How we support the humanitarian community
- Design & User Experience
- Digital Innovation
- Data Strategy
- Data Review & Analytics
Design & User Experience
Whether it’s a mobile application or a new website, great design and development complement each other. And it all starts with a solid strategy.
Design is only as impactful as the strategy supporting it. We start by asking a lot of questions, listening, and learning to make sure our ideas take the right shape before they take off. Then, we create a plan that brings engaging messaging, graphics, and functional elements together across every screen size and implement it.
Responsive Web Design
It’s normal to want to dive right into the aesthetics, but design is more about the process. Done right, every element has a unique purpose. The results are clear visuals that make it easy for users to find what they’re looking on any device.
Web Development
Using the latest web technologies, we develop websites and applications that can stand the test of time and adapt to the ever changing needs of the humanitarian community.
Custom-Built Mobile Applications
From streamlining remote data collection to better activity monitoring, mobile applications can provide more security and flexibility and better control over workflow. Our applications allow more people to access vital information remotely.
Featured Case Studies
Data Entry and Exploration Platform (DEEP)
Case Study
Data Entry and Exploration Platform (DEEP)
The Problem
Manual Entry Wasn’t Made For 21st Century Crises
Over the past 20 years, more than 7,300 natural disasters were recorded worldwide, affecting more than 4 billion people across the globe and generating $2.97 trillion in economic losses (UNDRR). The colossal effort to manually collect, track, translate, store, verify, and share critical data in the wake of these disasters has created overwhelming, and at times, insurmountable challenges for humanitarian responders— jeopardizing accurate decision making during a crisis and hindering global ability to prevent and abate future disasters. That’s where DEEP was born.
The Solution
Remove Collaboration Barriers, Improve Response Time, Save More Lives
DEEP is a platform built with AI in mind to centralize, accelerate, and strengthen inter-agency response to humanitarian crises at national and field levels. The free, open source tool was developed by field responders in the wake of the devastating 2015 Nepal earthquakes, and has since become a go-to resource for leading global humanitarian organizations, including UNHCR, UNICEF, UN OCHA, and the IFRC. Today, DEEP hosts the largest analysis framework repository in the international humanitarian sector, hosting more than 85,000 carefully annotated response documents and connecting more than 3,000 expert users worldwide.
Since its inception, DEEP has been used to inform more than 1,800 international humanitarian projects whose scopes are estimated to impact more than 98 million people, including USAID’s response to COVID-19, ACAPS’s response to the Rohingya crisis, and UNHCR and IFRC’s response to the Venezuela migrations crisis. More than two-thirds of individuals in areas where DEEP is utilized earn less than $5 USD per day.
DEEP & COVID-19
Partners
The COVID-19 pandemic has presented unprecedented challenges to the ability of humanitarian actors to collect and analyze data in humanitarian responses around the world. In addition to worldwide stay at home orders that have constrained traditional responses, humanitarian organizations have faced five concrete challenges:
To date, DEEP is active in coordinating COVID-19 responses in 14 countries across Central and Eastern Africa, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America. In the case of iMMAP, DEEP is centralizing COVID-19 response data collection among 464 humanitarian organizations spread across 6 target countries and operating alongside broader global efforts.
Through this partnership, DEEP has directly strengthened assessment and analysis capacities that continue to inform response and resource allocation for more than 41.6 million people in targeted areas.
How AI is Bettering Response To Internal Displacement
Case Study
How AI is Bettering Response To Internal Displacement
The Problem
More than 50 million people around the world are internally displaced. Forced by natural disasters and violence to flee their homes and often living in refugee-like conditions within their own country’s borders, the UNHCR has called internally displaced people “among the most vulnerable in the world.”Each year, thousands of internal displacement crises are tracked and analyzed by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC)—the world’s most definitive source of data on internal displacement. Prior to partnering with Data Friendly Space (DFS), IDMC relied on a small IT team to collect and securely store reliable, timely, and longitudinal data on millions of displaced people from over 188 countries. This limited capacity held back the international community’s ability to respond to, report on, and ultimately, reduce the risk and impact of internal displacements across the globe.
The Solution
In the digital age, data is among the greatest tools to disaster management—when managed, secured, and utilized effectively. Overwhelmed by data inputs and the complexity of their data infrastructure, IDMC turned to DFS, a trusted partner to leading international humanitarian organizations across the globe.Since 2019, DFS has introduced multiple data management tools backed by AI to better process, store, and analyze internal displacement trends and enable faster, more robust humanitarian responses in the field. Highlights include:
| DFS Solution | Result |
| Efficient Media Monitoring | DFS helped to replace IDMC’s manual processing with IDETECT, a tool that analyzes thousands of global news sources daily through natural language processing. With IDETECT, IDMC now automates data collection on natural disaster and armed conflict displacements and can visually present the data to partners, funders, and decision makers worldwide. |
| Smart Reporting | DFS carried out a complete re-development of the main IDMC web application used to collect, analyze, and report on internal displacement data around the world. HELIX, a global information management system, is now pre-populated from the IDETECT natural language processing system, resulting in: 1. Reduced manual input and increased capacity for team members 2. More accurate and comprehensive data entry DFS’s data outputs are used to create reports like IDMC’s 2020 Global Report on Internal Displacement that are a primary resource to the United Nations and humanitarian leaders around the world. |
| 21st Century Security | DFS redesigned and deployed an entirely new infrastructure to securely store IDMC’s data from 188 countries and thousands of annual displacement events. DFS continues to provide around the clock security monitoring for IDMC’s online resources. |
| Seamless Integration | DFS managed the migration of data from thousands of past internal displacement events to a centralized reporting system. Upgrades are designed to increase the organization’s interoperability and dramatically reduce human error and the need for manual input. |
DFS’s data management tools, including Smart Reporting (Helix) and Efficient Media Monitoring (IDETECT), were utilized to produce multiple reports on the state of internal displacement during the COVID-19 pandemic, including Internal Displacement 2020: Mid-year update. The report analyzed 14.6 million new internal displacements across 127 countries in the first 6 months of 2020, giving the humanitarian community access to geolocalized data on the key priorities of people in need for a more accurate response on the ground.
DFS also built the data processing tools to enable detailed tracking and analysis of key variables impacting internally displaced people throughout COVID-19, including the virus’ impact to health, livelihoods, housing, education, and security. Learn more about IDMC’s response to COVID-19.