This article is part of the Rethinking Humanitarian Action with a Geographic Approach blog series.
If we accept that the future of humanitarian action must be more locally and nationally owned, more geographic in its understanding of risk, and more connected through shared geospatial infrastructures, the next question is obvious: Where do we start?
One practical entry point? Strengthening national disaster risk management frameworks by building up the geospatial capacities of national disaster management authorities (NDMAs). Beyond technology adoption, this is about enabling national and local ownership of the narrative by empowering affected populations and their governments to define and oversee their own disaster risk management processes.
The National Disaster Risk Management Geospatial Enablement Program
A good place to start restructuring the humanitarian sector is to focus on strengthening national disaster risk management frameworks. We do this by building up the geospatial capacities of NDMAs. This approach allows for national and local ownership of the narrative by empowering affected populations and their governments to define and oversee their disaster risk management (DRM) processes.
By integrating local knowledge with national frameworks, DRM strategies can be more accurately tailored to the specific needs and contexts of the communities they serve and connect to broader national development goals.
In 2024, a concerted effort between Esri, MapAction, iMMAP Inc., WeRobotics, and Flying Labs led to the design of the National Disaster Risk Management Geospatial Enablement Program (NDRM GEP). This initiative aims to transform the humanitarian and disaster risk management landscape through the innovative use of geospatial standards, methods, and tools.
It’s by no means meant as an exclusive club but rather the seed of a “coalition of the willing” that we hope can contribute to a new humanitarian approach. The NDRM GEP is founded on three pillars: developing an NDMA geospatial strategic vision, lowering barriers to accessing geospatial technologies, and fostering regional communities of practice and knowledge exchange. It’s one concrete attempt to put the ideas from the previous articles into practice.
Pillar 1: Developing NDMA Geospatial Vision and Strategy
What’s the primary reason GIS technology implementation projects fail? They lack a long-term vision and strategy that clearly outlines how GIS technology should support organizational objectives and processes.
The “S” in GIS technology—the system—is too often neglected. GIS technology goes far beyond geographic information tools. It’s now an enterprise-wide system that can support every aspect of an organization’s operation.
The first pillar of the NDRM GEP therefore focuses on enhancing national disaster management authorities’ geospatial vision and strategies. The focus isn’t so much on technical training on specific GIS technology tools—it’s more on the ability of NDMA managers to strategically leverage geographic information for their organizational objectives.
The emphasis? Strategic use of geographic information to support decision-making processes, enhance program planning and implementation, and improve overall organizational efficiency.
Pillar 2: Lowering Barriers of Access
The second pillar of the NDRM GEP is dedicated to lowering barriers to accessing geospatial technologies for resource-constrained NDMAs. Esri contributes to this through a new licensing structure that ensures cost isn’t a barrier to implementing lifesaving geospatial infrastructures for DRM.
Esri’s Geospatial Enablement Program supports a range of government services, including disaster management in resource-constrained contexts. By making these technologies sustainably accessible, the program empowers NDMAs to build robust geospatial infrastructures that enhance their disaster preparedness, response, and recovery capabilities.
The Geospatial Enablement Program is coupled with a technical GIS training program. We designed it to equip NDMA personnel with the skills needed to effectively use geospatial technologies for disaster risk management. These trainings cover a broad range of topics, from basic GIS technology operations to advanced spatial analysis techniques. This ensures that NDMA teams are well-prepared to harness the full potential of geospatial data in their DRM efforts.
Pillar 3: Fostering Regional Communities of Practice and Knowledge Exchange
The final pillar of the NDRM GEP focuses on building and nurturing regional communities of practice and knowledge exchange. These efforts ensure continuous improvement of context-specific know-how and support coordination across neighboring countries affected by the same disasters.
We achieve this through the organization of regular regional conferences dedicated to the use of geospatial technologies in DRM. These conferences serve as a platform for all DRM stakeholders—local, national, regional, and international—to actively contribute to the ideation and development of regional geospatial infrastructures for DRM. These are early steps. But they point toward the kind of distributed, connected mesh that the humanitarian sector will increasingly need.
We Have the Building Blocks
To sum it all up, then: DRM is a geographic challenge. Local and national ownership will be essential components of a new emerging humanitarian model. Strengthening national DRM frameworks with geospatial strategies will provide a significant boost to this new model.
We have the building blocks: an existing geospatial infrastructure composed of many online resource nodes, affordable GIS technology and related geospatial tools, and distributed knowledge-exchange networks.
What’s left? Pulling these together into oobleck—a humanitarian and DRM system that’s fluid yet capable of firming up where and when shocks occur. This three-part series has laid out the case for why this transformation matters, explained the geographic foundation it must rest on, and shown one practical pathway forward.
The shake-up the humanitarian sector needs won’t come from a single funding decision or policy shift—it’ll come from building these meshes: local to national to global, connecting knowledge and capacity at every level, and organized around the geographic reality of risk.
We’re just getting started.
If you’d like to contribute to this thought process or to the practical work of building these geospatial meshes, please be in touch.
