Mapping the Humanitarian Sector Globally to Uncover Adoption of New Technologies.

Emerging technologies offer huge potential to improve humanitarian responses, but few have been widely adopted so far.

We worked on this topic with our partners RAND Europe and Athena Infonomics. The research commissioned by the UK Humanitarian Innovation Hub looked at the challenges the sector will face in the next 5–10 years and explored the potential of emerging technologies.

The project had three objectives:

1. Understand and define trends in the adoption and use of emerging technologies within the humanitarian sector.
2. Identify key emerging technologies that could strengthen humanitarian practice through an online survey.
3. Envisage a future research and innovation journey for the identified key emerging technologies.

To fulfil these goals, the study was divided into three phases. During the first scoping phase the study team conducted key informant interviews, targeted desk research, horizon scanning and web reading using the Glass.AI capability to assess the current use of emerging technologies in the humanitarian sector.

Our AI mapped the humanitarian sector globally (across countries and languages). We discovered and categorised more than 11K organisations:

2,262 core humanitarian organisations.

4,247 other humanitarian organisations.

435 tagged as think tanks, policy/research.

4,108 in the development category.

Our intelligent crawler also uncovered evidence of their use of emerging technologies and the key challenges faced by these organisations:

The study team also identified five promising technology areas for the humanitarian sector that could be further explored out to 2030:

• Advanced manufacturing systems: likely to offer humanitarians opportunities to produce resources and tools in an operating environment characterised by scarcity, the rise of simultaneous crises, and exposure to more intense and severe climate events.
• Early Warning Systems: likely to support preparedness and response efforts across the humanitarian sector while multifactorial crises are likely to arise.
• Camp monitoring systems: likely to support efforts not only to address security risks but also support planning and management activities of sites or the health and wellbeing of displaced populations.
• Coordination platforms: likely to enhance data collection and information-sharing across various humanitarian stakeholders for the development of timely and bespoke crisis response.
• Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs): support ongoing efforts to comply with increased data privacy and data protection requirements in a humanitarian operating environment in which data collection will remain necessary.

You can read the full study here.

If you’re interested in discovering or tracking companies globally, you can contact us at info@glass.ai.