B-READY combines parametric forecasting with community inputs to deliver humanitarian aid to individuals, communities, and enterprises prior to a disaster.

Visa has teamed up with Oxfam America to scale up Oxfam's Building Resilient, Adaptive, and Disaster-Ready Communities (B-READY) project in Kenya.

The project's goal is to provide real-time simplified money flow and relief payments to individuals and businesses in East Africa, as well as the Philippines, Colombia, and Puerto Rico.

B-READY combines parametric forecasting with community inputs to deliver humanitarian aid to individuals, communities, and enterprises prior to a disaster.

Visa and Oxfam America seek to scale B-READY in order to build a mobile-based payment solution infrastructure to digitise humanitarian payments in order to assist families, individuals, and small companies in protecting themselves and their assets before a crisis strikes.

The two said combining data-driven insights from Visa with Oxfam's disaster relief track record and predictive modelling can assist provide advance warning of catastrophic disasters, triggering rapid and secure pre-disaster payments to affected families, individuals, and small companies.

"We are thrilled to once again join forces with Oxfam to extend anticipatory relief efforts that increase resiliency and financial inclusion for individuals and businesses," said Rajiv Garodia, SVP and global head of Visa Government Solutions at Visa.

"Visa is ready to help people and businesses by facilitating real-time, streamlined, and efficient money movement for pre-disaster payments.Our aim includes financial inclusion, and our collaboration represents an important step towards empowering underbanked populations." Rajiv went on to say.

According to Abby Maxman, President and CEO of Oxfam America, disasters disproportionately affect the most marginalised individuals, exacerbating inequality and emphasising the importance of providing financial support to those in most need.

''We are excited to scale B-READY with Visa to improve catastrophe preparedness and recovery for at-risk communities around the world,'' he said.

The company said the B-READY project will be able to help build resiliency and reduce the impact of emergencies on people, homes, businesses, livelihoods, and governments by integrating Visa Direct, which provides a single point of access to billions of endpoints, and Visa Government Prepaid.

According the parties, anticipatory action and digital currency transfers are important components of the future of humanitarian finance; nevertheless, the lack of early warning systems related to digital cash transfers hinders anticipatory action's advance.