Building resilience, improving humanitarian action

HERA was established in 2020 as a non profit organization to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic. Our teams started the Covid-19 Data Project to support governments, non governmental organizations and research institutes evaluate, anticipate and respond to the spread of Coronavirus on the African continent.

The story of HERA

  • HERA’s First Project

    March, 2020

    As the Coronavirus pandemic spreads in Africa, the Covid-19 Data Project starts. Our teams build a solid methodology and look for reliable sources to update our future datasets.

  • Partnership with OCHA

    April, 2020

    Our teams are looking for a place to share the datasets. We contact UNOCHA to offer our support. Two weeks later, our datasets can be found on Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX).

  • The need for disaggregated data

    May, 2020

    We focus our work on finding disaggregated data, creating a subnational database of Covid-19 in West Africa. The dataset on Nigeria becomes the most downloaded file on our page.

  • New datasets

    August, 2020

    We enrich our datasets by providing city level data to learn more about the Covid-19 spread at the local level in west African countries.

Challenges of today and tomorrow

Overall, HERA believes that the humanitarian ecosystem has become obsolete. NGOs and local communities face multiple challenges that prevent humanitarian assistance from being efficient, rapid and appropriate.

  • During emergencies, well-functioning and efficient coordination is needed between all humanitarian actors.
  • International actors have been criticized for fostering a dependency with local communities and creating a vicious circle regarding humanitarian assistance.
  • Bureaucracy and administrative work have caused multiple difficulties to rapid access to aid funds & local actors are not benefiting enough from the funding.
  • Humanitarian aid is fragilized by new threats, such as terrorists and armed groups, which are targeting communities and aid workers leading to the disengagement of humanitarian actors.
  • Protracted crises are becoming more and more important, conflicts last longer and communities are being impacted in the long-term.
  • Forgotten crises and communities remain, we need to identify the most vulnerable populations, intervene in specific contexts and encourage local authorities to take the lead.

Our values

Transparency

We favor transparency in our interventions with every stakeholder we encounter. We believe that this will help individuals and partners gain trust in our actions and will open the humanitarian system to the public. We want to make our actions as transparent as possible while giving the opportunity for everyone to be fully informed of our actions.

Inclusion

We strongly believe that communities are the ones that should elaborate on the humanitarian programs which they are concerned with. We want to build a more inclusive and cohesive humanitarian system, which will give local actors the opportunity to become resilient through crises.

Agility

We encourage the development of initiatives in the digital and technological world, as long as it is supporting humanitarian action. We focus our work on providing reliable data about humanitarian crises to support NGOs in their response. We see agility as an opportunity to act as a flexible actor and make a change in that current frigid humanitarian system.

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