A decade of building the 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. I watched flood waters rise in displacement camps where no one had mapped the risk zones. I watched cash transfers reach the wrong households because targeting data lived in disconnected silos. I watched satellite imagery that could have predicted a drought sit unused while responders planned with outdated reports.

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, mapping physical and social vulnerability indicators for proactive emergency preparedness. 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 carried that conviction into Maiduguri — the epicenter of the Boko Haram crisis and one of the largest humanitarian operations in Africa. As Information Manager for the Shelter/NFI and CCCM Clusters with IOM, I built the cluster’s information management system from scratch — but I also saw that data dashboards alone weren’t enough. Displacement camps flooded every rainy season, and no one had the spatial risk analysis to anticipate it. So I built data-driven flood contingency plans and GIS vulnerability maps that changed how clusters prepared for seasonal hazards. That was the beginning of what I now think of as humanitarian systems architecture — where data analytics, geospatial analysis, and disaster risk reduction have to work together.

In Cox’s Bazar, the world’s largest refugee operation, I saw the same fragmentation in a different form. Cash-based interventions were growing rapidly, but the information systems behind them couldn’t keep pace — beneficiary targeting was disconnected from payment processing, and post-distribution monitoring was an afterthought. I designed the Cash-Based Intervention Information Management System (CBIIMS) for IOM — a five-stage workflow from beneficiary profiling through payment automation — while supervising the GIS unit producing maps for 29 camps and coordinating communication-with-communities data across 1,100+ radio listening groups. It was here I understood that geospatial tools, cash transfer systems, and humanitarian reporting aren’t separate disciplines — they’re parts of one integrated challenge.

In Ethiopia, those threads deepened further. I developed the UNICEF Information Management Strategy, deployed geospatial tools mapping drought response coverage and community vulnerabilities across conflict-affected regions, and served as data consultant for the Ethiopia Cash Working Group — leading the first-ever inter-agency post-distribution monitoring meta-analysis, designing financial services provider assessments across Tigray, and building the operational dashboards that tracked $3.2M in CERF-funded cash allocations reaching 185,000 beneficiaries.

Afghanistan became the culmination of all four pillars. Leading a $9.7M USAID-funded program, I led and managed the development and deployment of ReportHub for multi-cluster humanitarian reporting across 200+ organizations, the Humanitarian Spatial Data Center (HSDC) for multi-hazard geospatial analysis integrating earthquake, flood, and drought data, while developing data, evidence generation, and information management strategies for UN agencies and interagency coordination groups — including climate early warning platforms, anticipatory action frameworks, and Cash & Voucher Working Group analytics — all while navigating one of the world’s most complex operating environments under Taliban governance.

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