Context and rationale

Friends of Andalas is a coalition initiative convened by The Landscape Group to accelerate mid- and long-term recovery in Aceh, North Sumatera, and West Sumatera. Across the three provinces, the floods and landslides were not only a humanitarian crisis; they were a governance and delivery test. Extreme rainfall met structurally degraded watersheds, exposed settlements and infrastructure concentrated along river corridors and coastal plains, and revealed how quickly risk compounds when land-use change, weak enforcement, and fragmented investment collide.

The recovery challenge, therefore, is not simply to rebuild. It is to reduce risk while restoring livelihoods, and to do so in a way that strengthens the ecological and institutional foundations that determine future outcomes. Yet the recovery landscape is typically crowded and disjointed: many actors, many good intentions, and too few mechanisms that translate priorities into sequenced, safeguards-ready, financeable packages. Financing is often mismatched to risk and time horizons; projects remain isolated rather than mutually reinforcing; and learning is not captured fast enough to improve decisions while recovery is still underway.

Friends of Andalas responds to this gap by turning a watershed-to-coast recovery agenda into a coordinated pipeline of priority packages — and by using blended finance to mobilize the right mix of philanthropic support, public finance, concessional capital, and private investment. The initiative is designed to complement (not compete with) government plans and existing partner mechanisms. It is not a new implementing agency and it is not a standalone fund. Its role is to align actors around a shared pipeline, prepare credible packages to financing-ready standard, catalyze resources toward outcomes that matter, and ensure learning improves delivery over time.

Purpose and objective

The purpose of Friends of Andalas is to reduce disaster risk while restoring livelihoods by strengthening the ecological and socio-economic foundations of recovery across priority landscapes in Aceh, North Sumatera, and West Sumatera. Its objective is to create a trusted coordination table and a high-integrity delivery pipeline that enables partners to move faster from commitments to implementation — with clear sequencing, safeguard readiness, and measurable outcomes.

What Friends of Andalas does

Friends of Andalas operates as a convening-and-delivery platform with four connected functions, each responding to a specific weakness commonly seen in post-disaster recovery.

First, it convenes. It brings together donors, philanthropies, responsible private sector actors, civil society, universities, and technical institutions to align on priority landscapes, shared standards, and a common evidence base — while maintaining practical alignment with provincial and national recovery directions. The emphasis is on turning parallel initiatives into a coherent division of labor, with a shared view of priorities and sequencing.

Second, it prepares. It runs a light project-preparation function to bridge the gap between good ideas and implementable, finance-ready packages. This includes pre-feasibility, safeguards readiness, community engagement and consent processes, permitting pathways, basic engineering and ecological design concepts, and structured monitoring, reporting, and verification so outcomes can be credibly tracked from the start. The intent is to reduce the transaction costs that often stall recovery investments at the most critical moment.

Third, it catalyzes. It matches each package to a fit-for-purpose capital stack. Philanthropy and grants are used for public goods and unlocking costs. Concessional finance is used where affordability and tenor constraints matter. Commercial capital is brought in selectively and only when cash flows are genuinely credible. This discipline protects recovery from the familiar failure mode of forcing “investment” into interventions that should be funded as public goods.

Fourth, it informs. Friends of Andalas functions as an analytic and knowledge-management platform that strengthens recovery decisions in real time. It continuously synthesizes evidence on what is working, where implementation is failing, and why — across landscapes, sectors, and intervention types. It translates those lessons into practical guidance that partners can apply immediately, tightening design and sequencing as conditions evolve. This learning function is operational, not academic: it produces short learning briefs and decision notes, maintains a live “lessons register” tied to the pipeline, and supports partners to adjust approaches based on emerging field evidence. Over time, it builds a shared understanding of which combinations of conservation, rehabilitation, restoration, risk reduction, and livelihood recovery produce the most reliable outcomes in different watershed and coastal contexts.

Program focus and portfolio logic

Friends of Andalas organizes recovery into integrated packages rather than scattered projects, anchored in landscape realities and risk drivers. The portfolio prioritizes interventions that restore ecological function while reducing risk and protecting livelihoods.

The program focus includes: (i) ecological infrastructure for risk reduction, including conservation of remaining water towers, rehabilitation of mid-slope disturbance belts and river corridors, and restoration of peat and mangroves as hydrological control surfaces and coastal-risk infrastructure; (ii) resilient settlements and early warning modernization, including risk-informed spatial planning, calibrated engineering, and end-to-end early warning linked to local protocols; and (iii) recovery and upgrading of productive systems without expanding the risk frontier, so that agriculture, plantations, fisheries, and logistics recover while shifting toward deforestation-free, risk-aware pathways.

Governance and operating arrangements

Friends of Andalas is hosted by The Landscape Group, which serves as Secretariat and provides day-to-day coordination, pipeline management, convening support, and knowledge products. A small Steering Circle (eight to twelve institutions) sets strategic direction and endorses the annual pipeline. An independent Technical and Safeguards Panel provides quality assurance on hydrology, ecology, disaster-risk reduction, social safeguards, and integrity of claims. Provincial focal points in Aceh, North Sumatera, and West Sumatera anchor the work in local institutions, implementation constraints, and community realities.

Blended finance approach

Within the first year, Friends of Andalas aims to demonstrate that recovery can improve as it proceeds — not only expand in scale. The first deliverable is a functioning learning and evidence system that captures field realities and converts them into better decisions. This includes a live lessons register tied to the recovery pipeline, a regular cadence of short learning briefs and decision notes, and a set of common, practical indicators that allow partners to compare performance across provinces and packages. The goal is to shorten the feedback loop between design, implementation, and adjustment, so that recovery becomes progressively more effective and less exposed to repeating known failures.

Building on this learning backbone, Friends of Andalas then aims to deliver: (i) an agreed, public-facing pipeline of priority recovery packages and a partner-only deal room for serious co-financing discussions; (ii) three to five packages brought to financing-ready standard through project preparation; (iii) tracked commitments by instrument type (grant, concessional, commercial), not only pledges; and (iv) a simple outcome dashboard covering hectares conserved, rehabilitated, and restored, improvements in early warning coverage, and a small set of risk-reduction proxy indicators agreed upfront.

Initial ninety-day launch actions

The Landscape Group will convene anchor institutions and secure founding commitments, produce an initial “Andalas Pipeline v0.1” of priority packages with rough order-of-magnitude costing and sequencing, establish a short charter with transparency and conflict-of-interest rules, and hold a first roundtable that converts alignment into decisions on preparation funding and a six-month delivery plan. In parallel, the Secretariat will establish the initial learning system — including a basic lessons register and a simple cadence for learning briefs — so that early implementation insights are captured and used, rather than lost.

Call to action

Friends of Andalas invites partners to join as founding members by contributing to a shared preparation budget and participating in the Steering Circle and working groups. The immediate ask is practical: co-invest in turning priority recovery actions into finance-ready packages that can move at scale, with safeguards and integrity built in from the outset — and with a disciplined learning function that continuously improves recovery performance across Aceh, North Sumatera, and West Sumatera.