In partnership with
Humanitarian organizations often must coordinate their activities in emergency response, requiring them to share data about programming and the beneficiaries they serve. Despite the near-constant need to share data across organizations, doing so is fraught with technical, legal, and process challenges, all exacerbated by the extremely sensitive nature of beneficiary data.
Through this project, the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies sought to explore new technical approaches to data sharing in humanitarian response, with the aim of enabling organizations to securely share data necessary for effective coordination of cash-transfer programming.
Caribou conducted an assessment of emerging technologies, such as distributed ledgers and zero-knowledge proofs, to solve these challenges. Despite the project’s focus on technical functionality, the team identified the largest constraints to data sharing as nontechnical in nature, including the lack of semantic standards for data sharing. Caribou built a proof-of-concept web portal for secure data sharing and used it to validate these findings through remote user testing with in-country partners.
