The digital records of humanitarian crises—demographic surveys, food security data, logs of attacks on hospitals—are disappearing as international funding collapses. The abolition of USAID, cuts to Sweden’s SIDA, the disbandment of DFID, and reductions in Official Development Assistance have gutted the archives of UN agencies, international NGOs, and faith-based organisations. No one knows the full scale of what is being lost. This programme builds a global partnership to count the archives and essential records at risk, create a system to report and rescue them, and develop an ethical triage process for deciding what to save first. It also aims to produce a medium-term strategy for sustaining humanitarian data infrastructure. If it succeeds, future researchers and humanitarian planners will still be able to access the evidence they need—for example, to track food security trends or understand patterns of violence against healthcare workers. Without this work, critical datasets will vanish silently, undermining both operational decisions and historical accountability.
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This programme evaluates a critical shortfall in the digital infrastructure supporting humanitarian and global health research. Recent political shifts amplify sharp declines in international funding, such as the abolition of USAID, cuts to Sweden's SIDA, the disbandment of DFID, and decreases in international aid and Official Development Assistance (ODA). These cuts have a disproportionate impact on the generation and preservation of data in vital areas such as demographic health surveys, records of attacks on healthcare and education, food security indicators, and most health-related datasets. This erosion of resources undermines archival capabilities of key international bodies like UN agencies (e.g., UNHCR), international NGOs, and faith-based organizations (e.g., Catholic Relief Services), as well as the historical records of USAID itself. Whilst this data erasure will impact dramatically future research and operational decision-making, we currently lack the means to quantify the scale of these losses (both ongoing and imminent) to humanitarian aid records. This programme aims to address this crisis by consolidating global partnerships focused on archives and essential records (AER) to establish a census of the AER at risk, develop a mechanism for their report and rescue, an ethical approach to triage, and a medium-term strategy to address the issue.
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