Anticipatory action: the benefits of robust data models

As part of MapAction’s strategic commitment to locally-led, sustainability is defined as helping ensure the longevity and sustainability of anticipatory action (AA) projects by establishing effective evaluation frameworks and sharing lessons learned with the wider community. It is critical that local voices are embedded with these projects and processes.

READ MORE: MapAction’s Anticipatory Action Sustainability Methodology

READ MORE: MapAction and anticipatory action

This work is kindly supported by the Humanitarian Assistance programme of the German Federal Foreign Office (GFFO), as well as the Insurance Development Forum (IDF).

Strengthening data quality for shared humanitarian data sets can reduce human suffering

Since 2022, MapAction, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) and the University of Georgia, Information Technology Outreach Services (ITOS) have been working on strengthening data quality for what are referred to as Common Operational Datasets (COD): ‘best available’ shared datasets that ensure consistency and simplify the discovery and exchange of key data among humanitarian organisations.

Bad data equals more human suffering. Each time a disaster or a health epidemic strikes, data is at the heart of the first response. Yet public data is often full of gaps. If a population census is old, inaccurate or non-existent, people fall off the map. If a certain area is contested and the admin boundaries are disputed, people pay the price. Data is crucial to estimate people’s vulnerability and wellbeing in an emergency.

Why data quality is important

People overlooked due to data gaps will struggle to gain access to emergency services such as food, water, housing, health or parachute financial aid packages. Emergency service providers need good data and data management tools to make the best decisions under extreme pressure.

People overlooked due to data gaps will struggle to gain access to emergency services such as food, water, housing, health or parachute financial aid packages.

READ ALSO: MapAction Emergency Humanitarian Mapping Response Appeal – £105k needed ASAP

Poor data quality can undermine the effectiveness of evidence-based decision-making in the humanitarian sector. The path to improvement starts with identifying the challenges. 

Meet MapAction Head of Data Science Daniel Soares.

Humanitarian data highway stakeholders convene

In April 2024, MapAction hosted a panel with other organisations working to build ‘the humanitarian data highway’ to address the challenges on data quality. The panel was hosted at Humanitarian Networks and Partnerships Week (HNPW) in Geneva, Switzerland, and featured panellists from OCHA’s Centre for Humanitarian Data, Flowminder, ACAPS, Impact, CartONG, Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT) and Start Network.

Meet MapAction Head of Data Science Daniel Soares.

The panel, titled ‘Data quality challenges and their impact on the humanitarian response cycle‘, explored data quality for emergency response, preparedness and anticipatory action. All phases of a data project were covered, from data collection to visualisation and accessibility but also the specifics of working with open data and quality frameworks. The panellists also noted that limited resources for COD-related maintenance projects make it hard to fill this gap. 

Data analytics ecosystem

More data is needed; although not all data is good data. If we don’t compile and process data by age or gender we’ll fail to understand the specific needs of women and mothers; miscalculating the trajectory of a storm or its geographic boundaries could mean communities remain displaced, stranded and exposed. If we can’t automate the proximity of communities to vital services and support mechanisms our partners cannot maximise the impact of emergency aid delivery. These are just some of many considerations that affect the quality of data, and ultimately, the quality of disaster response reduction efforts.

If we don’t compile and process data by age or gender we’ll fail to understand the specific needs of women and mothers; miscalculating the trajectory of a storm or its geographic boundaries could mean communities remain displaced, stranded and exposed. If we can’t automate the proximity of communities to vital services and support mechanisms our partners cannot maximise the impact of emergency aid delivery.

READ ALSO: Why we must address the gender gap in humanitarian data

Where are the borders?

Within this context, MapAction has been working together with OCHA and the University of Georgia Information Technology Outreach Services (ITOS) on data quality analysis for the Common Operational Datasets (COD) for Administrative Boundaries (COD-AB).

