A humanitarian training course titled “The Use of Geoinformation in Humanitarian Action” ended last Friday, 28 January 2022. The course was hosted by the IFHV as part of a joint humanitarian training program of the IFHV and VENRO, supported by the German Federal Foreign Office.

 

During the two-weeks online training course, around 20 participants from all over the world acquired basic knowledge on the most important features, sources and fields of application for georeferenced data in humanitarian action. Guided by Karen Dall from the German Red Crossas well as Alec Schulze-Eckel and Melanie Eckle-Elze from the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology (HeiGIT), the participants were also enabled to put their new theoretical knowledge into practice through hands-on exercises from humanitarian contexts with the analysis software QGIS – from risk-mapping for floods in Uganda to the coverage of healthcare facilities in Perú.

 

In the final evaluation round, participants valued the training as a chance to get a better understanding of humanitarian (risk) mapping and geodata more broadly. Participants and trainers alike stressed that this kind of “geodata literacy” holds great potential to improve the translation of the huge amount of (geo)data that many organizations have collected for example through their monitoring and evaluation practices into useful analyses for humanitarian programming.

 

The course was advertised under the umbrella of the academy for humanitarian action (aha) and part of a broader certification program on “Anticipatory Humanitarian Action”. In March, a follow-up course on “Current Approaches and GIS Methods to Support Anticipatory Humanitarian Action” will amplify and complement the content of the recent training. It is open to everyone with basic knowledge on geodata and/or QGIS. Further details and information on the registration procedure will be communicated shortly via the aha newsletter.