OCHA’s Centre for Humanitarian Data is focused on increasing the use and impact of data in humanitarian response.

The Centre has just released the 4th edition of its flagship report The State of Open Humanitarian Data.

The team has registered the highest levels yet for data availability across priority humanitarian operations – a huge gain that can be attributed to the commitment of organizations to sharing and maintaining their data publicly.

“Our understanding of data availability and use comes from managing the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX), an open platform for finding and sharing data across crises and organizations,” says Sarah Telford, Centre Lead. "In 2022, Humanitarian Data Exchange was used by 1.5 million people in 233 countries and territories."

"Organizations added 3,700 new and updated datasets, bringing the total to over 20,400, which were downloaded over 1.8 million times - evidence of strong collective action in a sector that relies heavily on cooperation. We also saw strong demand for data about the world’s largest humanitarian crises, from the war in Ukraine to drought and food insecurity in the Horn of Africa.”

Although the Humanitarian Data Exchange includes data about all countries in the world, the report focuses on 25 locations with humanitarian response plans. This analysis is based on the Data Grids, which provide a comparable way to assess data availability across locations and categories.

“Our main takeaway from the research behind this year’s report is that availability of core data for priority humanitarian operations is at its highest levels in the past four years,” Ms. Telford tells us. “Yet, critical gaps remain with climate impact data, acute malnutrition prevalence and access constraints, among other areas.”

“Humanitarian crises are dynamic and so is the data needed to understand them,” she concludes. “A priority for 2023 will be a continued focus on climate impact data, which is essential for understanding and predicting the future impacts of hazards on vulnerable populations. We will also explore implementing data quality grades or scores for some datasets included in the Data Grids.”