After action review: Facilitation guide

This guide, published by the Anticipation Hub, is designed to help partners run After Action Reviews (AARs) for anticipatory action. As anticipatory action frameworks scale up globally—with 146 activations across 54 countries in 2025 reaching 96 million people—each activation offers a chance to learn how well existing frameworks perform during real extreme events. An AAR is a structured process where actors involved in an activation reflect together on what was planned, what actually happened, why, and what should change next time; this first-edition guide provides a practical, step-by-step approach to facilitating such reviews, with a particular focus on collective, multi-agency sessions that bring together governments, coordinating bodies, and implementing partners to jointly examine coordination and sequencing issues.

The key learning centers on the importance of facilitation itself: honest, cross-organizational reflection doesn't happen automatically—it requires a deliberately created environment that is inclusive, equitable, and safe for transparent dialogue and joint problem-solving. The guide lays out a process spanning two to three days and up to thirty sessions, through which partners can produce concrete outputs like action plans or advocacy messages for national and regional forums. Developed by the Anticipation Hub's learning team based on lessons from Mozambique's first national AAR for cyclones in 2025, the guide is explicitly framed as one adaptable approach rather than a fixed template, and as a living document that will be revised as more AARs are conducted and more lessons are learned about effective facilitation.