money via their mobile phone, very quickly, even before disaster strikes.
Faced with a flood, a hurricane or a mega-fire, “the faster you receive the money, the better,” summarizes Ranil Dissanayake, researcher at the Center for Global Development.
Better yet, it should be paid before the disaster: “beneficiaries can then prepare their accommodation, store food, or move to sheltered areas,” he explains to AFP.
“Imagine the difference this can make for manual workers in northern India who, if they receive aid ahead of a 50°C heatwave, will not necessarily have to work” in these conditions.
At the critical moment
This type of “preventive” intervention, deployed for several years by humanitarian organizations in other contexts, is recommended by experts such as the French economist Esther Duflo, but is still rare for climatic events, which are expected to become more frequent. more intense and frequent.
Direct payments by mobile phone, or via a withdrawal card, have however already been tested.
The UN has carried out a dozen pilot actions, in drought-stricken Ethiopia and Somalia, or in Bangladesh, where in 2020 more than 23,000 households were able to receive $53 a week before the peak of a gigantic flood.
“There is a consensus that it works, and that providing cash earlier has an increased social benefit, by providing aid at a critical time,” underlines Ashley Pople, researcher at the Center for the Study of African Economies from the University of Oxford, who studied the case of Bangladesh.
According to this study, the beneficiaries were able to stock up on provisions but also shelter their animals, and therefore their means of subsistence. For households that were unable to take advantage of it, the risk of going a day without eating was increased by 52%.
When a disaster strikes, “many multilateral development banks think about how to quickly help governments. But there is not much on how to quickly get funds to the people most affected,” observes Mme Pople.
100 dollars to avoid the worst
Since 2020, the American GiveDirectly program has intervened in Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo and even Malawi, by transferring, through mobile means, money to populations facing crises (conflict, displacement, etc.).
While Nigeria fears flooding again this fall, 20,000 households have been pre-registered, the most exposed of which will receive $320 at least three days before the peak of the flood.
To identify them, the NGO, in partnership with Google, relies on a mixture of satellite images, flood maps using artificial intelligence, administrative data, and field surveys. In Mozambique, more than 7,500 families received $225 through it three days before a flood in 2022. In Bangladesh, 15,000 people received $100 in 2024 before a flood of the Jamuna River.
However, this type of action is not without limits and challenges.
“We need sufficiently precise and detailed forecasts, ideally at the scale of a village or community,” explains M.me Pople, referring to Google’s work in this direction on floods.
Some bad weather, notably hurricanes, are also more difficult to predict, with changing directions.
“We are able to predict certain disasters in certain places. But for others, more investment is needed, particularly in weather stations,” explains Mr. Dissanayake.
He also mentions the necessary lifting of “political barriers”. “We must explicitly recognize that this is part of the response tools to climate change, and finance it effectively,” underlines the researcher. Even if this does not exempt from financing “infrastructure, transport, dikes… Anticipated individual aid can be a good part of the solution, [mais] she can rarely do everything.”