On 21 February, anyone trying to access FEWS NET found a dead webpage.
The site is a critical early warning data resource, which for 40 years has informed humanitarian response to hunger crises before they escalate into famines. Now, it is an early casualty of the USAID defunding crisis and an alarming harbinger of the assault on the data infrastructure that underpins humanitarian action.
Humanitarian action is driven by data: Statistical information guides decisions on where, when, and how to respond to crises. Moreover, these data streams are not independent but deeply interwoven: The failure of one can trigger cascading failures across multiple domains.
In addition to the immediate and devastating human cost of the cancellation of roughly 10,000 aid projects, the USAID defunding crisis now threatens to trigger a network effect collapse for crucial humanitarian data.
From needs assessments and public health and nutrition surveillance to famine alert systems and operational security, humanitarian data streams trigger and inform lifesaving interventions, forming the basis for policy and action. Areas dependent on data include:
- Needs assessments and crisis monitoring: Data collected from household surveys, remote sensing, facility-based information systems, field reporting, and other methods provides a picture of population needs, which allows for more precision in establishing priorities for humanitarian response and the allocation of always-scarce funds. The UN’s emergency aid coordination body, OCHA, relies on a constellation of data streams and data-gathering organisations to put together the humanitarian appeals and response plans that drive international funding and operations. NGOs rely on them to prioritise their operations at the field level and save lives.
- Public health and famine monitoring: Surveillance of incidence and trends of undernutrition, detection of outbreaks of communicable disease, and monitoring the occurrence of other important health conditions rely on a web of community and health facility reporting. These are complemented by other socio-economic and demographic information, including the measurement of mortality rates and trends in the prices of food and other essential commodities. If any one element is weakened, or absent, the entire system risks missing critical warning signs. The World Health Organization alone utilises a vast array of data streams to monitor humanitarian health, encompassing infectious disease surveillance, health status indicators, health system metrics, and research findings.
- Funding and resource allocation: Humanitarian donors – governmental and private – depend on credible, timely data to justify funding decisions. Without this data, funding becomes more subject to misallocation, political or other biases in decision-making, or will not be mobilised at all. Ensuring impartial allocation of funding and resources to the most vulnerable is central to humanitarian principles.
- Operational security and access: Security risk assessments and resource allocations require accurate, up-to-date information from local and international sources. Attacks on humanitarian workers and health facilities are already at an all-time high. Reduced access to this data will only increase the risks for aid workers and jeopardise operations.
Humanitarian crises are volatile and ambiguous, and decision-making already takes place under time pressure with insufficient information. The loss of critical data streams would not only degrade the decision-making capability of the humanitarian sector; it would also lead to significant global risks – such as potential pandemics, rising insecurity, and emerging hunger crises – being overlooked or misunderstood.
USAID understood the importance of data and invested heavily, strategically funding many of the critical humanitarian data streams.
Most individual humanitarian data streams support and reinforce others. Consequently, just as the 2008 financial crisis emerged from the failure of interdependent debt instruments, the loss of key data streams will create a chain reaction that will exacerbate future humanitarian emergencies and hinder effective response:
- Loss of monitoring capacity: Global organisations responsible for pulling, aggregating, and analysing data have had their projects shut down or scaled back. Local government bodies and civil society organisations that track critical data indicators have lost funding, and with it their reporting capacity.
- Blind spots in early warning: Without functioning monitoring networks like FEWS NET, crises are likely to go undetected until they reach catastrophic levels.
- Disrupted funding pipelines: Donors will lack the data to justify funding allocations, leading to further cuts and misallocations.
- Reduced humanitarian access and security failures: Aid groups will struggle to assess security threats, increasing operational risks to personnel and making it harder to reach vulnerable populations.
- Vulnerable people will die: Ultimately, the loss of these complex and interacting information systems will lead to unnecessary suffering and death for some of the most vulnerable people across the globe.
Humanitarian data loss is just one part of a broader information collapse threatened by the US retreat from its global leadership role, but its consequences are immediate and deadly.
The sector and its remaining principled donors are beginning to think about how to recover and rebuild. Preserving core data systems must be a priority: Without them, humanitarian response will be groping in the dark.
