1 December 2025

Picture a mother in Beira, Mozambique, watching the sky turn the colour of wet cement. She has seen storms before but not like this one in March 2019 where the water kept climbing. When it receded, the map of her life was unrecognisable: her home was gone, the roads were cut off, fields were ruined along with any hope of harvest, and the schools her children attended had been flattened.

Beyond weather, Cyclone Idai was a policy test. Could the systems we built protect people when the sea came inland? UN and academic assessments later put the total damage and losses in the billions of dollars, and called it among the Southern Hemisphere’s worst weather disasters.

The Nansen Initiative hypothesis and Africa’s last decade

When the Nansen Initiative was launched in Geneva in 2012, it did something deceptively simple: it named the gap. People displaced by disasters were not necessarily refugees or neatly protected by existing legal regimes. They moved across borders or within them, often falling through the cracks of international protection. The Nansen Initiative offered a practical Protection Agenda, suggesting that cooperation, solidarity and clear standards for admission and stay could close the gap between principle and practice.

A decade later, Africa has become the proving ground for those ideas. The continent has moved from recognising the problem to designing real mechanisms to keep people safe before, during and after climate-related disasters. Governments have aligned disaster risk strategies with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, adopted guidance on cross-border displacement, and collectively affirmed that disaster displacement is not just a humanitarian concern but a legitimate policy domain.

That is meaningful progress. Yet, it is also incomplete. The next decade must be about delivery, ensuring that rules, resources and responsibilities meet people where they stand, or where they have been forced to move. While the Nansen Initiative drew the blueprint, Africa is raising the structure.

What Africa actually built in practice

1. A continental backbone for risk reduction: In 2017, the African Union adopted the Programme of Action (PoA) to implement the Sendai Framework in Africa. It provides a strategic plan for national and regional disaster risk reduction strategies, with an explicit emphasis on early warning and preparedness. This matters because preventing avoidable displacement is the first cost-effective protection measure.
2. From principle to procedure on cross-border movement: In the IGAD region, States moved beyond high-level statements to operational tools, including the development of standard operating procedures (SOPs) on admission and stay for people displaced across borders by disasters. The SOPs emerged from a multi-year process with governments, the Platform on Displacement (PDD) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), and they have been tested in simulations so officials can use them under pressure.
3. A political signal with continental reach: In 2022, ministers from the East and Horn of Africa adopted the Kampala Ministerial Declaration on Migration, Environment and Climate Change (KDMECC). By 2023, 48 African countries had endorsed the Declaration, sending a clear message: mobility in the context of climate change is real, regional cooperation is necessary and policy harmonisation is the path forward.

When hazards hit, we need systems that work, not paperwork

Africa’s risk landscape is not an abstraction. The basin that once supported communities around Lake Chad has fluctuated dramatically over decades due to climate variability and water withdrawals, periodically shrinking to a fraction of where it was in the 1960s. People adapt by moving, often seasonally, sometimes permanently. Managing that movement safely is part of climate policy. A concise overview of Lake Chad’s long-term fluctuations and a study showing recent seasonal recoveries which complicate the ‘vanishing lake’ narrative are both instructive.

The floods in Mozambique in 2000 and Cyclone Idai in 2019 underline a second truth. Disasters are punctuated, high-impact events that can erase development gains in days and trigger internal and cross-border displacement. Idai destroyed homes, health facilities and services, and schools across several countries, with billions of dollars of economic losses.

Where policy has caught up

Across the continent, countries have been aligning their disaster risk policies with the Sendai Framework, reporting into the Sendai Framework Monitor and strengthening multi-hazard early warning systems. These are not headlines. They are the infrastructure that makes anticipatory action possible and that can reduce displacement when hazards hit.

On adaptation planning, an increasing number of African states have submitted National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), a signal that mobility considerations are being mainstreamed into climate policy. The number of NAP submissions keeps growing, and you can verify the latest figures on a publicly accessible database that is regularly updated.

