Managing data in Southern and Eastern Africa means navigating fast-shifting crises with frequently fragmented information flows while ensuring accuracy, protection, and real-time relevance of the information for decision-makers.
This is why Elvis Odhiambo Ayiemba and Abdifitah Subow, with the Regional Office for Southern and Eastern Africa (ROSEA) of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), conceptualized a dashboard that consolidates regional datasets into a single platform.
The dashboard now supports OCHA’s advocacy, outreach, and analysis in the region.
A one‑stop, sustainable, adaptable platform
The dashboard is an up-to-date overview of the humanitarian situation across the region by using near real-time data pipelines connected to the most reliable sources and automatic updates.
Users can obtain instant aggregated insights by chatting with an integrated Microsoft Copilot agent. They can request summaries, ask questions, and obtain quick overviews of any humanitarian situation.
In short, you have access to the latest information updated in real time.
From reactive to proactive
This dashboard is really transforming our approach from reactive reporting to proactive analysis and stronger situational awareness. It integrates and standardizes data from sources such as IPC, HPC, HDX, IOM, UNHCR, and WHO, providing a near-real-time view of humanitarian caseloads across 25 countries served by OCHA's Regional Office for Southern and Eastern Africa.
This automation allows for earlier detection of rising food insecurity, disease outbreaks, displacement, and other indicators.
As a result, the team can prioritize deteriorating contexts sooner, initiate internal coordination earlier, and engage partners with concrete data at a stage when timely intervention can still reduce impact and cost.
An asset for advocacy and fundraising
The five-year historical data perspective turns the dashboard into a strategic evidence platform, demonstrating that current crises arise from long-term vulnerabilities like drought, displacement, underfunded responses, disease outbreaks, and other drivers of need
This evidence enables our partners and us to make a stronger case for funding anticipatory action while giving a better sense of the severity of each crisis.
We will continue to develop our dashboard to include new partnership agreements with data providers and integrate predictive and threshold-based alerting, alongside climate-related shock indicators, which enable earlier identification of emerging risks.
