Most organisations operating in Africa have a crisis management plan. Fewer have tested it, and fewer still have tested it with the people who would actually take the call at two in the morning. The distance between those two positions is where crises become reputational events.
The plan is not the capability
A crisis plan describes a structure. Capability is whether the structure assembles quickly, decides under incomplete information, and communicates without contradicting itself. Only exercising reveals which one you have — and it usually reveals it in the first twenty minutes, when the team discovers the on-call number rings to someone who left last year.
- A current on-call roster with deputies, tested by calling it unannounced.
- One activation route, not three competing ones, with a single incident log from minute one.
- Predefined roles: incident lead, welfare, communications, liaison, logging — assigned to people, not to job titles alone.
- A stand-down process, because unresolved activations quietly exhaust teams.
Scenarios worth exercising in African operations
Choose scenarios from your own risk register rather than from a generic library. The recurring set for African programmes: a missed check-in on a road movement; a staff member detained at a checkpoint or airport; a hospitalisation requiring evacuation from a location without definitive care; a complex attack on a venue used by your staff; an abduction with an early, unverified claim of responsibility; and a compound event pairing civil unrest with an internet shutdown.
Exercise the scenario you believe is unlikely but survivable. The one you consider impossible is the one nobody has a first move for.
Running an exercise that produces something
A useful tabletop runs two to three hours, uses injects delivered on a clock, and forbids the phrase 'we would have already done that'. The facilitator's job is to keep decisions time-bound and to record where the team stalled. Success is not a smooth run — a smooth run usually means the scenario was too gentle.
Family, welfare and the human file
Organisations consistently under-plan the welfare workstream. Who contacts the family, in which language, and with what authority to share information? Who supports colleagues who witnessed the incident? Who manages the traveller's return and reintegration weeks later? These questions are answered badly under pressure unless they are answered in advance.
Communications discipline
In a live incident, the first external statement sets the frame for everything after it. Hold statements should be drafted in advance for the scenario types above, approval authority should be named, and the default posture on operational detail — particularly in abduction cases — should be settled before the event, with legal and insurer positions understood.
Close the loop
Every exercise and every real activation should generate a short lessons-identified log with named owners and dates, reviewed at the start of the next exercise. Organisations that do this find their second exercise materially better than their first. Those that do not repeat the same twenty minutes of confusion every year.