Research Brief 2 of 4 - Data Collection Analysis and Use in Protracted Humanitarian Crises

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 2: Data collection, analysis and use in protracted humanitarian crises – In this paper the findings relate to issues of data quality and the differing needs of “coordinators” versus “implementers”; the former require more oversight information while the latter require management information to help design and implement their programmes. The lack of defined information management roles (including the people to fill them) inhibits collection and use of a range of different data types, including needs assessments, 3/4W, impact data, and monitoring data. Effective data sharing is undermined by limited and inconsistent data sharing practises. How best to treat sensitive data was found to be another challenge that all stakeholders needed to overcome when collecting, analysing and using data. Finally, data collection methodologies were found to often be unclear, or without rigour, suggesting that minimum quality control standards for data collection would be of value.