Platform / network

FOREWARN Bangladesh

Youth and technical experts turning forecasts, data and local knowledge into analysis the Hub's programmes can act on — particularly around anticipatory and evidence-informed humanitarian action.

Knowledge & expertise networkNot a funding programmeYouth-led analysis

A platform, not a programme

FOREWARN does not hold funding or run allocations. It produces the analysis that makes acting early defensible.

Anticipatory action rests on a claim: that a forecast is reliable enough to spend money on before anything has happened. Someone has to be able to defend that claim — to say why this threshold and not another, what the model gets wrong, and what last season’s forecast actually predicted versus what occurred.

FOREWARN Bangladesh is where that capability sits. It brings together hydrologists, meteorologists, agronomists and risk analysts with early-career Bangladeshi professionals, and holds the expertise inside the national network rather than buying it in from outside each season.

That is also a deliberate answer to a structural problem. Technical authority in humanitarian decision-making has historically sat with international agencies. Building it here, held by young Bangladeshi analysts, changes who gets to say what the evidence means.

The analysis feeds directly into Disaster Risk Financing triggers and contingency plans.

At a glance

What it is: Network and platform
Who is in it: Youth analysts and technical experts
What it produces: Risk briefings, model review, evidence
Who it supports: The Hub and its programmes
Logo sequence: FOREWARN, then the Hub on the right

What the platform does

Four functions

01
Seasonal risk briefings
Published ahead of each season: outlook, hazard-specific watchpoints, and what the forecast skill actually is for each hazard and region.
02
Trigger and model review
Independent scrutiny of the thresholds that release DRF funding — including saying when a model is not good enough to act on.
03
Post-season verification
Comparing what was forecast against what happened, so thresholds improve rather than calcify. This is the part most systems skip.
04
Building the next cohort
Placements and fellowships for early-career analysts, so technical capability accumulates in Bangladesh instead of rotating through it.

The network

Who is involved

FOREWARN Bangladesh convenes two groups that rarely sit in the same room: senior technical specialists with decades of Bangladeshi hazard experience, and early-career analysts who will hold that knowledge in twenty years.

Hydrologists and meteorologists working on flood, cyclone and temperature forecasting
Agronomists and food-security specialists on drought and cropping-calendar risk
Risk analysts and data specialists building and stress-testing the trigger models
Youth analysts on placement, contributing to briefings and verification work
Member organisation staff who supply the ground-truth the models are validated against

Expert and youth network membership to be confirmed with the FOREWARN team.

Section content pending from the FOREWARN team

Image to source

FOREWARN working session: young analysts and senior technical experts around a screen showing forecast maps or model output. The mix of ages in one working group is the point of the image — this is where expertise is transferred, not just applied.

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