Humanitarian Data Stewardship

Humanitarian organisations collect overlapping data on the same beneficiaries. The reasons span incompatible systems, overlapping mandates, and a justified caution around data sharing, and result in duplication of effort, failure to reach all beneficiaries, and a lack of consistent overview of how many people are being served at any given moment by a humanitarian response.

Since 2024 we've been working with the Collaborative Cash Delivery Network on solutions and approaches to shared ownership and responsibility over beneficiary data, especially focused on the data sharing problem between humanitarian organisations. Our Ukraine pilot with the Ukraine Response Consortium is where most of our solutions started to take shape. Through in-country workshops with information managers and field workers, remote design and research, we defined and piloted governance systems and technical solutions to th interoperability challenge, culminating in the Data Stewardship toolkit and stack approach that encompasses governance, technology, data standards, and legal frameworks necessary to establish a collaborative ownership and responsibility over shared data.

In 2025 we co-founded the Data Stewardship Collective with humanitarian.info and Humanitarian Data Solutions, supported by CCD. DataStew is a group of humanitarian data practitioners working to promote, strengthen, and support data stewardship across contexts and responses. We are currently supporting, at various levels of effort, responses in Ukraine, OPT, and Myanmar.