SHARE
Structured
Humanitarian Assistance Reporting
A Summary Description and
Requirements for Geo-referenced Data Collection and Mapping to Support
Humanitarian Assistance Operations
Geographic Information
Support Team (GIST)[1]
20 April 2000
From the earliest phases of an
emergency, certain information is critically important for a broad spectrum of
actors involved in emergency-response decision-making. This information includes the locations and
numbers of affected people, the extent and distribution of damage and needs,
the locations of assistance projects and other resources, and factors affecting
the security of the affected population and assistance workers. Amidst the
chaotic and rapidly changing events of an emergency, no single organization or
entity has all of this information. The more time required to collect and
process it, the longer it takes to organize a response to assist the victims.
Quickly and efficiently obtaining and processing this information, on the other
hand, can save time and allow more efficient and effective use of resources,
which in turn saves lives.
Typically when a country
experiences a major emergency, the government and local responders, NGOs, UN
agencies and other international organizations, donors, media and affected population
itself are all involved collecting and disseminating information. Assessments
and situation reports may contain contradictory information or repeat
information reported by other sources. One assessment report will cover
nutrition, the next water and sanitation, another logistics or security, often
using different methodologies and measurement indicators. Some locations and
populations will be assessed repeatedly, others not at all. Much field reporting is anecdotal and in
narrative form, rather than systematically organized as data. Integration of
information across sectors to obtain a comprehensive picture of the situation
becomes difficult if not impossible.
SHARE is a systematic approach to
organizing critical information so that it can be pooled, analyzed, compared,
contrasted, validated, reconciled, and mapped. This allows a common frame of
reference to be established, leading to more coordinated decision making, such
as on which areas to prioritize, who is responsible for what, what kind of assistance
is warranted, and so on. SHARE is not a
new idea, but rather a distillation of an approach developed and refined over a
number of years under actual field conditions by operational humanitarian
assistance agencies.
Although the SHARE concept assumes
that certain information is critical for emergency-response decision-making,
SHARE is not content-specific. Instead,
SHARE provides a simple format for ensuring that data collected can be used by
someone other than the originator. The format is applicable to any thematic
data that has: 1) a geo-reference , or locational information indicating where
the data was collected or what geographic area it represents, 2) a time stamp
indicating when the data was collected and in some cases at what frequency, and
3) meta-data, or information about the data itself, including the source of the
information, who collected it, what the data values represent, what standards
were used, and how the data was measured or derived. SHARE's simple, standardized geo-referencing system allows
assessment and other operationally-relevant information to be pooled from multiple sources, linked to
specific locations, analyzed and mapped.
An example from Turkey illustrates applications of the
SHARE approach. On 17 August and again on 12 November 1999, massive earthquakes
struck northwestern Turkey. Together
the two earthquakes killed more than 18,000 people and left over 200,000 people
in need of emergency shelter. In this example, the geographic location data required by the
SHARE format can be specified using common place names found on standard
reference maps (figure 1).
Figure 1
This type of base
information can be collected and made available prior to the emergency event,
as can other baseline information on demographic distributions, health,
infrastructure, economic activities and land use.
Once an emergency
is underway, however, field surveys become a crucial source for information
stemming from the emergency. The SHARE format is designed to organize
geo-referenced data on specific themes or sectors -- camps, water wells,
primary health centers, damage assessments, relief activities, etc. -- into
database form (table 1).
Table
1: Provincial Distribution of earthquake homeless population
Date: 10 March
2000, Source: Government of Turkey
|
Province |
Total
Population |
Number
of tent camps |
Number
of beneficiaries in tents |
Number
of Pre-fab cities |
Number
of beneficiaries in pre-fab |
%
of Homeless people/total population per province |
|
Kocaeli |
1,117,380 |
17 |
17,677 |
41 |
51,420 |
6% |
|
Sakarya |
731,800 |
1 |
827 |
39 |
36,120 |
5% |
|
Yalova |
163,920 |
2 |
1,861 |
16 |
19,029 |
13% |
|
Bolu |
382,401 |
11 |
16,490 |
21 |
9,119 |
6% |
|
Duzce |
170,619 |
24 |
49,391 |
19 |
18,657 |
40% |
|
TOTAL |
2,626,120 |
55 |
85,291 |
136 |
134,345 |
8% |
From data collected and processed
in this form, emergency-specific map products can be generated (figure2).
Figure
2
The more specific the geo-reference
-- and given appropriately-scaled base map data -- the more detailed the
picture that can be obtained (figure 3).
Figure
3
Any operationally-relevant thematic
information that can be put into the SHARE format -- that is, geo-referenced,
sourced and dated -- can be handled in this manner. The rationale for adopting this approach is improved information
sharing among emergency-response actors, leading to better coordination,
increased efficiency, greater accountability and a smoother transition from the
emergency to recovery phase. Data
compiled and reported this way becomes a common resource for all involved in
planning relief activities. Such
information can be used to develop proposals and appeals, coordinate relief
activities, monitor and evaluate projects, and plan follow-on, more in-depth
sector-specific assessments.
The critical implementation
requirements are that organizations who collect and act on this type of
information agree on the critical core information content and take the
necessary organizational steps for obtaining and sharing it. These steps
involve cooperation among a broad array of actors on a wide variety of
preparatory and operational tasks. Insofar as possible, responsibilities for
the tasks required for implementing the SHARE approach should be identified and
worked out in advance of emergencies according to agencies' unique mandates,
capabilities, and resources. Efforts
will be needed to draft scopes of work, prepare base maps and data for priority
countries, establish procurement mechanisms, conduct training, acquire
necessary hardware and software, design surveys, or whatever the issue might be
such that all elements are in place to the greatest extent possible.
In this way, as much as 80% of the
elements required to implement SHARE can be in place prior to any given
emergency. If this level of
preparedness can be achieved, the other 20% of the factors that cannot be
accounted for ahead of time should not prevent field-based reporting and
information management mechanisms from providing timely, sufficiently accurate
information for a variety of critical humanitarian assistance applications.
The international humanitarian
assistance community is extremely diverse. Different types of organizations
have different roles and capabilities. SHARE’s decentralized nature reflects
the decentralized reality of contemporary international emergency responses. No single organization or entity has access
to or can provide all of the critical information. Each participating
organization has a role to play in terms of providing some element -- baseline
data, resources, sectoral expertise, field assessments, added value analysis.
The resulting "shared" knowledge base will lead to a better
coordinated humanitarian response.
This
concept paper has been developed by members of the GIST - an informal technical
team of geographic information focal points working for the UN Food and
Agriculture Organization, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Office for
Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs,
the UN World Food Programme, UNICEF, US Agency for International
Development, and the World Bank. It
does not necessarily reflect the official policy or practices of these
organizations.