Attachments
Letter from the Chair
2014 was a sobering year for humanitarian responders. South Sudan’s fragile peace fractured, the Syrian conflict spilled over into Iraq and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa emerged. Natural disasters continued to occur in Paraguay and Serbia amongst many others. Millions of men, women and children found themselves displaced, homeless, and bereaved. As ever it was the vulnerable who suffered most.
It is a great relief that the tide on Ebola seems to have turned but, as with so many crises, we cannot be complacent and must always be prepared.
To this end, we have expanded our preparedness activities, building stronger partnerships with colleagues from the World Bank and World Food Programme, as well as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). We carried out Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and spatial awareness training with Unicef colleagues and their partners in the Democratic Republic of Congo and we actively contributed to the UN’s Disaster Assessment and Coordination team training and simulation exercises.
MapAction’s unique team of highly skilled GIS volunteers demonstrated their professionalism, commitment and flexibility in each of these situations, many using their annual leave to do so. We developed our services to include greater analysis mapping, which has been particularly noteworthy in some of our Serbia, Paraguay and Ebola mission maps. We also introduced our web mapping kiosk, enabling us to provide a local access online capacity to web maps for service users to take away even when the internet is down. And we strengthened our monitoring capacity introducing new methods to capture our contribution to the humanitarian response.
We ended the year aware we had stretched our comfort zone. The humanitarian need demanded it and it looks as though events will continue to demand it. When MapAction was formed over ten years ago, we knew the value of GIS to decisionmaking but had no idea how this would benefit the humanitarian community. Now, through the dedication and imagination of our volunteers and staff, we know we make an important difference and, with your help, we will continue to do so for the next ten years and beyond.
Roy Wood,
Chair of Trustees