MapAction works across the globe to ensure humanitarian teams have access to the information they need to make key decisions, at the right time, to save lives and alleviate suffering. Our vision is of a world where people vulnerable to humanitarian emergencies are more resilient, and those assisting them are more effective, through the use of technological advances in information management. After more than 20 years of experience and learning carefully gleaned from attending over 120 different humanitarian emergencies and supporting countless more, we have developed a unique human capacity to apply geospatial insight to tackle big problems. We help humanitarians make rapid sense of chaotic, dangerous and rapidly evolving situations. We do this during a crisis - anywhere in the world, and at just 24 hours notice - but also before and after a crisis. When emergencies happen, the entire global MapAction knowledge base is immediately on hand to assess which data is available to support decision making, whether it is reliable enough, and which maps, data and visualisation products have worked best in similar situations. We don’t ask what maps are needed, but which decisions need to be supported. Sometimes it’s not a map that’s required, but a dashboard, a cleaned data set or another form of spatial analysis or visualisation. Our team has the skills and knowledge to recognise and provide it. Away from crisis response, we share the very specialist knowledge we have acquired, by teaching and training humanitarian coordinators to use maps and other specialist geospatial data products to help them make better decisions, improving humanitarian outcomes. We’re also developing new systems to ensure the essential data we know to be indispensable in humanitarian crises is prepared ahead of time and made available automatically, as soon as it’s needed.
