Research Brief 3 of 4 - The Use, Challenges and Opportunities Associated with Digital Platforms

The Grand Bargain was launched at the World Humanitarian Summit in May 2016. Its goal to achieve $1bn in savings to address the gap in humanitarian financing was to be realised through a series of commitments in nine key areas. Publish What You Fund launched a project in early 2019 to investigate and better understand the user needs of on the ground humanitarian actors, particularly local and national responders. We were seeking to understand what challenges humanitarian actors in protracted crises faced in accessing and using data, and whether and how improved transparency and greater information sharing could help. 

As a result of this research, we have produced a series of four reports on humanitarian data transparency, each aligned with one of the four Grand Bargain Transparency Workstream commitments. The reports were published in June 2020:

Research Brief 3: The use, challenges and opportunities associated with digital platforms – In this paper the research team presents its findings around awareness and use of different digital platforms for programming and publication purposes. The team found that the number and usability of existing platforms is, in the eyes of users, sufficient for accessing the operational and financial data they need. The team found that users want to be able to download raw data in easily accessible formats such as Excel and to be able to download the underlying methodologies to understand how data was collected, and thus more accurately determine its legitimacy and value. The team identified the most commonly used data platforms and considered issues around data quality and sharing, finding that inconsistency in reporting and underlying data quality issues inhibit data use.