Founded in 1956, the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) is a leading international NGO and one of the few with a specific expertise in forced displacement. Active in 40 countries with 9,000 employees and supported by 7,500 volunteers, DRC protects, advocates, and builds sustainable futures for refugees and other displacement affected people and communities. DRC works during displacement at all stages: In the acute crisis, in displacement, when settling and integrating in a new place, or upon return. DRC provides protection and life-saving humanitarian assistance; supports displaced persons in becoming self-reliant and included into hosting societies; and works with civil society and responsible authorities to promote protection of rights and peaceful coexistence.
Purpose of the consultancy
Under the project Anticipatory Humanitarian Action for Displacement (AHEAD), the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) and DEMAC are commissioning a consultancy to consolidate lessons and findings on the role of diaspora in anticipatory action under the project. The consultancy focuses on two levels:
(1) Context monitoring, community sensing and early warning: examining whether diaspora and local partner specific signals, including remittance patterns and community sensing indicators, can serve as reliable early warning indicators for conflict-induced displacement; and,
(2) Response and activation: the distinctive contribution diaspora organisations and their local partners make in the partial and full activation phases, including how they mobilise resources quickly and exploring other innovative modalities for channelling support.
Background
AHEAD — Anticipatory Humanitarian Action for Displacement — is a global project led by the Danish Refugee Council (DRC) that aims to strengthen humanitarian responses by improving the ability to act before displacement occurs. Implemented in eight countries (Yemen, Myanmar, Somalia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Uganda, South Sudan), it combines in-country implementation with cross-context learning to build an evidence base for anticipatory action (AA) in conflict settings — an area far less developed than AA for climatic shocks. A key component of the project is to strengthen the inclusion of diaspora and local actors in designing AA frameworks and supporting their engagement in preparedness, early warning dissemination, and rolling out AA responses.
Diaspora, often outside formal humanitarian structures, play an essential role in conflict-prone contexts. Sitting at the intersection of a layered, real-time information ecosystem, they occupy a unique position of trust and access that formal systems cannot replicate, receiving real-time community intelligence — often within hours — and disseminating warnings through channels, communities actually listen to in areas hard to reach. The same trusted channels that receive community intelligence also serve as the fastest available mechanism for mobilising and transferring resources. Across crises, they share unique capacities to mobilise and transfer resources swiftly, rapidly and innovatively, serving as often overlooked yet critical lifelines that are sustained beyond the lifespan of a crisis. This dual function of sensing and acting is what makes diaspora actors uniquely positioned in the AA ecosystem, and what distinguishes them from other formal early warning actors.
Yet while diaspora actors are increasingly recognised as informal humanitarian actors and vital responders in the aftermath of crisis, their capacity to mobilise existing knowledge, networks and resources in the critical window before displacement peaks remains largely under-conceptualised and under-examined. This gap extends across both dimensions of diaspora engagement: the signals they detect and the modalities through which they mobilise support. Remittances are illustrative. As a signal, shifts in remittance behaviour may point to deteriorating conditions in real time — when communities begin planning their displacement journey — yet their reliability and specificity as an early warning indicator remain untested. And while Somali remittances exceed USD 2 billion annually, outpacing official development assistance and humanitarian aid combined, these flows are inherently kinship-based and solidarity-driven, mediated by relations of trust and reciprocity, and mobilised almost exclusively in reaction to crises that have already hit. Accordingly, this raises broader questions about whether their support can be relied upon proactively, and/or sustained across recurrent shocks without exhausting the networks they depend on. Across both the predictive and the financing dimensions, it remains unexamined whether diaspora signals and resources — remittances among them — can be oriented towards anticipatory ends. This is the conceptual and empirical gap the consultancy sets out to explore and address.
This consultancy is anchored in the AHEAD Somalia context - a context that combines recurrent, overlapping conflict- and climate-driven displacement with an exceptionally strong, densely connected diaspora. As AHEAD is implemented in Somalia, DRC and its partners generate evidence on two questions: whether the signals diaspora detect are reliable enough to act on, and how their engagement affects outcomes once a response is triggered. The consultancy's role is to consolidate this evidence and package it into a structured account of diaspora as anticipatory actors. In doing so, the consultancy seeks to position diaspora as a missing piece in AA systems, with the Somalia experience presenting an emerging, largely unexplored frontier whose lessons could strengthen how anticipatory action is designed, funded and activated across other contexts.
Because this work concerns anticipation, its object is inherently uncertain — whether a predicted crisis will take place, and when or how often partners activate, cannot be known in advance; the consultancy is therefore designed to follow the implementation as it unfolds and adapt to what it surfaces, rather than evaluate predetermined events.
Objective of the consultancy
The consultant will consolidate and package the evidence generated under the project by DRC across four learning areas. The guiding questions under each set out what the consolidated learning should answer.
Across these areas, the consultant will be required to:
- Context monitoring, community sensing and early warning: Examine and consolidate findings on whether signals reported by diaspora and local partners, namely shifts in remittance patterns and community sensing data gathered under the AHEAD project, can serve as reliable early warning indicators for conflict-induced displacement.
Sub-questions:
- Can changes in remittance patterns — spikes or drops in transfer volumes, frequency, and requests — serve as a reliable early warning indicator for conflict-induced displacement, and/or as an earlier precursor of crisis?
- Can social signals related to community sensing, including social media monitoring and social pattern detection serve as reliable early warning indicators for conflict-induced displacement, and/or as earlier precursors of crisis?
- Activation – Response: Examine and consolidate lessons on the distinctive contribution diaspora organisations and their local partners make in the partial and full activation phases, and how their engagement affects outcomes (assessed against indicators such as access, speed and trust). This includes capturing lessons from innovative modalities for support emerging from AHEAD’s implementation in Somalia. Among these, DRC is currently exploring trigger-based payments that connect early warning triggers to diaspora transfers ahead of a predicted crisis; should this be taken forward, it would form part of this learning.
Sub-questions:
- How does diaspora engagement in AA implementation affect outcomes for affected communities — e.g. reach to hard-to-reach groups, trust, acceptance, complementarity with the formal response, and associated risks?
- How do the speed and modality of diaspora financial support affect AA outcomes?
- What innovative modalities for channelling diaspora support emerge through AHEAD's implementation in Somalia, such as trigger-based payments, and what conditions, infrastructure and partnerships are needed for them to work as anticipatory funding ahead of a predicted crisis?
- Linking Informal to Formal EW/AA Structures: Examine and consolidate lessons on the conditions, benefits and risks of connecting diaspora and community-based early warning (EW) structures to the AHEAD AA response mechanism across both the monitoring, reporting, escalation and activation cycle.
Sub-questions:
- What conditions proved necessary for diaspora and community-based EW structures to connect effectively to the AHEAD AA response mechanism across the monitoring, reporting, escalation and activation cycle?
- What benefits and risks did this surface for the actors involved — including effects on community ownership, diaspora–local partner trust, and responsiveness to warnings?
- Cross-Cutting - Learning & Advocacy: Package the consolidated learning into case studies for external publication and a synthesis report to inform AHEAD and broader diaspora programming, drawing out implications for scaling to other contexts.
Scope of work and Methodology
The consultant will prepare a methodology and work plan setting out how the evidence generated in-house will be consolidated and packaged against the objectives above, and the support required from DRC and DEMAC.
Division of roles: All primary data collection, triangulation and assessment is carried out in-house. DRC's AHEAD team and partners collect early warning and monitoring data, including bi-weekly reporting from diaspora–local partner pairs; DRC's MEAL and data teams triangulate and assess this dat...