Humanitarian data management system launched

A new UN unit, the Southern African Humanitarian Information Management Service (SAHIMS), has been launched in Johannesburg to provide data management support to UN humanitarian coordinators conducting vital planning for the region. Initiated by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the inter-agency unit will focus on the UN "family" working in the six countries most affected by the current food and humanitarian crisis. In Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique and Malawi about 14.4 million people face an uncertain future after droughts, floods and economic and political problems depleted their food supplies. The response to the emergency involves the management of masses of diverse data on all facets of the complex crisis including the impact of HIV/AIDS. "The unit will help Resident Coordinators and country teams understand what it going on and provide analysis of hot spots in the region," Giorgio Sartori, Technical Manager from OCHA New York told IRIN. Sartori said that although many agencies in the region were collecting data they needed a streamlined system to store and share it. Current inefficiencies ranged from technical problems like incompatible formats and protocols, clashing methodologies and even occasionally a fear that the data could be "stolen". There was often time wasting duplication of data collection by different agencies and, at its most extreme, teams from different agencies could visit the same village at different times gathering the same information. "This left villagers saying: 'you've been here three times and we've told you how many people there are and what our needs are, what do you need now?'" Sartori explained. SAHIMS would overlay data from the separate UN agencies in the region to form a complete picture for analysis by humanitarian coordinators. "We were told by one agency that 80 percent of their time was spent collecting data and 20 percent on analysis and they would like it to be the other way around," Sartori said. Although the information would be available to all agencies, the separate reports would remain the property of the agency which conducted the research and queries would be directed to them. There would be no clash with the work done by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and that of the US Agency for International Development-funded Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET) as SAHIMS would focus on data from UN agencies. SADC, FEWS NET, NGOs and governments would be able to share the data stored by SAHIMS. Secondments to the unit were encourgaed as a way to help data and information sharing. Similar models of the regional information management service had already proved valuable in other regions like the Horn of Africa. Donors have been asked to support the initiative which hopes to be fully functional within two months. Methods of sharing the information include placing it on websites, and on CD Roms as a kind of "regional encyclopedia".