Karla Picado is a MERL and Strategy Support Specialist and Regional Senior Coordination Support Manager at the Latin America and Caribbean Hub of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). She supports multi-country initiatives by strengthening monitoring, evaluation, learning, and adaptive strategy processes, helping teams and partners translate data into practical decisions. Her work focuses on ensuring that information is not only collected but meaningfully used, by institutions to improve planning and by communities to strengthen their agency in managing risk and environmental change.

Her practice centers on disaster risk reduction, climate resilience, and environmental governance, with particular attention to gender equity and the inclusion of Indigenous, rural, and historically marginalized populations. Karla works at the intersection of technical and social approaches, combining participatory mapping, spatial analysis, and mixed-methods research with facilitation and partnership building. She supports teams in developing theories of change, designing indicators, and implementing learning cycles that allow projects to adapt to complex territorial realities rather than follow static plans.

Karla brings ten years of experience across cartography, data collection, and information management in international cooperation and NGOs. She began providing professional mapping and field data collection services, later working for over five years producing analytical data products to inform decision-making in regional bodies, municipalities, and public institutions across Central America, México and the Caribbean, contributing to information processes supporting humanitarian and institutional planning. Over the past years at HOT, she has coordinated regional support for projects that connect community-generated data with policy and preparedness efforts.

Alongside her professional work, Karla has volunteered in her community for more than a decade, leading citizen environmental management initiatives related to waste management, municipal public policy engagement, conservation, and regenerative agriculture in coffee-producing landscapes. Her work is guided by the belief that sustainable territorial management emerges when technical evidence, local knowledge, and collective action are integrated, and when communities participate not only as data providers, but as decision-makers.