Assessing the humanitarian data landscape

Three years ago, 59 major humanitarian aid donors and implementers brokered the ‘Grand Bargain’ at the World Humanitarian Summit. It had the ambitious goal of achieving $1 billion in savings to address the gap in humanitarian financing through a series of commitments. The first of these commitments was greater transparency in the humanitarian context to enhance decision-making. While significant gains have been made in this regard, the full potential of more transparent humanitarian data is yet to be realised. This can only be done if the information made available is actively used by and benefits the full spectrum of humanitarian aid providers.

Funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and in partnership with Development Initiatives, Ground Truth Solutions and Publish What You Fund have conducted research to understand the information needs of humanitarian actors and the challenges they face as part of the Grand Bargain Transparency workstream. By focusing on national aid providers, international NGOs, governments, and UN agencies in Iraq and Bangladesh, this project provided recommendations on how open data platforms, tools and standards need to change to make information more useful and accessible in a humanitarian response.

Three years ago, 59 major humanitarian aid donors and implementers brokered the ‘Grand Bargain’ at the World Humanitarian Summit. It had the ambitious goal of achieving $1 billion in savings to address the gap in humanitarian financing through a series of commitments. The first of these commitments was greater transparency in the humanitarian context to enhance decision-making. While significant gains have been made in this regard, the full potential of more transparent humanitarian data is yet to be realised. This can only be done if the information made available is actively used by and benefits the full spectrum of humanitarian aid providers.

Funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands and in partnership with Development Initiatives, Ground Truth Solutions and Publish What You Fund have conducted research to understand the information needs of humanitarian actors and the challenges they face as part of the Grand Bargain Transparency workstream. By focusing on national aid providers, international NGOs, governments, and UN agencies in Iraq and Bangladesh, this project provided recommendations on how open data platforms, tools and standards need to change to make information more useful and accessible in a humanitarian response.

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