Humanitarian Exchange articles tagged:Information management

In natural disasters and complex emergencies, access to high-quality, timely information is a critical precondition for effective aid delivery. Unfortunately, recent crises have exposed the shortcomings of the humanitarian community in rapidly gathering and effectively using information on the key needs and priorities of affected populations. Such shortcomings are largely due to the lack of dedicated interagency resources for the collection, analysis and dissemination of key information. As a result, post-emergency contexts are often characterised by significant gaps. The first gap concerns the emergency phase of a crisis, when the supply of data is insufficient to meet demand. As data…

Afghanistan has come to be seen as a laboratory for the development of civil–military coordination and informationsharing. However, while numerous information-sharing portals have been established, none has emerged as the single indispensable venue for coordination between civilian organisations and military actors. As this article explains, the limited uptake of such systems reflects three broad challenges: technical problems in the design of information-sharing systems; concerns among civilian organisations that sharing information with the military violates humanitarian principles and puts them at greater risk of attack; and the military’s long-standing restrictions on sharing information. Information-sharing portals for Afghanistan Within Afghanistan, face-to-face coordination…

This section offers members the opportunity to comment on previous Network publications and Newsletters. Relevant comments will usually be communicated to the authors and will be taken into account by the editors in future mailings. Comments received since the last mailing came from World Vision Canada, Frank Riely at Tulane University and from one of our ‘southern’ NGO members in Burkina Faso. Linda Tripp, Vice President of International and Government Relations at World Vision Canada, wrote to let us know that she would be sending Network Paper 5, Advancing Preventive Diplomacy in a Post-Cold War Era: Suggested Roles for Government…

This article summarises the findings of a recent monitoring report on an emergency cash-based intervention in South Central Somalia. In what is thought to be the largest cash programme to be implemented by non-governmental organisations (NGOs), 14 NGOs (six international and eight local partners) distributed $50.6 million-worth of cash and commodity vouchers to 136,673 households affected by the famine of 2011. Approximately half the beneficiaries were located in parts of the country controlled by the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), and half were in areas controlled by the Islamist group Al Shabaab (AS). The monitoring exercise was undertaken by the Somalia…

The IDP Vulnerability Assessment and Profiling (IVAP) project was launched in Pakistan in 2010 to enable agencies to provide humanitarian assistance in a more impartial and targeted manner. Responding to needs arising out of a protracted conflict, humanitarian agencies in Pakistan’s north-western Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province were preparing to provide aid to hundreds of thousands of conflict IDPs for a third consecutive year. Effective targeting of beneficiaries – particularly in a period when financial resources were steadily decreasing – required humanitarian agencies to locate and identify those directly affected by the conflict, broadly understand their priority needs and then analyse…

The Household Economy Approach (HEA) is widely used as a framework for understanding food security, livelihoods and poverty. The framework also has the potential to inform social protection programming by improving understanding of the context in intervention areas, and enhancing targeting and coverage. In the Sahel, HEA has been used successfully for social protection programming in Niger and Mali in the form of safety nets based on regular cash transfers. Save the Children piloted safety nets in the Niger district of Tessaoua from 2008 to 2009 using HEA as a targeting and monitoring tool. The programme reached around 26,000 of…

The humanitarian reform agenda recognises the need for evidence-based decision-making in emergencies. However, current approaches to humanitarian needs assessment often do not provide a sufficiently coherent picture of humanitarian requirements and, therefore, are unable to effectively inform decisions. Multiple, independent, uncoordinated assessments often represent significant duplication of time, effort and funds, provide a fragmented picture of need and risk neglecting certain beneficiary groups and leaving gaps in information. These efforts may not meet commonly promoted humanitarian standards of accountability to vulnerable groups affected by crises. For all these reasons, coordinated needs assessments are increasingly seen as crucial for the more…

A striking feature of the 2012 Sahel food crisis, as compared to 2010, has been the situation of markets across the region, with a number of indicators reaching worrying levels. Among these indicators and possible market stress factors were the unusual price increase of cereals at harvest period, the opening of new market routes, the limited export capacity in coastal countries and scattered areas of production deficit, even in countries where such ‘shocks’ are not usually felt. Overall, the substantial rise in coarse grain prices led to price levels 20% to 90% higher compared to the five-year average throughout the…

Information and communication technology is evolving at an extraordinary pace, changing the way we live and work. In recent years, advances in mobile phone penetration and other new technologies in low-income and disaster-affected countries mean that there is growing interest from donors, practitioners and governments as to how technology can serve humanitarian responses. This article summarises the findings of a study commissioned by the Cash Learning Partnership (CaLP) to review the current use of new technology in humanitarian cash and voucher programming, and the broader implications for humanitarian practice[1]. It explores three different areas of technology (electronic payments, mobile communications…

Identifying the most appropriate response from the wide range of available options requires a response analysis. The growing use of cash transfer programming in emergencies has made us more conscious of how important this step is, primarily as a result of the broader analysis necessary to ensure that markets can be used to support humanitarian response. Use of cash transfers as a response option has shifted programming logic from a focus on the distribution of outputs to defining the objectives of a programme in relation to needs and intended outcomes at the beneficiary level. The tools developed to guide modality…