Waiting for the F-word

I cry at Secret Millionaire. One Born Every Minute leaves me an emotional wreck. My angry shouting at the news is normal in our house.

But this is different. This is a pit-of-my-stomach sadness. It’s a sense of anger that grows every time I see more photos and films. It’s a deep frustration at our habit of waiting for a situation to get so obviously and appallingly awful before we lift a finger to improve it.

The situation in Somalia and its drought stricken neighbours didn’t need to get this bad. Various agencies foresaw the consequences of the lack of rain in the area, and they tried to rally the resources to help prevent them. But until the point of absolute desperation and the declaration of the F-word – Famine – it proved impossible to mobilise the funds and resources to the scale required.

All my prayers are with the people on the ground trying desperately to deal with the immediate crisis. But my mind is now bent on how we can turn this bad habit around. To make a habit of preventing situations from developing so horrendously in the first place.

We’re working on this goal in terms of climate change and broader sustainability. We’re enabling organisations to spot the ‘weak signals’ of things to come and act on them early. We’re helping the health sector explore sustainable, preventative pathways of care. And we help companies build their resilience and spot opportunities by helping them understand what the future could have in store for them and their markets.

As Andrew Harding, the BBC’s Africa correspondent so plainly puts it:

“If the world put as much effort into long-term programmes to build resilience in communities, as it's now doing to feed the hungry, this famine would never have happened.”