Common Operational Datasets, or COD, are authoritative reference datasets needed to support operations and decision-making for all actors in a humanitarian response. COD are ‘best available’ datasets that ensure consistency and simplify the discovery and exchange of key data. The data is typically geo-spatially linked using a coordinate system (especially administrative boundaries) and has unique geographic identification codes (P-codes). 

These data sets are often derived from data collected by local authorities and international partners to ensure quality, but most vitally, local ownership. COD can be collected on administrative boundaries, population and more. 

LEARN MORE: Still confused as to what a COD is? This brief song should help! 

After a first discussion with OCHA and ITOS partners in 2022, a preliminary methodology proposal has been developed by MapAction to assess the geospatial quality for Common Operational Data-Administrative Boundaries (COD-AB). COD-AB sets can become outdated or less effective if they are not regularly updated. A country’s administrative boundaries can be redrawn more than a dozen times in a tumultuous year; an outdated data set becomes a means of exclusion. 

COD-AB sets can become outdated or less effective if they are not regularly updated. A country’s administrative boundaries can be redrawn more than a dozen times a tumultuous year; an outdated data set becomes a means of exclusion. 

With this partnership with OCHA and ITOS we aim to create a quantitative assessment mechanism that enables the prioritisation of work to update or enhance existing COD-AB data sets.  The expected output is a quality index for each COD-AB data set based on tests for features (geographical, metadata, etc). A diverse team of MapAction volunteers has been formed to tackle this project, with GIS, data engineering, data science and software volunteers.

How does this partnership work?

ITOS analyses and enhances the quality of COD-AB countries proposed by OCHA. The recent discussions have raised, in particular, the need for support on a prioritisation queue. This queue would combine a geospatial quality index and risk index per country in order to help OCHA to select priority countries and ITOS to focus their high level analysis on the most important countries.

Blossoming InnovationHub

As a fledgling branch of any organisation, our InnovationHub is growing wings and beginning to expand its focus areas. The number of partnerships with other organisations working on similar goals is growing. 

As climate scientists continue to predict that natural disasters will increase in severity in the coming years, our goal is to make sure no one is left behind and falls off the map. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” wrote Arthur C. Clarke. Only by pushing the boundaries and committing resources can we come up with ‘magic’ models and frameworks to combat the climate emergency and mitigate seasonal hazards and conflicts. Our InnovationHub marks our sustainable commitment to that cause.

This work is funded by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA).

MapAction would like to acknowledge the generous contribution that Max Malynowsky is making to the COD Quality project.  Max has dedicated years to contributing to administrative boundaries in the humanitarian sector.  His multiple projects, hosted at fieldmaps.io, include significant work towards making it easier to access global boundary data sets, including COD-AB.

Background: About MapAction and building the ‘humanitarian data highway’

There are dozens of agencies and organisations working in what is known as the ‘humanitarian data analytics’ sector: essentially the delivery of data sets, information management systems and in MapAction’s case, geospatial data and expertise, as well as anticipatory action risk models, applied to disaster reduction. They range from large UN agencies to small local civil society organisations. The International Organization for Migration Displacement Tracking Matrix alone brings together 7,000 data collectors and over 600 technical experts serving in over 80 countries.

Since MapAction’s inception in 2002, the organisation has mapped for people in crises in more than 150 emergencies. We have created 1000s of maps used by emergency service providers.

In 2022, MapAction launched an InnovationHub: to tackle some of the biggest challenges confronting data scientists, data analysts and humanitarian responders working with data in emergency relief. We still don’t have all the answers, but we believe that the InnovationHub will find solutions by posing the right questions. Our work is increasingly in anticipatory action: supporting countries to co-build risk models, with the right data, to help mitigate future hazards. 

LEARN MORE: MapAction and anticipatory action

CoP 28 : Good use of data is key to mitigating the climate emergency 

MapAction urges world leaders and stakeholders gathered at COP28 to promote data-driven solutions to improve the lives of people on the front lines of climate change. (A version of this article was first published before CoP27 in Egypt in 2022. It was updated for CoP28 in November 2023. )

In recent years we have seen a large increase in the number of natural disasters worldwide. Regular climate-related disasters are exacerbating water and food insecurity. 

