This article initially appeared in The State of Open Humanitarian Data 2025.

As we began to reflect on progress with data for our annual ‘state of data’ report, it became apparent that extreme funding shortages in 2025 may mean that 2024 will be the high-water mark of data availability across humanitarian operations for years to come. While the impacts will take time to fully materialize, we created a framework to assess the risk to data availability in the coming year, with a primary focus on the data in the HDX Data Grids.

As a starting point, the assessment framework includes the organization and the data it contributes to a specific Data Grid sub-category. We then look at information about the data: the level of availability in the 2024 Data Grids and the update frequency. Finally, we assess the focus of the data, the level of resource required to produce it, the funding exposure of the organization, and whether there is a complementary dataset that could fill a data gap.

Using these criteria, the data is assessed as being at a low, medium or high risk to continued availability. (Read the full methodology in Annex D of the report.) The presented risk level is a baseline and does not reflect real-world mitigation measures or resource prioritization. For example, an organization may prioritize data collection efforts despite funding constraints. Furthermore, this is not an evaluation of the value of these datasets or the organizations producing them.

The results of our assessment can be found in the table* (see below). Some key takeaways include:

  • ‘Data about people and how a crisis is affecting them’ has the highest risk to continued availability. This includes data on acute malnutrition, food security, internally displaced people, returnees and humanitarian needs. Producing this data requires in-person data collection and is resource intensive (e.g., through exercises such as multi-sector needs assessments, displacement tracking, smart surveys and household food security and coping mechanisms surveys). Any funding contraction would be impactful, given there are minimal complementary datasets. This data is central to humanitarian action and is relied upon by many actors for targeting their response efforts and for secondary analysis. Even if this data is prioritized to continue, the frequency and extent of primary data inputs may be reduced over time. Organizations will need to decide what data is absolutely critical to the response and consider the minimum level of data that is required to act in a principled manner.
  • Data about the response, namely operational presence, humanitarian access and funding, has a medium risk to continued availability. This data is produced by OCHA through reporting by humanitarian actors. Its comprehensiveness is determined to a large degree by the information management capacity of partners. The impact on this type of data may be slower to manifest and will be dictated by the extent of capacity constraints in the system.
  • Contextual data that is derived from crowd-sourcing, satellite imagery or through the application of statistical methods has a low risk to continued availability. Many of these datasets depend on stable reference data or third-party sources, and are therefore less vulnerable to humanitarian funding cuts, e.g., administrative boundaries, climate hazards, roads and populated places. The continued adaptation of these sources for humanitarian purposes will be critical. 

For some datasets, the existence of complementary data is an important factor in the risk assessment. For example, the food prices and population statistics benefit from alternative sources for this information, although not always for countries with humanitarian operations. It is important to consider where these alternatives depend on validation and triangulation with ‘ground truth’ data from primary data collection efforts.

Impacts Beyond the Data Grids

The Data Grids only cover a subset of humanitarian data, reflecting data available through HDX. For example, some data is too sensitive to share publicly but is nonetheless essential for humanitarians and its continued availability should be considered. Our framework can be applied to such data to give an early indication of risk in light of funding shortages.

Community feedback data provides a clear example of this. The production of this data is heavily dependent on the efforts of specialized organizations and local partners, a part of the humanitarian community that is highly susceptible to funding cuts. Community data captures the experiences of people in crisis and provides important inputs to response efforts without which there can be a mismatch between what people need and the assistance they receive. Given this data is not accessible through open platforms, changes to its availability may be less immediately apparent.

In a contracted system, data processes will still move ahead and core datasets will still be produced. However, the frequency and extent of primary data inputs may be reduced over time, requiring the humanitarian system to adjust to this new landscape without impacting effective decision making for humanitarian programming.

Over the coming months, we will continue to assess the risks to the humanitarian data ecosystem and will be undertaking deeper analysis of impacts and exploring potential futures. Humanitarian data is sustained through a vast interconnected network of actors, resources and infrastructure. Progress depends on continued investment in the capacity, expertise and partnerships that have taken years to establish. 

Please be in touch with questions or comments at centrehumdata@un.org.

*The following information serves to contextualise specific entries in the table: 1) The update frequency for humanitarian needs is most often set as ‘annual’ for this data on HDX as its publication aligns with annual HNRPs. Needs data is updated more frequently at a country-level; 2) The majority of data for the food security sub-category is provided by either the IPC (10 locations) or FSNWG WA (6 locations). We have combined these into one entry, as the assessment results are the same; 3) Historically, the US Government has been a major source of funding for the country-specific acute food insecurity and acute malnutrition analysis workshops. As such, the financial exposure of these workshops is significant in many HNRP locations; 4) Three organizations provide data to the climate hazard sub-category; and 5) WorldPop’s data on the spatial distribution of population is a complementary dataset in the populated places sub-category.