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Preparedness is an essential aspect of the humanitarian action. Local communities and authorities must be prepared to the eventuality of a crisis to mitigate its negative impact, and humanitarian actors must be adequately prepared to provide an efficient and timely response. One of the functions of the cluster is to build national capacity in preparedness and contingency planning, and WASH coordination team is therefore fully involved in the WASH sector emergency preparedness. WCC must coordinate the preparation of the WASH Emergency Response Plan (ERP) with the partners, and participate in inter-sector and inter-agencies emergency planning process. ERP is inextricably linked to capacity mapping and development, and many tools and approaches are the same for both process.

Preparing local authorities to take on WASH humanitarian coordination is part of the general preparedness process led by clusters. Transition from a cluster to a sector-led coordination must be anticipated well in advance, and can only occur once context is more stabilized.

It is also when the context is more stabilized that lesson-learned documentation can be produced, to learn from the previous emergency response and improve the future ones.