Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping: Harnessing Human-Machine Intelligence for High-Stake Public Policy and Resilience Planning

ABSTRACT

Humanitarian challenges, including natural disasters, food insecurity, climate change, racial and gender violence, environmental crises, the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, human rights violations, and forced displacements, disproportionately impact vulnerable communities worldwide. According to UN OCHA, 235 million people will require humanitarian assistance in 2021(1). Despite these growing perils, there remains a notable paucity of data science research to scientifically inform equitable public policy decisions for improving the livelihood of at-risk populations. Scattered data science efforts exist to address these challenges, but they remain isolated from practice and prone to algorithmic harms concerning lack of privacy, fairness, interpretability, accountability, transparency, and ethics. Biases in data-driven methods carry the risk of amplifying inequalities in high-stakes policy decisions that impact the livelihood of millions of people. Consequently, proclaimed benefits of data-driven innovations remain inaccessible to policymakers, practitioners, and marginalized communities at the core of humanitarian actions and global development. To help fill this gap, we propose the Data-driven Humanitarian Mapping Research Program, which focuses on developing novel data science methodologies that harness human-machine intelligence for high-stakes public policy and resilience planning.