2023 SAG Award Winners

UN OCHA, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

Project Goal

In 2019, with the establishment of the international humanitarian coordination architecture in Venezuela, the UN and its partners have been scaling up the response, providing humanitarian and protection assistance in coordination with the authorities. The response has focused on saving lives and strengthening the delivery of essential services, prioritising the most vulnerable people.

To understand the most relevant humanitarian needs and guide the prioritisation of the response in terms of thematic and geographic focus and most vulnerable population groups, OCHA Venezuela has consolidated and published key information through situation reports, maps and dashboards. These have been made available to all humanitarian actors to guide policy and operational decisions.
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Business Problem Solved

As part of this initiative, OCHA Venezuela created a humanitarian operations and assistance baseline by developing and verifying Common Operational Datasets (CODs). To prepare the CODs, we created maps of each of Venezuela's states and shared these for validation with the humanitarian community. This helped us support humanitarian actors with mapping requests for field missions, natural disasters and logistical operations.

OCHA Venezuela set up ArcGIS solutions for information gathering to provide visualisation platforms for monitoring operations and to follow up on information related to COVID 19 and disasters such as flooding emergencies. OCHA Venezuela also developed several forms in Survey123 to collect information on needs and gaps in the response in the field, especially in rural communities with unreliable internet access. The platform helped us gather up to date information, including perspectives from affected communities, which subsequently informed response priorities.

Technology Implemented

ArcGIS Desktop
ArcGIS PRO
ArcGIS Enterprise
ArcGIS Dashboards
Survey123

Development Team Biography

Gabriel Dicelis
Head of Information Management Unit (2019-2022)
James Steel
Head of Information Management Unit (2022-2023)
Jonathan Torres
Information Management Assistant GIS
Alejandro Negrín
Information Management Assistant Developer