Promoting Responsible and Ethical Use of Data through New Publications and Tools
In the fall of 2020, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Centre for Humanitarian Data received a grant through the COVIDaction Data Challenge to increase responsible use of data by humanitarian organisations responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We are now pleased to announce the publication of new documentation and a new interactive learning path focused on supporting the safe, ethical and effective use of humanitarian data during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
Humanitarian micro-data is data on the characteristics of a population that is gathered through exercises such as household surveys, needs assessment or monitoring activities. This type of data is critical to determining the needs and perspectives of people affected by crises but it also presents unique risks. Understanding how to assess and manage the sensitivity of this data is essential to ensuring its safe, ethical and effective use in different contexts.
Organisations collecting microdata and sensitive health data as part of the international response to the COVID-19 pandemic do not always have the expertise to assess the risk of this type of data or to use methods, such as Statistical Disclosure Control, to minimise those risks. Without a support system in place to facilitate data anonymisation, organisations often tend to not share this valuable data.
In order to improve how our team and our partners manage microdata more responsibly, we partnered with COVIDaction and UK Aid to develop an introduction to disclosure risk assessment. It includes a step-by-step guide, a series of short videos and links to additional resources.
We also developed a technical tutorial to walk information management officers and other ‘advanced’ users through the process of conducting a risk assessment and applying disclosure control techniques. The goal of all of these resources is to provide an accessible on-ramp for learning more about what can be a dense subject and to build a common understanding of their application in humanitarian response.
We have published documentation on the tools and methods that we use for statistical disclosure control on HDX and data loss prevention (automated screening for sensitive information) on HDX. We will continue to update this documentation based on what we learn and will explore additional topics of interest based on demand from our community.
It is our hope that the tools and documentation we produced will support improved handling of sensitive and/or personal data during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond.
Let us know if you have questions or would like to share your own experience in managing sensitive data responsibly by contacting us at centrehumdata@un.org.
Please note that a version of this blog was previously published.
About the FCDO COVIDaction Data Challenge
The Data Challenge is part of the COVIDaction programme, funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) across key thematic areas of oxygen, data, resilient health, and local production. The programme is a partnership between the UK FCDO’s Frontier Technology Hub, Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub), UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering, along with other collaborators.