Even politically, the centre of gravity is shifting. In 2024, Kenya became the Chair of the PDD, signalling African leadership in a space it has long occupied by necessity.

Weak links that highlight gaps in practice

If the first decade since the Nansen Initiative Protection Agenda built the scaffolding in Africa, implementation is now the bottleneck, with three persisting deficits.

1. Joined-up policy is the exception, not the norm: Mobility sits at the intersection of migration, disaster management, climate policy, labour and international protection. Too often, these portfolios operate in parallel rather than in partnership. While declarations are necessary, so are budgets, bilateral instruments and inter-ministerial mechanisms.
2. Financing is short-term in a long-term risk system: Donor cycles reward projects, not maintenance. Early warning systems need technicians, spare parts, data feeds and drills every year. SOPs on admission and stay need to be practised, updated and resourced. The cost of not maintaining is always higher after a disaster hits.
3. Data is improving but is still thin on what matters most: We have hazard data. But we need mobility-aware, gender-disaggregated data that captures how and why people move, where they go and what helps them recover with dignity. NAPs and disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies are the right ‘homes’ for this data if we design them that way. The data-profiles produced by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) and NAP Central remain the baseline references to watch.

What execution looks like on the ground

We often talk about resilience as a thing communities either have or lack. The truth is more pedestrian and more powerful. Resilience is logistics. It is whether the radio works when the network goes down. Whether the bridge stands long enough for a bus to cross. Whether a border post has a laminated protocol that lets a family fleeing a flash flood enter, register and receive assistance without being told to come back on Monday. The policy world has spent a decade achieving alignment. The practitioner’s world now needs authority to execute.

Staying true to the Protection Agenda

To stay faithful to the Nansen Initiative’s Protection Agenda, Africa’s next steps should track its three core priorities.

1. Cooperation and solidarity: Scale the KDMECC spirit into bilateral and regional instruments with teeth. That means mutual assistance clauses for evacuations, data-sharing on early warnings and fast-track border measures when specific hazard thresholds are met.
2. Standards for admission and stay: Take the IGAD SOPs and turn them into standing operating capacity. Run annual simulations. Allocate line-item budgets. Publish help-desk numbers. The SOPs exist because ministers asked for them. Now permanent secretaries must make them muscle memory.
3. Operational responses: Build anticipatory action into national DRR plans, with triggers tied to meteorological thresholds and social indicators. If water levels hit X and the road to Y floods at Z, the local government should already know which shelters must open, which cash transfers release and which admissions protocols activate at the nearest border. The Sendai-aligned Programme of Action is the place to codify this.

What next? Four practical commitments for policymakers

1. Fund the boring essentials: Earmark recurrent budgets for early warning maintenance, cross-border coordination meetings and annual SOPs drills. The unglamorous line items save the most lives.
2. Make mobility visible in plans: Require every sector ministry to identify how climate-related mobility affects its mandate and what services it will adapt, then reflect that in NAPs and DRR strategies. Track publicly on NAP Central and the Sendai Framework Monitor.
3. Turn KDMECC into mechanisms: Use the political mandate to craft model bilateral protocols on temporary protection during disasters, portable ID for displaced persons and mutual recognition of civil documents. Report progress each year at regional DRR or migration forums.
4. Centre women and youth in design: Require gender-disaggregated indicators and youth participation in every SOP test and evacuation plan. This is not an add-on. It is the difference between a policy that works on paper and a policy that works at dusk on a flooded roadside.

A decade on from the Nansen Initiative Protection Agenda, Africa has a shared language and a continental frame. The next decade must embed these in systems that function under pressure. When a mother in Mozambique meets the next storm, she should not depend on improvisation or goodwill. She should find a system rehearsed in advance. That is what real protection looks like.

Dr Nicodemus Nyandiko is a Senior Research Fellow at Masinde Muliro University of Science and Technology (MMUST), Kenya and Ibukun Taiwo is a Communications Specialist at Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.