The Power of Participatory Data in Community Resilience

“If you’re not on a map, you simply don’t exist in many senses. Having tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people just appear as a dot with no level of detail beyond that continues this marginalization of people all over the world who are living in the shadows.” Tyler Radford, OpenStreetMap

The notion of democratizing data – using crowd sourced information to better identify and address issues on a local or global scale – is very close to the heart of the Global Resilience Partnership. It is one of the most critical ingredients in accurately identifying issues (even in real time), working out how to fix them indigenously, and then communicating and sharing progress and outcomes.

The Amplify challenge, supported through the Global Resilience Partnership, is a great example of creatively bringing communities of thought leaders, community members, and experts together online to find solutions for a host of pressing issues. AtmaGo in Indonesia, for example, built a localized social network to help urban poor communities build resilience to shocks from climate change and economic uncertainty. With the mobile app, individuals in a given community can better share knowledge and resources with their neighbors. And their approach is already proving to be successful – during the devastating flooding in Jakarta in February 2015, people were able to share tips and real-time updates on shelters and services.

We are committed to not only advocating for better data sharing and integration among the different sectors working for resilience solutions, but in recognition of the value of evidence-based decision making, one of the Global Resilience Partnership’s programmatic streams coming online soon will focus exclusively on using technology to build resilience. We will invest in developing new analytics tools that help us do that smarter and faster. Our aim, through our recently launched Water Window Challenge, is that we’ll be able to surface some great ideas that use data and technology to support resilience solutions to flooding in the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and South and South East Asia.

Luca Alinovi
Executive Director
Global Resilience Partnership

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