How emergency relief stakeholders and governments coordinate their responses to the climate emergency can impact the recovery of affected communities. That is why good data is key to preparedness and mitigation, especially in locations with limited resources. 

Ice and snow on the Hindu Kush mountain range, which runs along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, is melting and causing devastating floods in both countries. Photo: MapAction

As the changing climate ravages and displaces some of the world’s poorest communities, good data use will not prevent such climate-driven occurrences. It can only soften the effects by helping the affected communities, and stakeholders, to be prepared and to coordinate relief strategies. Good use of data in decision-making at key moments can reduce the human cost of the climate emergency. 

“Data, often visualised through maps, can help identify who the most vulnerable people are, where they are, and highlight need,” said Nick Moody, MapAction’s chair of trustees, before CoP27 in 2022. “At CoP27 there was a recognition that while this information is critical during a crisis, it can have an even greater effect if used in advance. MapAction has a huge role to play in helping others to build resilience through data.”

Why MapAction?

Since MapAction’s inception over 20 years ago, the charity has provided data and specialist technical geospatial and data volunteers in more than 140 crises, many climate-related, worldwide. Our team has supported responses alongside UN, regional and national agencies as well as INGOs and local civil society organisations, providing relief to some of the most vulnerable climate-exposed people worldwide. 

READ ALSO: MapAction urges wider adoption of GIS for disaster resilience at UN Expert Meeting

Our 70+ volunteers come from across the ever-growing range of sectors using data and geospatial technology, bringing a huge diversity of technical expertise. MapAction gives them the training, operational experience and support needed to operate effectively in humanitarian situations. 

Working in collaboration with many emergency relief partners, our teams create unique situation maps, data visualisations, data sets and other products that help coordinate disaster relief using the best available information in the most insightful ways. The improved decisions they enable can help mitigate, for example, the impact of droughts, floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, famines and health crises, to save lives and protect communities. In 2023 alone, MapAction has provided data products, volunteer mapping teams or experts to support emergency response, anticipatory action programmes or capacity building in a dozen countries in five continents.

READ ALSO: MapAction continues to strengthen global disaster preparedness in summer of 2023

From response to anticipation

While MapAction’s initial expertise was in support of emergency response, our work is increasingly moving into early warning and preparedness. Anthropogenic climate change has been proven to alter both the likelihood and the severity of extreme weather events around the world, and the growing frequency of these can be predicted, if not precisely then generally. Being ready to spot the indicators, triggering early support for anticipatory action can be life-saving. Predictive analytics can allow us to define the mechanisms that trigger these actions by analysing current and historical data and developing models, as long as the data is reliable.

READ ALSO: Why we must address the gender gap in humanitarian data

“It is more important than ever to be able to respond effectively to such events, but also to be able to anticipate them, in order to more effectively mitigate their impact,” Daniele Castellana, former lead Data Scientist at MapAction, commented before CoP27. “Through our collaborations with the Centre for Humanitarian Data and the Start Network, MapAction has been working on this flourishing component of humanitarian aid.” MapAction launched its own InnovationHub in 2022.

READ ALSO: MapAction Data Science Lab: the story so far

Early action is one of the most effective ways to address the ever-growing climate impacts. That is why MapAction has partnered with the START Network, a coalition that focuses on humanitarian action through innovation, fast funding and early action; Insurance Development Forum is also a partner in this work. START Network brings together 55 international non-governmental organisations and 7,000 partners worldwide. MapAction is also working with INFORM to support updating forecast and risk models with select national disaster management agencies worldwide.

