Since March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated lives causing tremendous economic disruption worldwide. Those facing existing crises have felt the impacts of the pandemic most acutely. Humanitarian responders faced multiple challenges: humanitarian access was constrained activities were disruptedaid workers were unable to conduct regular monitoring and assessments to meet the growing needs of crisis-affected people Countries found themselves overwhelmed by unstructured, overlapping, or missing data. There was an emerging need among country-level humanitarian responders for timely, comprehensive, and structured data on the transmission of the virus and the humanitarian impact of COVID-19 in affected countries on sectoral and intersectoral levels.
To address this urgent need in the humanitarian community, DFS partnered with iMMAP, a partner NGO that provides information management services to humanitarian and development organizations. Together we designed and implemented a large-scale secondary data review and COVID-19 situation analysis project in six countries: Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, DRC, Syria, Colombia, and Nigeria. Monthly situational analyses were developed for each country, reporting on the evolution of ongoing situations such as quarantine effects, protection concerns, access to essential goods and services, market prices and more, to inform decision making. In addition to the reports, country-level aid responders were provided with weekly snapshots of available information at sub-national levels, summarized visually in country-specific dashboards. Hundreds of weekly snapshots were developed throughout the project period with DFS playing a crucial role in developing the analytical frameworks for the project and ensuring that all data (academia, news articles, social media, humanitarian reports, phone surveys, etc.) would be screened, captured, tagged, and structured in DEEP. Between September 2020 and February 2021, 74 publicly available country reports were published on the COVID-19 dashboard.
