Showcasing Microsoft Azure as the Engine behind the Powerful Stories told by Power BI in Humanitarian Emergencies in Nigeria

Mercy Corps has integrated the use of Microsoft Power BI to visualize data coming from several data collection platforms such as Ona and CommCare. Within the last 12 months, Mercy Corps added standardised data collection forms and Microsoft Azure to that technology stack to facilitate Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) operations for rapid data cleaning and visualisation. Using Microsoft Azure as a backbone, Mercy Corps was able to create standardised data collection forms for Ona and CommCare with data visualization templates for Power BI; creating a toolkit to be deployed quickly and efficiently in humanitarian emergencies. Mercy Corps has been responding to the humanitarian crises in northeast Nigeria since 2012. Mercy Corps’ response is across the sectors of food assistance, multi-purpose cash, nutrition, protection, WaSH, and shelter all delivered through electronic vouchers. Using CommCare for data collection and case management, Mercy Corps Nigeria created linked data collection forms to track key participant outcome indicators at registration, post distribution, and endline. The same tracking methodology was applied to Mercy Corps electronic voucher system where every participant transaction is recorded. Participant data combined with transaction data gives powerful insights into some of the reason why certain outcome indicators behave the way they do. The combination of these different data sets has been made possible using Microsoft Azure. Microsoft Azure is used to engineer the different datasets together into usable datasets that can be visualised using Microsoft Power BI to produce insightful stories from the data. The entire process of data engineering and visualisation is automated after setup – making the process seamless. Mercy Corps deployed these resources in protracted crises facilitating efficient data collection, analysis and visualisation. This presentation will discuss the role of Microsoft Azure in expediting data visualisation in Microsoft Power BI through several transformation operations. The presentation will further discuss the advantages of having Microsoft Azure as part of the technology stack.