Geospatial information is critical during humanitarian crises for timely and reliable data and can help ensure effective coordination, prioritise areas of intervention, and allocate resources.
Last year, Caribou (formerly Caribou Space), together with the UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub (UKHIH) published the Beyond Borders Report, which provided a state of play for the use of satellite technologies, such as geospatial information, in humanitarian decision-making. The report highlighted a large number of ongoing initiatives but also heard from the community that a number of operational, technical and knowledge related barriers exist.
To follow on from this report, Caribou Space conducted a series of interviews with decision-makers in the humanitarian community to understand three challenges in more depth:
- Low awareness of potential use cases for satellite technology in humanitarian crises, or resistance to or mistrust of these tools;
- Low technical expertise, restricting the use of satellite technology;
- Concerns relating to the ethics of using satellite data and privacy and security implications of its use and storage.
The findings from the user interviews, as well as desk research into existing initiatives, led to the development of 11 research insights that served as a starting point for our ideation process.
Our ideation session convened a group of humanitarians, technical advisors and ecosystem thinkers, bringing together diverse but complementary expertise to exchange ideas, challenge each other and co-create new possible initiatives using a systems-thinking approach, inspired by Wasifiri’s Systemcraft.
We asked our workshop attendees to explore the context around one of the problems. This helped to identify possible opportunities, leverage existing networks, and develop incentive structures and communication channels.
“I think the biggest takeaway for me from the workshop is the value of having diverse stakeholders here,” said Steven Ramage from Réseau Consulting. “At my table, I sat with a representative from the private sector, someone from the UN and someone from Oxfam. So, it was an eclectic mix of people doing different things in the humanitarian space, but everyone with an important role to play.”
Markus Enenkel from The World Bank added, “Although we have been struggling with some of these critical questions for more than 10 years the number of people there are that are filling this cross-sectorial role are increasing, which could really strengthen the development of solutions.”
The workshop is part of a consultation exercise carried out by Caribou on behalf of the UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub (UKHIH).
Authors
Carlotta Maucher
Follow Carlotta Maucher on LinkedInAnalyst, Climate & Space
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