READ ALSO: 7 Country Missions Completed Successfully as Part of Phase 1 Programme for Anticipatory Action and Disaster Risk Reduction

From commitment to action

MapAction has made concrete commitments to actively seek solutions to reduce the impact of climate change. In October 2021, we signed the Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organisations. The charter was developed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), and guided by a 19-person strong Advisory Committee which included representatives of local, national and international NGOs, UN agencies and National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, as well as academics, researchers and experts in the humanitarian, development, climate and environmental fields.

Signing that charter commits us to being a part of the solution and helping people adapt to a changing climate and environment. It will also help strengthen our own resolve and efforts to be environmentally sustainable. Most of all, it recognises that our efforts must be a collective endeavour – no organisation can tackle this alone.

Together with a growing range of partners, looking to engage ever more locally, we are using geospatial data, data visualization and data science to start laying the groundwork for climate resilience. The objective is to improve preventive actions and strategies in humanitarian response. 

Because what we map today we can mitigate tomorrow and in the future. That is why the science of how we source, analyze, shape, share and deploy data must be at the heart of all current and future discussions on adapting to climate change. 

For more info on MapAction’s work, please drop by our website

You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram

If you haven’t yet done so, please do subscribe to our newsletter to receive regular updates on our work. 

A version of this article was first published before CoP27 in Egypt in 2022. It was updated for CoP28 in November 2023.

MapAction’s work in geospatial is funded by USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, the German Federal Foreign Office (GFFO), UNICEF, Calleva Foundation and other foundations, private individuals and companies. Learn more here.

Why we must address the gender gap in humanitarian data

Without a consistent approach to sex-and-age-disaggregated-data (SADD) in local, national and international data collection, the specific needs of women and girls – as well as men and boys – will continue to be misunderstood or overlooked by international development agents and disaster relief operators. The same is true for understanding the needs of the LGBT community in a disaster.

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

Women and children, and in some cases men and boys, should not be more likely to die or be injured in a natural disaster. Yet a brief review of the literature on the disproportionate effects disasters place on different genders reveals that boys, girls, men and women can all be overlooked in humanitarian response for different reasons.

Previous studies have shown that key challenges in health, provision of shelter, food security and women’s safety – to mention but a few examples – cannot be solved with a one-profile-fits-all approach to data collection and analysis. Otherwise certain groups remain marginalised and the support they need does not reach them. 

Needs differ, even in a disaster

MapAction, a humanitarian mapping charity that maps disaster landscapes, needs the right data to make the right maps to support decision-makers. Decisions based on SADD can be critical, yet hard to source. To get a better understanding of the need for more SADD in humanitarian response, MapAction interviewed representatives from 10 stakeholder organisations and reviewed dozens of specialist academic reviews on SADD in humanitarian data collection and response. 

The knowhow MapAction has accumulated from 140+ emergency responses feeds into the long-term innovation and MEAL strategy.

The process revealed that sometimes something as simple as stigma can be the key factor in misunderstanding gender-specific needs in a disaster. During the cholera outbreak in Haiti in 2011, for example, SADD revealed that more men were dying and fewer men were attending clinics than women. This led to the discovery that men needed more education on the symptoms and highlighted where men had been hiding their symptoms because they confused them with HIV, which had associated stigma, notes a case study in the EU’s Gender-Age Toolkit

Another report by UN Women also found that people who identify as LGBT suffer more before and after a disaster. “The authors found that the discrimination, violence and isolation LGBT people face before, during and after emergencies weakens their ability to live resilient and dignified lives, survive and recover. And humanitarian and disaster response organizations do not appear to be systematically dealing with the problem, they say,” states UN Women in a summary of the report The Only Way Up that looked at cases in Myanmar, the Philippines and Vanuatu.

An interesting case study from Eritrea showed that adolescent demobilised male fighters were experiencing severe malnutrition because they did not know how to cook and had nobody to cook for them. While cases such as these highlight male margination, it is women and girls who continue to experience the most disproportionate impact because of unresolved gender parity issues, especially in societies with stronger patriarchal attitudes. “Gender equality is growing more distant. UN Women puts it 300 years away,” António Guterres, secretary general of the UN, told the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in March 2023.  

