On 7 May 2020, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs launched a revised COVID-19 Global Humanitarian Response Plan to include another nine vulnerable countries - Benin, Djibouti, Liberia, Mozambique, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, Togo and Zimbabwe - and calling for US$6.7 billion. So far it has raised almost $1 billion. The original GHRP, released on 25 March 2020,...
COVID-19 Topic Page
When the World Health Organization pronounced COVID-19 a pandemic on March 11 2020, there were more than 118,000 cases in 114 countries, and 4,291 people had lost their lives.
At time of writing, those numbers had topped 1,350,000 cases in 184 countries, with almost 75,000 deaths. The Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which manages ReliefWeb, launched...
Since ReliefWeb launched its new responsive site, we have received feedback from many of our users, especially about usability and navigation. We truly value your input, which we can apply to continue improving the site to meet your needs.
While we review that feedback and continue working on better ways to present and deliver the critical humanitarian information to our global users, we would...
In 2010, when work started on ReliefWeb’s last major redesign, there weren't many visitors on mobile phones. Indeed, there were fewer than 60,000 users on mobile, just over 1%. Nine years later, more than five million visitors to the site used only mobile devices, almost half the total.
To serve the growing number of mobile visitors, m.reliefweb.int was launched in 2013, a stripped-down,...
In 2019, ReliefWeb continued to break its own records, topping the 10 million mark for the first time, with 10.8 million visitors. In a year characterized by extraordinary natural disasters – ranging from Cyclones Idai and Kenneth affecting millions of people in Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe in the first quarter of the year, to Hurricane Dorian hitting the Bahamas in August, extremes of drought...
It is a commonplace that there is an abundance of information available about humanitarian situations; the key issue is not how much information we have at our disposal but how we present it in the most user-friendly manner, so that our audience can tap into it quickly and easily.
The selection filters and advanced search on ReliefWeb have improved over the years, allowing users to quickly narrow...
As an outcome of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, the Grand Bargain aims at improving the efficiency of humanitarian action. Among the commitments made were increasing the transparency in financing and support to local responders.
Publish What You Fund, the global campaign for aid and development transparency, was tasked with researching the information needs of humanitarian actors,...
While ReliefWeb was first created as an information-sharing platform to support well-informed decision-making in humanitarian crises, over the years the variety and comprehensiveness of its content have also made it a go-to resource for the academic community. Not only the humanitarians of tomorrow, but also many students and scholars in development and international relations are tapping into...
Many of you (more than 150,000 subscribers at the last count!) receive various updates from Reliefweb, including OCHA situation reports, disaster updates, jobs, training and other country-specific information. To make your user experience much better, we have revamped our inbox updates to include the following features:
Same ‘look and feel’: you can easily identify ReliefWeb emails by their...
Les récents visiteurs du site mobile de ReliefWeb auront remarqué un nouvel outil... Un sélecteur de langue est maintenant disponible dans le coin supérieur droit du site.
Cliquez dessus, et vous verrez trois options après l'anglais : espagnol, français et russe.
Il faut préciser que cet outil ne permet pas de traduire le contenu du site (la traduction de quelque 650 000 rapports de l'anglais vers...
Los visitantes recientes del sitio móvil de ReliefWeb habrán notado que contamos con una nueva herramienta… En la esquina superior derecha del sitio ahora está disponible un selector de idiomas.
Dale clic, y verás tres opciones después del inglés: español, francés, y ruso.
Debemos aclarar que esta herramienta no traducirá el contenido. (La traducción de unos 650,000 informes del inglés a otros tres...
Recent visitors to the ReliefWeb mobile site might have noticed a new feature... Tucked into the top-right-hand corner, there's now a language switcher.
Click it, and you'll see two options, French and Spanish (with some more due soon).
To be clear, this won't bring translated content. (Translating 650,000 reports from English into two other languages would merit a much bigger announcement - and...
The number of reports published on ReliefWeb recently passed another milestone: 750,000. The archive has been built up since 1996, and the pace is increasing - more than 50,000 reports were posted in 2018.
Analytics show that well over half of these reports are viewed every year, and maintaining this archive is a core part of ReliefWeb's mission, as is informing humanitarians about the current...
In November 2018, 977,000 users visited ReliefWeb - the highest monthly usage since the site was launched more than 20 years ago.
What this statistic shows is that ReliefWeb remains the “go-to” online platform for humanitarians around the world. Our 24/7 operation and editorial processes ensure that ReliefWeb delivers relevant and reliable information on ongoing crises and timely updates when a...
OCHA products are designed to help everyone involved in a humanitarian aid operation find the information they need to understand the context, organize an effective response and monitor results. Over time, we developed several core reporting products: Flash Updates, Situation Reports and Humanitarian Bulletins. We also continue to produce maps, snapshots, infographics and other kinds of media.
At...
Imagine you are tasked with finding out how many refugees there are in Kenya, where they're from, and how the situation has changed from last year... Where do you start?
Managing information about a crisis is difficult and time-consuming. More so when the information is buried deep in pdfs, when the figures vary from day to day and source to source.
To make it easier to quickly grasp the extent of...
Two of the most frequent questions that we receive daily from users of the ReliefWeb jobs section are "Where can I send a job application?" and "How can I help or collaborate with you?" Many of these messages come from university graduates seeking to make positive contributions to the world and looking for an entry point.
The first challenge: work experience
Many recent university graduates seek to...
Algunas de las preguntas más frecuentes que recibimos a diario de los usuarios de nuestra bolsa de trabajo son “¿dónde puedo enviar una solicitud de empleo?” o “¿cómo puedo ayudar o colaborar con ustedes?” Muchos de estos mensajes vienen de personas recién egresadas de la universidad que buscan aportar algo al mundo, pero simplemente no saben por dónde empezar.
También hemos recibido mensajes de...
Nine years ago, a devastating earthquake hit Haiti, and I was among many looking for meaningful ways to help, albeit from far away. That's how I became involved in the world of digital humanitarianism, once unknown to me, which revolves around one thing only: information management.
From that experience to the more recent one of working with content management on ReliefWeb, a common thread is that...
As 2018 is drawing to a close, the release of a new set of humanitarian icons may well be OCHA’s end-of-year gift to all of us working in digital communications.
From disaster types to clusters to affected people, humanitarian icons come in handy for inclusion in websites, reports, maps, and any other kind of publications such as humanitarian snapshots. “At first the icons were developed because...