Humanitarian Data Insights Project & HAIA

Humanitarian organizations sit on enormous quantities of data – needs assessments, program reports, evaluations – that almost never get read across, because no team has the time. The Humanitarian Data Insights Project was built to change that, using machine learning and generative AI to extract, interpret, visualize, and draw insights from that data at scale.

I originated the partnership behind it, bringing together DataKind's data-science capacity, Save the Children's humanitarian data and domain expertise, and Microsoft's technical and cloud support. On top of that foundation the team built HAIA, the Humanitarian AI Assistant – a tool that lets non-technical staff ask questions of the evidence base in plain language.

The aim throughout was decision-support, not dashboards for their own sake: getting the right insight to the person making a call about where resources go.