The COVID-19 pandemic struck at a time when the world was more connected than ever. But as barriers to digital access have fallen and information has become increasingly accessible, it has become difficult to identify what is most relevant and accurate. There was a recognition across the Movement that the unprecedented and evolving nature of the pandemic response required having a constantly updated understanding of the situation to continually inform planning decisions.
The IFRC’s GO platform has emerged as an essential tool for coordinating the Federation-wide response to COVID-19. In this blog entry, we provide an update on the role and impact of GO, introduce a new analytical resource and point towards some lessons emerging from the IFRC COVID-19 evaluation.
Evolution to meet unprecedented demands
The GO platform receives and visualises data from Red Cross Red Crescent Societies across the world. GO evolved to meet the global needs of the COVID-19 operation, with 192 National Societies responding locally to the pandemic, helping to identify priorities, channel resources, track activities and provide analytics to enable a shared situational overview and access to key information most applicable to decision-makers across all levels of the Movement in real-time.
The dedicated COVID-19 page on the GO Platform includes dashboards showing NS activities, funding allocations, global surge deployments, links to regional and country specific information, key contacts, global risk analyses, links to guidance and help desks as well as key operational documents such as appeal documents, sitreps and monitoring reports.
Supporting Federation-wide reporting and analysis
In order to monitor the IFRC network’s COVID-19 response, a Federation-wide monitoring system to collect financial and indicator data from all National Societies was developed. Using the information reported by NSs, the FDRS team created tools and dashboards allowing different teams across the IFRC Secretariat to track progress, review the data, and provide immediate feedback on data quality. All collected and verified data is published and available through interactive dashboards on GO to provide evidence of the COVID-19 funding impact, reach and effectiveness, thus showing the power of the collective network and global data collection and sharing.
New COVID-19 dashboard
A recent addition is the inclusion of the COVID-19 dashboard, which provides key data in an interactive way, helping to guide analysis of the ongoing response to the pandemic. It includes case and mortality trends, humanitarian severity level, vaccination implementation and acceptance rates and pandemic data.
There are a number of ways to interact with the data, including by filtering this by through a timeline of key milestones in the response as well as by country and IFRC region. The visualisation of the data can be toggled to show different chart types including stacked charts, bubble charts and choropleth maps. The data behind this dashboard is fed in real time from WHO, INFORM, Our World in Data and other partners, avoiding duplication of data collection efforts.
Learning from the experience
Stakeholders who were engaged throughout the ongoing COVID-19 evaluation have reported that their National Societies’ usage of the platform gained momentum quickly as staff and volunteers moved out of offices and nations went into lockdown. This sudden shift towards remote-working presented a challenge for teams that needed to coordinate around shared information and to more easily access the array of resources that were previously scattered across different sites.
“The response to COVID marked a cultural shift towards a shared recognition of the value of data-driven decision-making.”
The evaluation provides some interesting insights on future needs and opportunities for the GO platform, elaborated on below:
- The global COVID survey and stakeholder interviews revealed that the GO user base still has room for growth, with certain role profiles and geographies lagging on adoption. The GO team will need to continue consulting with NS to ensure information supply meets demand while also communicating the benefits of using the system.
- Despite positive reviews of the quality of data that the platform served up, users — particularly those in decision-making roles — wished for more Movement-specific analyses. Teams want help making sense of what all of this primary and secondary data actually means for their own projects and planning.
- Given the global nature of the pandemic and the diversity of technical gaps across the Movement, the IFRC created an array of resources to support National Societies. But each additional resource created leads to one more thing to find, and users appreciated having those resources more easily discovered in a single, unified platform. GO can build on that success by continuing to build linkages and improve the discoverability of these tools, resources, and more.
- The past 18 months have generated an abundance of datasets across the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement whose value could be increased through consolidation and interoperability. But the ability to merge and extract data is dependent on compatibility between systems. GO’s reporting mechanisms — such as the 3W or field reports — must be compatible with both systems used within the Movement as well as those used by humanitarian partners.
