Harnessing Microsoft Azure Cloud Data Engineering Capabilities to Standardize and Aggregate Data Across Multiple Humanitarian Contexts and Programs to Gain Insight into Global Trends and Inform Agency Strategy to Improve Humanitarian Food Security Programming Globally

Mercy Corps recently launched an agency level Organizational Outcome Measurement (OOM) Initiative to better determine what types of program interventions may more effectively address food insecurity in different contexts. Mercy Corps has begun implementing the use of cloud data engineering in Microsoft Azure to standardize and aggregate data across multiple disparate humanitarian programs that previously did not have the same data standards in order to conduct aggregated analysis of portfolio level trends across different regions and countries to explore how Mercy Corps humanitarian programs improved food security conditions for persons affected by crisis. This global aggregated analysis of multiple Mercy Corps humanitarian programs has been used to tell a more compelling narrative across the agency on the agency’s accomplishments and shortcomings as well as providing insight on where, for whom, and during what programmatic periods food security outcomes improved most. This has led to Mercy Corps to more closely explore and evaluate programmatic approaches that appear to be most effective in different regions, countries, and humanitarian contexts. This presentation will cover the initial early findings of this analysis and how Mercy Corps has used this initial analysis to begin strategic discussions in order to revamp its global approach/strategy to improving food security.