While the sheer volume, scale and value of data is leading to radical transformation in the way we live, work, and communicate, managing data securely and responsibly is the greatest challenge of the information age. Data has the potential to transform high-quality humanitarian and development work in responding to needs of individuals and communities and offering transparency and improved coordination for impact. But the problem in civil society organizations and INGOs is the reality of fragmented, insecure, and underutilized data.
Ordering a pizza involves a number of steps you can map through from deciding your toppings to dialing through your order. In a similar way, we can take complex data flow processes in humanitarian and development programming and break them down into more manageable steps. This has formed the basis of learning for Oxfams journey towards trying to tackle fragmented data collection in the humanitarian sector.
Oxfam was awarded a Humanitarian Innovation Fund grant to handle feedback from refugees in Zaatari, Jordan. Alongside SurveyCTO for data collection and case management, Oxfam established a system using Microsoft products (Cosmos DB in Azure, Power BI) to allow them to consistently log and store this feedback and aggregate data for reporting and prioritization before offering feedback to the original contributors. A larger institutional grant rolled out in 5 countries helped Oxfam take further steps on the journey towards one location for data storage. In a workshop with the country team in the Philippines, they mapped user stories and ambitions for how this feedback data could be mapped together with wider parts of the data architecture. And, yes there was pizza.
In this session, you will have the opportunity to:
We invite you to share with us questions for this webinar and what other topics related to data you'd like to see covered in future webinars. Please email your questions and ideas to Leila Toplic.
