"In Vanuatu, business is community," said Glen Craig of the Vanuatu Business Resilience Council. "Your warehouse manager's village is the village that's lost its roof. There is no economy for us without functioning communities."

Craig was one of dozens of speakers at the Connecting Business initiative's tenth anniversary forum, a ten-hour marathon that ran across seven sessions and as many time zones, from the Pacific to the Caribbean. Over its first decade, CBi — co-managed by UNDP and OCHA, and hosted by ICPSD since 2021 — has built a network of more than 20 private sector member networks across 60-plus countries, all working to bring business into disaster preparedness, response and recovery.

For Marcos Neto, UN Assistant Secretary-General and Director of UNDP's Bureau for Policy and Programme Support, the decade ahead starts with how the private sector is seen: "Stop treating the private sector as a bystander or a checkbook," he told the forum, "and start treating it as a genuine partner across the full spectrum of disaster preparedness, response, and recovery." The harder task, he argued, is structural: "Presence at the table is not the same as a place in the architecture. That is where the real work of the next decade will be done."

The strength of CBI and the partnership it fosters is exemplified through in Türkiye. When the 2023 earthquakes struck the country's south, the business federation TÜRKONFED drew on years of CBi training to respond at scale. "Prior to CBI, we did not have any experience in disaster management," said Secretary-General Arda Batu. "Everything we had learned, we had learned from CBI." Within two weeks, the federation had mobilized and tracked $11 million in goods and services from its member businesses into the affected region.

The same lesson ran through every session, which is that the speed of a response is set long before the crisis arrives. Vasiti Soko, who led Fiji's National Disaster Management Office, framed it as a question of timing. "Partnership does not work well when you're building it during a crisis, it is partnership formed outside of response time, in the quiet season, in the planning meetings, that delivers when everything is on the line."

In closing, CBi's two parent agencies pointed to the stakes and the road ahead. Lisa Doughten, Director of OCHA's Financing and Outreach Division, noted that more than 252 million people now need urgent humanitarian assistance, more than double the figure in 2016, even as governments cut their budgets, making the case for business "as a full partner, with a seat at the table to co-create humanitarian solutions." ICPSD Director Sahba Sobhani, whose centre has hosts CBi, looked further out: to "a network effect across networks around the world," and to helping those networks raise domestic and international finance to get ahead of the hazards they face.

Ten years in, the message from the forum was consistent. Business is already first on the scene when crisis hits, and the task now is to give it a permanent place in how countries prepare for the next one.

The Connecting Business initiative works with private sector networks in more than 60 countries to bring business into disaster preparedness, response and recovery. To explore how your country office or business network can connect with CBi, reach out to connectingbusiness@un.org.