Running a humanitarian GIS training at the British Red Cross
In 2021, British Red Cross set up an Information Management Register, a pool of personnel trained in information management who are able to provide surge support for humanitarian responses. As part of running this register, we’ve been providing training for members that is aligned to the IFRC’s IM surge support roles.
When we asked people on the IM Register what their learning priorities were, nearly all of them included GIS and map-making in their wishlists. To respond to this need, in January 2023, we ran a training course on GIS using the IFRC Surge standard open-source software QGIS for members of the BRC’s IM Register and Global Surge team.
The course was designed for people with little or no experience of GIS and was run over four weeks. The field of GIS is huge, so we deliberately narrowed the scope by focusing on the data, tools and analysis that are most relevant to humanitarian surge work.
BRC uses ESRI’s ArcGIS software internally, but when working with the global SIMS* network we default to using open-source software that doesn’t require licenses to use. This is so that projects can be shared and jointly worked on by Surge people whose home organisations have different IT infrastructures, and these products can then be handed over to the host National Society to take forward and develop, once Surge is completed.
We split the training into four sessions, looking at:
1. Introduction to GIS
2. Working with QGIS
3. Spatial analysis
4. Making maps (Print composer)
The aim was to get people from total beginner to intermediate level. Rather than try and cover too much we put a lot of emphasis on how to look for help when you get stuck or want to try something new. (A combination of the QGIS docs and GIS Stack Exchange usually gets you there…!)
There are lots of free QGIS trainings available online, and some good paid ones too. At first, we considered paying for a facilitator to run the training, but we had the good fortune that a new member of the Global Surge team had run QGIS trainings in the past and had materials that could be adapted.
One reason we didn’t point people to trainings already available online is that we wanted to make sure we could teach people about the things they are most likely to encounter in requests when supporting surge deployments. There are specific types of requests that come up often and rely on specific types of data, for example OpenStreetMap data and data from the Humanitarian Data Exchange.
By developing our own materials, we could make the examples and processes covered as relevant to the group as possible. For example, we covered how to import fonts and icons that are used in SIMS maps, the IFRC’s colour palette and also focused on working with data for countries in BRC’s priority partners list.
In total, we delivered 36 hours of training and also had optional spaces on Zoom and Slack for wider discussion. We delivered the trainings live to give participants as much chance as possible to ask questions and receive direct support, and after each session, participants were given homework exercises to practice the skills they’d learnt that week. In the final session, we devoted half the time to an extended exercise where participants had to use all the skills they had learned so far to fulfil a mapping request.
Weekly drop-in sessions on Zoom gave people a chance to ask questions they’d thought of outside the training sessions and were also useful for us as organisers, as they allowed us to better understand which concepts and tools people found difficult and we could adapt the training materials in response. Some of the things people found difficult were the differences between file formats, importing OpenStreetMap data and working with projections.
Colleagues in the German and Dutch Red Cross societies have also recently run GIS trainings and we’ve been talking to them about how we can consolidate the resources we’ve made and make them available to other people in the RCRC Movement.
Now that this cohort has completed the training, they’re better prepared for deployments in Surge IM roles (in particular the Mapping and Visualisation Officer role). Since we completed the training, we’ve received positive feedback from people using their new skills in deployments and in their day-to-day work.
Given the appetite for this GIS training, we’re looking at ways to help register members continue to learn and improve their GIS skills. This might include seminar-style, one-off trainings on more in-depth technical topics, or a broader look at options for online maps (which was outside the scope of this training). We’re also looking into building a library of styles and templates we can share to speed up mapping workflows.
* SIMS = Surge Information Management Support
