Research Brief 4 of 4 - Data Use Capacity 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 4: Data use capacity in protracted humanitarian crises – In this paper the team identifies that data needs and corresponding capacity issues were similar across the two case study countries. The research finds that current funding models and reporting requirements inhibit data use capacity, particularly in local NGOs (but also INGOs) as they tend to receive less base funding, outside of projects, than other organisations, and do not have the time to report to multiple donors/platforms. Additionally, there is usually no explicit funding allocated to carry out needs assessments (a key requirement of on-the-ground organisations) and often either they cannot finance information management officer roles at all, or they lose their IM staff to bigger organisations. If data use capacity issues are addressed properly then it is likely that the use and publication of data (e.g. needs assessments, 3/4W, nutrition assessments, facility assessments, monitoring and evaluation data, and IATI data) among humanitarian organisations will also improve in the longer-term.