By Beth Simons
In July 2012, then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called for a ‘data revolution’ and a new era of data-driven, evidence-based humanitarian decision-making, including enhanced coordination and data sharing, and improvements in data collection and analysis. Against a backdrop of the demise of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and funding reductions amongst major donors, how far have we come since Ban Ki-moon’s announcement and where do we go next?
Since the 2012 announcement, there has been a multiplication of data-collection approaches and provision of humanitarian analysis and insights in various formats (e.g. reports, dashboards, indices) and a growth in organisations supporting data collection, management and analysis. Looking at two data and analysis repositories alone, Reliefweb hosts over 1 million updates and there are just over 18,000 datasets on the Humanitarian Data Exchange, hosted by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). These products are used for myriad reasons, from quantifying humanitarian needs and severity, identifying gaps, prioritising response decisions and supporting donor funding allocations. Technological advances and the growing use of ‘big data’ has seen forecast models and AI-assisted analysis tools emerge. Concurrently, there has been enhanced use of weather and climate, conflict, and economic data to support contextual analysis and early warning.
Alongside the growth of humanitarian data, there have been improvements in data coordination and sharing. Whilst not perfect, this has seen enhanced data, including to and from national governments, development of multi-stakeholder analysis approaches and creation of common operational datasets (these datasets currently have a warning due to US stop work orders impacting their workflows). Much of this collaboration goes unnoticed. This article aims to highlight some critical connections within our humanitarian data and analysis ecosystem, as seen in this interactive map.
Read the full report here.