About Humanity Centered Data: Mission and Methodology
Humanitarian Data Should Be Free, Accessible, and Actionable
Every year, forced displacement uproots tens of millions of people from their homes. Behind every statistic is a family separated, a community fractured, a life disrupted. Yet the data that tells these stories, the numbers that could drive better policy, smarter funding, and faster response, remains scattered across dozens of portals, buried in PDFs, and locked behind technical barriers that most people cannot navigate.
Humanity Centered Data exists to change that. We believe that humanitarian data is a public good. When a researcher in Nairobi, a journalist in Berlin, or an NGO worker in Amman needs to understand displacement patterns, conflict trends, or development indicators, they should not have to spend weeks assembling spreadsheets from eight different agencies. They should be able to find verified, contextualized, and comparable data in one place, for free, without creating an account or navigating bureaucratic access requests.
This is not just a convenience. It is a matter of equity. The communities most affected by displacement are often the least equipped to access the data about their own situations. Policy decisions that affect millions are made on the basis of incomplete information because the complete picture requires expertise and time that most organizations simply do not have. We build the infrastructure that closes that gap: aggregating, verifying, synthesizing, and presenting humanitarian data so that anyone with an internet connection can use it to make informed decisions, hold institutions accountable, and tell the stories that need to be told.
Our Approach
We aggregate, cross-reference, and synthesize data from the world's most authoritative humanitarian and development agencies, transforming fragmented datasets into a unified analytical layer.
UNHCR
UN Refugee Agency
Refugee and IDP population statistics, camp data, and asylum trends from the primary global authority on forced displacement.
OCHA
Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
Humanitarian needs overviews, funding requirements, and coordination data for active crises worldwide.
IOM
International Organization for Migration
Displacement tracking matrices, migration flow data, and return monitoring across conflict and disaster zones.
ACLED
Armed Conflict Location & Event Data
Real-time conflict event tracking, including battles, protests, violence against civilians, and strategic developments.
HDX
Humanitarian Data Exchange
Open humanitarian datasets covering population figures, geographic boundaries, and multi-sector assessments.
ReliefWeb
OCHA ReliefWeb
Situation reports, press releases, and analytical briefs from hundreds of humanitarian organizations on the ground.
IDMC
Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
Global internal displacement figures, disaster displacement data, and country-level displacement profiles.
WFP
World Food Programme
Food security assessments, vulnerability mapping, and nutrition data for populations affected by crisis.
UNICEF
UN Children's Fund
Child protection data, education disruption metrics, and health indicators for children in crisis-affected areas.
By pulling from these nine core sources, plus supplementary data from the World Bank, WHO, OHCHR, and national statistical offices, we construct a picture of each crisis that no single agency can provide alone. Our platform connects displacement figures with conflict event data, overlays humanitarian needs on socioeconomic indicators, and benchmarks every country against its regional and income-group peers.
Who We Serve
Our platform is built for anyone who needs humanitarian data to do their work, but we designed it with five audiences in mind.
Researchers and Academics
Dissertation writers, policy institutes, and think tanks who need citation-ready, source-attributed data for longitudinal studies, regression analyses, and peer-reviewed publications. Every data point links back to its original source.
Journalists and Media
Investigative reporters and editors who need verified statistics for fact-checking, data-driven storytelling, and deadline-driven reporting. Our daily AI-synthesized briefings distill hundreds of reports into actionable summaries.
NGO and Humanitarian Workers
Field staff, program managers, and coordinators who need camp-level needs assessments, conflict data for security planning, and cross-agency situational awareness without logging into five separate portals.
Policy Makers and Government Officials
National and international policy advisors who need peer benchmarking, UPR compliance tracking, refugee hosting burden analysis, and crisis early warning data pre-formatted for briefing documents.
The General Public
Citizens, students, educators, and anyone seeking to understand the scale and patterns of global displacement. No technical expertise required. No jargon. Just clear, honest data presented in ways that inform and empower.
Our Methodology
Trustworthy data requires a rigorous process. Here is how we collect, verify, and maintain the information on this platform.
Collection
We pull data programmatically from official APIs maintained by UNHCR, OCHA, ACLED, HDX, ReliefWeb, and the World Bank. Automated pipelines fetch updated figures on a scheduled basis, ensuring that our data reflects the latest available releases from each agency. Where APIs are unavailable, we parse structured datasets published on official portals and verify them against secondary sources.
Verification and Cross-Referencing
No single source tells the complete story. We cross-reference displacement figures from UNHCR against IOM tracking matrices and IDMC estimates. Conflict event counts from ACLED are contextualized with OCHA situation reports. When sources disagree, we note the discrepancy and attribute each figure to its origin, letting users evaluate the evidence themselves rather than presenting a false consensus.
Synthesis and Contextualization
Raw numbers are not enough. Our platform synthesizes data into cross-country comparisons, historical trend analyses, and thematic overviews. AI-assisted analysis generates daily briefings that connect events across countries and domains, identifying patterns that only become visible when data is viewed in aggregate, such as how displacement velocity in one crisis compares to historical precedents.
Updates and Freshness Monitoring
We operate a data freshness monitoring system that tracks when each source was last updated and flags datasets that may be stale. Source update frequencies vary: ACLED publishes weekly, UNHCR monthly, and World Bank annually. Our platform displays the last-updated date for every data point and alerts our team when expected updates are overdue, ensuring users always know how current the information is.
Our Values
Everything we build is guided by four principles that we refuse to compromise on.
Human Dignity
The people represented in our data are not abstractions. They are individuals with families, histories, and futures. We present data in ways that preserve their dignity, avoid sensationalism, and center their experiences rather than reducing them to numbers. Language matters. Framing matters. We are deliberate about both.
Data Ethics
We do not collect personal data from displaced populations. We aggregate institutional-level statistics that are already public. We never publish information that could identify or endanger individuals. When using AI to synthesize reports, we enforce strict quality controls to prevent hallucination, misattribution, or the amplification of unverified claims.
Transparency
Every data point on this platform is attributed to its source. Every methodology is documented. When our data has limitations, we say so. When sources conflict, we show both figures. We do not present curated narratives as objective truth. We present evidence with full provenance and let users draw their own conclusions.
Accessibility
Humanitarian data should not require a PhD to understand or a subscription to access. Our platform is free, open, and designed for screen readers, keyboard navigation, and low-bandwidth connections. We write in plain language, provide glossaries for technical terms, and build interfaces that work on mobile devices in the field, not just desktop monitors in offices.
The Team Behind HCD
Humanity Centered Data is maintained by The HCD Research Team, a small group of data engineers, humanitarian analysts, and designers who believe that better data infrastructure leads to better outcomes for displaced populations. Our backgrounds span UN agencies, academic research institutions, investigative journalism, and open-source software development.
We are not a traditional NGO. We do not operate in the field or deliver direct services. What we do is build the connective tissue between the organizations that collect data and the people who need it. We sit at the intersection of data engineering and humanitarian practice, writing code that pulls from nine agency APIs, building interfaces that make complex datasets navigable, and publishing the cross-country analysis that takes weeks to produce manually.
Our team operates with a commitment to staying small, focused, and independent. We do not accept funding that would compromise our editorial independence or create conflicts of interest with the agencies whose data we aggregate. The platform is sustained by a combination of voluntary contributions and advertising revenue, allowing us to keep all data and tools free for everyone.