Impact story: OCHA and META: Partnering to give humanitarians open access to population data

Summary

Population data is essential for any humanitarian operation. The more detailed the data, the more humanitarians can understand exactly who needs what type of assistance and where. But knowing where people live, how many live there and their demographics (age and sex) is a significant challenge for humanitarians. In many crisis-affected countries, population data is often out of date or just not available. Seventy-five per cent of countries with a UN inter-agency humanitarian response plan have not had a national census in over a decade; for a third of those countries it’s been more than 20 years.

The team managing the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) platform – an initiative of the United Nations Office for the Coordination for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) – has partnered with data provider Meta to improve access to timely population data.

In the absence of traditional data from Government sources, new data sources are proving to be a useful proxy. A great example is Meta’s High-Resolution Population Density Maps (referred to hereafter as ‘population density maps’). Last year, the maps’ data accounted for more than 40 per cent of all the population data sets downloaded from HDX. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and satellite imagery, Meta’s population density maps estimate the number of people living within a 30-metre grid and their demographics. This can include estimates for the number of children under age 5 and the number of women of reproductive age.

Humanitarians are now using this data to reach people who need help. The World Health Organization (WHO) used it to reach 5,000 children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) with its first dose of the polio vaccine, and World Vision reached people with clean water in dozens of locations worldwide.