A decade of building the data systems behind humanitarian response

There’s a particular kind of urgency that drives you when you’ve seen what happens when decisions are made without evidence. Early in my career, I watched communities suffer not because help wasn’t available, but because the information to direct that help simply didn’t exist — or existed in fragments scattered across spreadsheets that no one could piece together in time.

That experience planted a question I’ve been trying to answer ever since: What does it take to put the right information in front of the right people before a crisis becomes a catastrophe?

That question took me to Durham University on a Commonwealth Scholarship, where I studied risk and environmental hazards at the Institute of Hazard, Risk and Resilience. My research on social vulnerability indices wasn’t just academic — it was built in partnership with the Newcastle City Council Emergency Planning Unit, creating tools they could actually use. That experience taught me something that has shaped every role since: the most sophisticated analysis in the world is worthless if it doesn’t reach the people who need it, in a format they can act on.

From Durham, I found my way to Maiduguri — the epicenter of the Boko Haram crisis and one of the largest humanitarian operations in Africa. As the Information Manager for the Shelter/NFI and CCCM Clusters with IOM, I built the cluster’s information management system from scratch. That was the beginning of what I now think of as humanitarian systems architecture.

The journey since has taken me across six countries, through some of the world’s most complex emergencies — from Cox’s Bazar to Geneva to Addis Ababa to Kabul — each role pushing the boundaries of what information management can achieve in crisis contexts.

I’m not done building. The humanitarian sector is at an inflection point where AI, geospatial intelligence, and real-time data can fundamentally change how we respond to crises — if we build the right systems and put them in the right hands. That’s what I do.