Enhancing data quality and use — the role of GO in the humanitarian data ecosystem
A data ecosystem refers to a combination of organisational infrastructure and applications that are used to aggregate and analyse information. The humanitarian sector’s collective approaches to collection, storage, analysis and dissemination of data can be understood as one such ecosystem. Improving this will help avoid duplication of efforts, while ensuring that the best available evidence is used to inform decision-making — and that this evidence is used appropriately. IFRC, through the GO platform and as a standard setter, convener and data curator has a key role to play in this multi-institutional effort.
The IFRC’s role to learn from and respond to recurrent and under-the-radar crises
In previous posts, we discussed opportunities to enhance responses to future disasters by leveraging data from previous crises. We also referred to IFRC’s own experience collecting, curating and analysing disaster data and developing systems that could help National Societies scale up anticipatory action.
Over the IFRC’s 100-plus years of existence Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have been active before, during and after crises. Our origins and purpose mean we are alive to the imperative to learn from our successes and failures and to get the most out of the entire network in order to help alleviate the suffering of the most vulnerable.
We are reminded of the need to improve when crises occur again and again in the same places, triggered by the same hazards and affecting the same vulnerable communities, especially where these crises are ‘under the radar’. The ongoing/impending food insecurity crisis due to the combined impacts of drought and conflict in the greater Horn of Africa is one of several recent examples of this phenomenon. An initial field report submitted to GO last month by the Bangladesh Red Crescent Society on the impacts of annual monsoon flooding in South Asia is another.
As we head into July — September, the most intensive period of the year for hydro-meteorological disasters (figure 1), this sobering backdrop reminds of the need to transform talk into effective action, that progress in policy and research yield concrete results to champion and to learn from.
Leveraging the IFRC’s convening role
At IFRC we tune one ear to the latest practice and policy dialogues and the other ear to the needs of our National Societies. In recent months, we’ve been using our convening power to shape the discourse and harness momentum around improvements to the humanitarian data ecosystem to serve the needs of the National Societies. Last November, we along with the University of Oxford organised a roundtable discussion on how to improve data and statistics within the humanitarian sector. The event’s keynote speaker, Simon Levine from the Overseas Development Institute, closed his remarks with something that resonated with what we often hear from our National Societies: ‘Be useful — the analysis has to be used, not just methodologically rigorous’ and ‘don’t talk about numbers, use numbers to talk about life.’
Highlights from the University of Oxford-IFRC Roundtable
Panellists came from a number of organisations across the humanitarian community, including UN OCHA, Map Action, Crisis Ready, World Pop, the World Bank, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, ACLED, the ISI Foundation, CIMA Foundation and Facebook/Meta.
Participants discussed the potential politicisation or misrepresentation of analysis — and the imperative for data producers and analysts to take precautions where necessary to avoid misuse of the evidence.
Another common theme that arose was the need to simplify complexity of analyses in order to make the evidence useful for stakeholders and decision-makers with varying degrees of technical sophistication. Data analysis and its communication is itself a language, and so we need to invest in our own translation skills, whether that be visualisation or storytelling.
Given the scepticism of models and data of many within the humanitarian sector, we must be transparent about how models work, have been validated and the uncertainty of any model or prediction.
More recently, at last month’s Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Week (HNPW), the IFRC IM Team participated in several sessions, including organised by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) Global Information Management Working Group on the use of data for informing anticipatory action and another focusing on added-value information for decision-makers. These fora provided opportunities to shape the discourse by conveying some key message from National Societies: to make sure that hydro-met data, models and products fit into their existing decision-making processes; and to avoid overwhelming operational decision-makers with tons of competing evidence. Encouragingly, we weren’t the only ones saying this: in fact, there was a collective call for us and by us as a community of practice to organise ourselves more effectively to avoid unnecessary duplication of efforts and to ensure that what we were working on ‘in Geneva’ responded to the needs of our colleagues in the field.
GO GO GO — from talk to action
As one of the primary vehicles of the IFRC, the GO platform has been a key means of democratising data across the National Societies and bringing more evidence into decision-making processes. Before the HNPW had even wrapped, the IFRC IM Team had begun an intensive week-long workshop to enhance GO and make it as useful a tool for the National Societies as possible. Over the coming months, we will be unveiling a number of features that will prove useful for National Societies and the humanitarian sector more broadly.
- Firstly, we will be making visible more information on past events from the Global Crisis Data Bank, and we will visualise more impact forecasts associated with specific hydro-meteorological hazards from our partners.
- More importantly, we will be bringing a number of key processes onto GO, including the DREF, which National Societies use to request funds from IFRC for both anticipatory action and to respond to disasters once they do occur.
- We will also be working to use the information from the impact-forecast models to automatically generate maps and to pre-populate and/or validate information in forms that is currently entered manually. These enhancements will save our colleagues time and help National Societies that do not currently take advantage of funding opportunities do so in the future.
While not solving all of the data and problems in the humanitarian sector, these enhancements will generate more direct pathways from data, models and evidence to funding decisions and concrete action taken in the field. When it comes to the GO platform, this means we will increasingly curate and visualise data and products from our partners’ in order to bring the best evidence to bear on our own decision-making. In order to do so, we are leveraging existing partnerships, such as those with OCHA, the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), the World Food Programme, the World Bank and the EC’s Joint Research Centre and the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), and developing new ones.
If you’re not already collaborating with IFRC to strengthen the humanitarian data ecosystem but would like to do so, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us — IM@ifrc.org.
