With the unprecedented funding crisis in the humanitarian sector, data roles are being sacrificed to maintain essential services. Yet data is key to understanding any crisis and making the right decisions in anticipation or response.
MapAction, with its expert volunteer model, is well positioned to help fill this gap with a support-on-demand approach for humanitarian agencies worldwide, from the UN down to local civil society organisations.
The crisis has had a domino effect in the sector like none since 1945. The impact of the closure of the United States Agency for International Development, formerly the largest foreign aid agency, on the humanitarian sector is unprecedented.
A report by the United Nations (UN) Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in June 2025 noted: 'More than halfway through the year, the humanitarian funding landscape remains dire. As of now, less than 17% of the $46 billion required to meet global humanitarian needs in 2025 has been received. This marks an alarming 40% drop compared to the same time last year.'
Data-driven decisions still key to humanitarian sector
Unfilled budgets for emergency aid at the UN, closures of programmes and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) worldwide all are well-documented. Humanitarian organisations have had to revert to drastic layoffs to survive, with information management officers often among the first to depart.
With them goes the ability to capture, analyse and visualise key information to inform data-driven decisions.
This puts the lives of many of the most vulnerable people in humanitarian crises at risk.
MapAction has not been immune to the funding crisis, but our volunteers have rallied to fill any gaps. For more than 20 years, MapAction has supported global and local humanitarian agencies with mapping, information management and critical data skills.
We have done that in more than 100 countries, and our expert team of volunteers now stands at 70+ members. Many have been with MapAction for 10, in some cases even 20 years: they work for government agencies, tech companies and other businesses and globally renowned institutions.
We continue to provide emergency response mapping and information management services, for instance, during the Myanmar earthquake in March or during our work supporting the response to Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica.
We also continue to provide humanitarian information management training and support to major humanitarian agencies such as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) or the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
But our service has evolved. With hundreds of information management experts laid off at organisations worldwide, major UN agencies and humanitarian organisations need support to fill that gap.
MapAction is well positioned to help with this, having steadily increased our capacities across the information management and data fields in the past decade.
That is why MapAction has transitioned to also provide a support-on-demand model: building live dashboards, data-sharing tools, data pipelines and visualisations for emergency response and anticipatory action. This draws on our in-house geographical information systems (GIS) and technological capacity and expertise.
MapAction is building tailor-made data tools and products for the OCHA and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in DRC, as well as for United Nations Department of Safety and Security (UNDSS) in Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar.
Across several projects, we now deploy this model. Virtual help desks in Ukraine and Myanmar connect tech troubleshooting issues at civil society organisations, UN agencies or disaster risk management institutions with volunteers or staff at MapAction who can provide technical solutions.
UN and MapAction data from the earthquake that struck Myanmar, March 2026. Image © MapAction
How does MapAction's model work?
Our project in Myanmar in 2025 worked so let's say a civil society organisation there is struggling to prepare data for a visualisation to share with cluster partners. A team member can raise a ticket and expect a response from a technical expert from MapAction who will pick it up within 72 hours. It might be a tech problem, such as which software to use, a coding challenge or difficulty preparing data for visualisations.
Our information management officers help local and international organisations to solve technical challenges. For instance, preparing and storing data, sharing data and data visualisation tools and techniques. When this data is visualised it helps decision-makers to perform their role and showcase their expertise with data-driven actions. This can begin to reverse the domino effect caused by the drastic funding cuts.
MapAction's new approach is designed to stretch limited cash in organisations already under extreme financial pressure. It leverages available data and resources to provide a user-friendly and effective solution for coordination and response.
The problem is most acutely felt in countries where emergencies are more frequent, such as the DRC, Sudan or Syria. Today, more than 7.8m people remain internally displaced in DRC, while the eastern provinces – North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri, Maniema and Tanganyika – continue to experience chronic instability.
For more than three decades, the DRC has faced a protracted and multidimensional humanitarian crisis characterised by persistent armed conflicts, massive population displacements, recurrent epidemics and increasingly frequent natural disasters.
Case study shows static to live shared data
Last year, MapAction began work to support major UN agencies working on various humanitarian crises in the DRC, in a programme funded by Humanitarian2Humanitarian (H2H) Network and UK Aid Direct. Our on-the-ground information management officer worked with the IOM to prepare their data on internally displaced people – of which the IOM estimates there are nearly 6m in DRC – and camp management.
Once the data had been prepared, MapAction created a dashboard for the IOM team in Goma, Eastern DRC. The IOM team was then able to share the data with the wider camp and coordination management (CCM) cluster. MapAction trained IOM personnel to update the dashboard.
With all the data in one place, UN agencies and humanitarian civil society organisations can coordinate actions and strategy more easily.
Decision-makers can get a quick and accurate idea of the latest on migration patterns in a specific area or the needs of a specific camp.
The dashboard is designed to help OCHA and the clusters monitor new humanitarian emergencies and the corresponding responses in real time. This tool centralised multi-sector alerts, reduced the time required to consolidate information from several days to a few hours, and enhanced the speed and quality of operational decision-making.
By painting a unified picture for all organisations, ultimately each sector – known as clusters – can save more lives and meet more needs of the displaced population.
MapAction's Giresse Likunde leads a workshop in April 2026 on building and maintaining an information management system for local not-for-profits and civil society organisations in DRC. Image © MapAction
Maps of camps help with planning
To deal with a major gap in the coordination of camps for displaced people, MapAction also developed a series of static maps of camp sites. These provide a clear overview of site occupancy and population movements.
Partners now use these maps to plan decongestion and relocation activities and to support coordination at both provincial and national levels.
MapAction's static map showing sites of temporary settlements where internally displaced people live in the province of North Kivu in Eastern DRC. Image © MapAction
Donate to MapAction
MapAction's resources have halved in recent years and its ability to represent the power and goodwill of the professional geospatial community in humanitarian emergencies has reduced accordingly.
Yet over the years the support of both generous GIS professionals and the companies they work for has been paramount. It is even more critical now that there is a substantial funding gap in the humanitarian sector.
To support MapAction, please visit or share this page.
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