The need for accurate and up-to-date information to support emergency management has long been recognized.

Despite this recognition, information infrastructure related capacity building efforts, especially right after a crisis, remains fragmented in countries, resulting very often in:

  • Fragmented and weak information systems,
  • Duplicated and unaligned efforts,
  • Incomplete, out-of-date and of limited quality/accuracy datasets.

One of the major consequences of the above is the lack of proper information and data when a disaster strikes a country. A lot of time is therefore lost trying to get whatever is available, especially geospatial data, to support response and recovery.

In addition to that, once the crisis is over, not much of the efforts, nor the data which has been collected, get institutionalized leading to the same gaps in terms of data and technical capacity at the time of the next crisis to come.

The objective of the Strengthening Information Infrastructure for Emergency Management (SIIEM) project is to define and implement a new conceptual framework aiming at reducing fragmentation among capacity building efforts to improve information management, geographic information in particular, in support to emergency management and disaster risk reduction in countries.

As it stands, the SIIEM framework builds on the following principles:

  1. Countries should be in a position to generate and maintain the core layers of information necessary to support disaster risk reduction and emergency management ;
  2. The international community (sensu lato) should support countries in reaching principle 1;
  3. An open data policy should be used as much as possible. When this is not possible, agreements allowing access to this data should be signed between the government and all the actors involved in risk reduction and emergency management (including response, recovery and reconstruction) activities;
  4. Data collected during the crisis by the international community should be integrated back into the government information system.

SIIEM aims at working with relevant stakeholder to support governments in the implementation of these principles.