2024 - 2026 Cycle
Cover Photo: Soldiers from the Somali National Army stand watch as women wait at an IDP camp near the town of Beletweyne, Somalia / Tobin Jones
Compounding social, political, and environmental risks are leading to a surge of people in need of humanitarian aid with increasingly limited resources. A record number of people are living in displacement and in areas of difficult access. Gathering information in these areas can be challenging, which is where HOT works with local and global mapping communities to fill these gaps through coordination and improved data crowdsourcing.
Understanding the geographic context of conflict affected areas, including where people are, how to access them, and the state of local infrastructure is critical to plan adequate aid to meet basic human needs. Through this program, HOT collaborates with expert partners to link crowdsourced and participatory mapping methodologies to humanitarian data users. Our context specific projects address spatial data gaps and promote the responsible use of open data and methodologies in conflict-affected areas, areas of displacement, and host communities.
HOT holds itself and its partners to highly responsible data standards guided by HOT’s data principles. All work done through this program complies with HOT’s data protection framework.
Open data for better planning and aid delivery in crisis situations, such as conflict zones and displaced communities.
- Baseline infrastructure location data
- Analysis ready data
- Damage estimate datasets comparison
- Clear and usable infrastructure damage data
- Accurate humanitarian needs assessments
- Remote crowdsourced methods to locate new displacements
- Participatory tools for coordinated data collection in camps
- Streamline humanitarian data sharing to OSM
- Data insights and access to key datasets
- HDX data grids
- IM & GIS Collaboration
Claudio de los Reyes Teran
11 July, 2025
Claudio de los Reyes Teran Raiza Pilatowsky Gruner Jessica Pechmann
27 May, 2025
Jessica Pechmann
18 March, 2025
For 13 years, HOT has worked in collaboration with local communities to put the places they live on the world map. Our global community of 600K+ volunteers map buildings, roads, and key infrastructure on OpenStreetMap (OSM), a free open source map of the world. Our four Regional Hubs work in 94 countries, connecting with local organizations, government agencies, international networks, and others to ground truth map data and get locally created maps into the hands of decision-makers. Community knowledge, needs, and solutions are at the center, with HOT facilitating the end-to-end process of identifying missing data, mapping, analyzing data, and using that data effectively.
HOT's work is global in scale and contributes to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our Monitoring and Evaluation framework is constantly evolving to ensure tangible and measurable impact. Check out our core impact areas and learn more about where we're making a difference.
