SHARE Structured Humanitarian Assistance Reporting A Summary Description and Requirements for Geo-referenced Data Collection and Mapping to Support Humanitarian Assistance Operations Geographic Information Support Team (GIST) 1 20 April 2000 From the earliest phases of an emergency, certain information is critically important for a broad spectrum of actors involved in emergency-response decision-making. This information includes the locations and numbers of affected people, the extent and distribution of damage and needs, the locations of assistance projects and other resources, and factors affecting the security of the affected population and assistance workers. Amidst the chaotic and rapidly changing events of an emergency, no single organization or entity has all of this information. The more time required to collect and process it, the longer it takes to organize a response to assist the victims. Quickly and efficiently obtaining and processing this information, on the other hand, can save time and allow more efficient and effective use of resources, which in turn saves lives. Typically when a country experiences a major emergency, the government and local responders, NGOs, UN agencies and other international organizations, donors, media and affected population itself are all involved collecting and disseminating information. Assessments and situation reports may contain contradictory information or repeat information reported by other sources. One assessment report will cover nutrition, the next water and sanitation, another logistics or security, often using different methodologies and measurement indicators. Some locations and populations will be assessed repeatedly, others not at all. Much field reporting is anecdotal and in narrative form, rather than systematically organized as data. Integration of information across sectors to obtain a comprehensive picture of the situation becomes difficult if not impossible. SHARE is a systematic approach to organizing critical information so that it can be pooled, analyzed, compared, contrasted, validated, reconciled, and mapped. This allows a common frame of reference to be established, leading to more coordinated decision making, such as on which areas to prioritize, who is responsible for what, what kind of assistance is warranted, and so on. SHARE is not a new idea, but rather a distillation of an approach developed and refined over a number of years under actual field conditions by operational humanitarian assistance agencies. 1 The GIST is an informal technical team comprised of geographic information focal points from United Nations and donor agencies with disaster management and humanitarian assistance mandates.
Although the SHARE concept assumes that certain information is critical for emergency-response decisionmaking, SHARE is not content-specific. Instead, SHARE provides a simple format for ensuring that data collected can be used by someone other than the originator. The format is applicable to any thematic data that has: 1) a geo-reference, or locational information indicating where the data was collected or what geographic area it represents, 2) a time stamp indicating when the data was collected and in some cases at what frequency, and 3) meta-data, or information about the data itself, including the source of the information, who collected it, what the data values represent, what standards were used, and how the data was measured or derived. SHARE's simple, standardized geo-referencing system allows assessment and other operationally-relevant information to be pooled from multiple sources, linked to specific locations, analyzed and mapped. An example from Turkey illustrates applications of the SHARE approach. On 17 August and again on 12 November 1999, massive earthquakes struck northwestern Turkey. Together the two earthquakes killed more than 18,000 people and left over 200,00 people in need of emergency shelter. In this example, the geographic location data required by the SHARE format can be specified using common place names found on standard reference maps (figure 1). Figure 1 This type of base information can be collected and made available prior to the emergency event, as can other baseline information on demographic distributions, health, infrastructure, economic activities and land use.
Once an emergency is underway, however, field surveys become a crucial source for information stemming from the emergency. The SHARE format is designed to organize geo-referenced data on specific themes or sectors -- camps, water wells, primary health centers, damage assessments, relief activities, etc. -- into database form (table 1). Table 1: Provincial Distribution of earthquake homeless population Date: 10 March 2000, Source: Government of Turkey Province Total Population tent camps beneficiaries in tents Pre-fab cities beneficiaries in pre-fab % of Homeless people/total population per province Kocaeli 1,117,380 17 17,677 41 51,420 6% Sakarya 731,800 1 827 39 36,120 5% Yalova 163,920 2 1,861 16 19,029 13% Bolu 382,401 11 16,490 21 9,119 6% Duzce 170,619 24 49,391 19 18,657 40% TOTAL 2,626,120 55 85,291 136 134,345 8% From data collected and processed in this form, emergency-specific map products can be generated (figure2). Figure 2
The more specific the geo-reference -- and given appropriately-scaled base map data -- the more detailed the picture that can be obtained (figure 3). Figure 3 Any operationally-relevant thematic information that can be put into the SHARE format -- that is, georeferenced, sourced and dated -- can be handled in this manner. The rationale for adopting this approach is improved information sharing among emergency-response actors, leading to better coordination, increased efficiency, greater accountability and a smoother transition from the emergency to recovery phase. Data compiled and reported this way becomes a common resource for all involved in planning relief activities. Such information can be used to develop proposals and appeals, coordinate relief activities, and plan follow-on, more in-depth sector-specific assessments. The critical implementation requirements are that organizations who collect and act on this type of information agree on the critical core information content and take the necessary organizational steps for obtaining and sharing it. These steps involve cooperation among a broad array of actors on a wide variety of preparatory and operational tasks. Insofar as possible, responsibilities for the tasks required for implementing the SHARE approach should be identified and worked out in advance of emergencies according to agencies' unique mandates, capabilities, and resources. Efforts will be needed to draft scopes of work, prepare base maps and data for priority countries, establish procurement mechanisms, conduct training, acquire necessary hardware and software, design surveys, or whatever the issue might be such that all elements are in place to the greatest extent possible.
In this way, as much as 80% of the elements required to implement SHARE can be in place prior to any given emergency. If this level of preparedness can be achieved, the other 20% of the factors that cannot be accounted for ahead of time should not prevent field -based reporting and information management mechanisms from providing timely, sufficiently accurate information for a variety of critical humanitarian assistance applications. The international humanitarian assistance community is extremely diverse. Different types of organizations have different roles and capabilities. SHARE s decentralized nature reflects the decentralized reality of contemporary international emergency responses. No single organization or entity has access to or can provide all of the critical information. Each participating organization has a role to play in terms of providing some element -- baseline data, resources, sectoral expertise, field assessments, added value analysis. The resulting "shared" knowledge base will lead to a better coordinated humanitarian response. This concept paper has been developed by members of the GIST - an informal technical team of geographic information focal points working for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the UN World Food Programme, UNICEF, US Agency for International Development, and the World Bank. It does not necessarily reflect the official policy or practices of these organizations.