Women most affected

In Pakistan, for example, a 2009 review of World Food Programme (WFP) food ration recipients identified 95% of registered men were collecting rations, but only 55% of women. This triggered further investigation that led to understanding the access constraints affecting women, states a multi-stakeholder report from 2011. 

Another example showed that female victims of natural disasters in Pakistan refused to be transported by male helicopter pilots because of potential stigma and fear of repercussions from male relatives. Stakeholders from major INGOs interviewed by MapAction for this study also cited striking other examples of gender imbalance in aid provision from Tanzania, Somalia and Sri Lanka. Understanding the role gender plays in each territory and context is vital. 

Globally natural disasters kill more women than men and often at a younger age, observed a World Health Organization (WHO) study. Gender and age both matter in terms of who dies, who is injured and whose lives are impacted in what ways during and after the crisis, note Mazurana and Proctor in the The Routledge Companion to Humanitarian Action

Data challenge

That is why sex-and-age-disaggregated data (SADD) is key. SADD highlights how people are affected differently depending on their age and gender, notes a 2021 report by the office of the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR). Disaggregated data is key for example when modelling differences in development, mortality and disease risk, allowing for more targeting of specific at risk groups, states an earlier study on gender, data and international crisis response. Disaggregated data is also vital for understanding vulnerabilities, needs and barriers to access during a humanitarian response.

Number of people trained in disaster management by MapAction over the course of two decades.

Culture and politics play a role

Yet often SADD is sadly not available. “It is commonly argued that ‘paying attention to gender issues may not be timely or practical on the ground,’ i.e. the so-called ‘tyranny of the urgent,’” notes a study by the Swedish development agency Sida, while emphasising the role that SADD can play for “effective relief and lifesaving assistance.”

Beyond the will to collect such data, there are logistical and technical challenges. SADD can be complex to interpret and better formatting and presentation are needed to improve adoption for programming decisions. Others have noted that where SADD is collected, there are reports of inconsistent collection, inconsistent data management and inconsistent analysis and use. There are also challenges associated with data sharing, with a lack of coordination and data quality concerns.  Data collected locally are also sometimes not shared or aggregated at a national level in a way that loses the SADD which was collected.

More SADD, please!

We believe the brief and non-exhaustive list of recommendations and resources below will help strengthen our own and our partners’ role in pushing for the availability and mainstreaming of more SADD for humanitarian response.  

  • The more people who are asking how gender is being considered during assessments, or requesting SADD, the more likely it is to begin to be more systematically considered. This should include sharing of knowledge and best practices with partners and in the humanitarian ecosystem;
  • Identify community groups and agencies that may be key to helping inform and include a gender perspective;
  • Training and awareness raising. It is not just after a disaster occurs that SADD matters, it is also important in anticipatory action. Integrating protection, gender and inclusion considerations into anticipatory action interventions is a crucial step in tackling the intersecting vulnerabilities that affect the delivery of humanitarian assistance. It also helps to ensure that any assistance provided does not exacerbate these vulnerabilities. 

USEFUL RESOURCES

The Gender Handbook for Humanitarian Action, Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IACS)

Gender in Emergencies, Care Emergency Toolkit

Oxfam Minimum Standards for Gender in Emergencies, Oxfam

A Little Gender Handbook for Emergencies, Oxfam

READ ALSO: CoP 27 : Good use of data is key to mitigating the climate emergency

This work was made possible with funding from USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance.

How maps can save lives when disasters strike

Prompt mobilisation of MapAction volunteers is helping the earthquake response in Türkiye and Syria. But as natural disasters intensify, the charity is appealing for funds to meet growing demand

A batch of maps printed for disaster relief field teams in Gaziantep, southeast Turkiye, in February 2023. Photo: MapAction.

Read more in the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Land Journal.