GDA AID Fragility, Conflict & Security

Thematic overview

Fragility, conflict, and violence (FCV) is a critical development challenge that threatens efforts to end extreme poverty, affecting both low- and middle-income countries.  Conflicts drive 80% of all humanitarian needs and, by 2030, up to two third of the world’s extreme poor could live in FCV settings.  Preventing and mitigating FCV challenges is key to making progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to the international community’s broader efforts to promote peace and prosperity. Violent conflict has spiked dramatically since 2010, and the fragility landscape is becoming more complex with the effects of global trends such as climate change, rising inequality, demographic change, poor governance and illicit financial flows, which are often interconnected and transcending borders. The world is also currently facing the largest forced displacement crisis ever recorded, and the COVID-19 pandemic adds even greater stress, threatening to reverse decades of advancements in poverty reduction and development. Indeed, the World Bank (WB) estimates show that an additional 23 million people were pushed into poverty in 2020 in countries affected by FCV. Through the Fragility, Conflict and Security activity, the GDA programme engages with IFI partners to co-design tools providing timely and precise information in support of ongoing initiatives aiming at reducing poverty, helping economic development and promoting environmental safety in States affected by FCV. As part of this GDA AID activity, products and services are developed following a multidisciplinary approach, combining geospatial data and data from heterogeneous sources, to feed customised analyses and reports that improve decision making processes.

Fragility, Conflict & Security Themes

The Use Cases have been designed considering four major priorities identified together with the IFIs:

• Improved assessment of fragility risk exposure and analysis of coping capacity,
• Effective characterisation of dynamics and needs in FCV contexts,
• Enhanced generation of information services for planning, monitoring and management of post-conflict reconstruction activities
• Better assessment of natural resources and assets

In line with the above themes, the project will develop EO based geo-information in the following 8 operational scenarios:

1. Planning and monitoring of development interventions in areas with limited access Leveraging EO for the ongoing remote supervision of development projects in remote, fragile and conflict-affected areas on a global basis. Showcasing what kinds of development projects and under which conditions can reliably be supervised via EO. Effective connection of ground-level and EO data to effectively close crucial information gaps and feed into project-level decision making processes. Supporting the assessment of socio-economic status of localities in view of development interventions to reduce isolation and improve conditions of remote communities.
2. Development of FCV analytics Exploiting EO data to support better understanding of instability factors, onset of crisis, socioeconomic trends related to FCV dynamics to feed into decision-making processes on programmatic and project level. These can include (a) tracking forced displacement dynamics over time; (b) monitoring the development of refugee camps; (c) damage and needs assessments in conflict zones; (d) early warning on large-scale conflict events; (d) analysis of compound risks.
3. Early warning decision support in fragile states at pre-operational level Developing and delivering critical information services and strengthening crisis preparedness for community resilience. Identification of risk-informed plans for community public works and information that assist the leveraging of layered financing. Provision of geo-intelligence for food security operations, specifically targeting response applications, by supporting provision of timely risk information and indicators, based on EO combined with other data sets on drought, political violence, displacement, migration, to allow effective integration of conflict information into the modelling of famine forecast.
4. Assess environmental effects of conflicts and availability of resources in view of contingency planning and support to reconstruction Monitoring land and water pollution, and assess ecosystem status, including habitats acting as reservoirs or propagation vectors for infectious disease or insect plagues.
5. Monitoring of illegal or not sustainable resources exploitation and trafficking Including illegal extraction of timber, minerals, fish, forestry crimes, wildlife poaching, illegal extraction of oil, and associated trafficking activities,  practices connected to depletion of resources.
6. Analysis of dependence on limited critical infrastructures and ecosystem services, and risk of exposure to emerging threats
7. Access information to support planning, monitoring and management of post-conflict reconstruction activities Supporting accurate delineation of infrastructure damage and linked reconstruction priorities and support implementation of independent information systems to guarantee all citizens in a country of their property rights. Supporting monitoring existing conflicts or crisis using a multi-source approach spanning social media crawling, political and contextual publicly available information, mobile derived analytics, open source intelligence to EO processing.
8. Monitoring of the evolution of structures and urban extent Better understanding migration flows as well as economic development and increasing knowledge about current status and evolution since the beginning of a crisis in fragile context. Supporting economic impact assessment of a crisis.

In terms of organisation, the project team has identified three major sets of EO based information and related main thematic sector experts (in charge of the Use Case management), and EO product manager (in charge to the product development):

• Assets, population and exposure
• Agriculture and food security
• Situational awareness e-flyer and brochure for more information:

     

  Supported IFIs projects

  • Cameroon Transport Sector Development at the World Bank
    • Use case: Security risks monitoring of infrastructures under construction/maintenance to prevent/enhance security at human level.
  • Nigeria Rural Access & Mobility Project-Phase at the World Bank
    • Use case: Impact monitoring of roads rehabilitation projects to identify anomalies affecting infrastructures, the evolution of the environment before and after the roads rehabilitation/construction + monitoring for approximately 3 years after the closure of the project.
  • Pakistan Community Support Project at the World Bank
    • Use Case: Dashboard for monitoring small-scale infrastructure works ongoing activities and citizen needs
  • Assessing the Nexus of Land Administration and Resilience to Disaster and Climate Risk in Ukraine at the World Bank
    • Use Case: Land tenure indicators to assess land grabbing
  • Cox’s Bazar Analytical Program at the World Bank
    • Use Case: Land use land cover (LULC) change analysis to understand the effects of displaced population on local economy in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh: welfare growth of households and businesses in refugee camps to support budget planning for improvements.
  • Emergency Locust Response Project in Eastern Africa at the World Bank
    • Use Case: Monitoring of the flow of desert locusts through an enhanced inter-regional platform with the employment of EO-based data (i.e. soil texture, soil moisture, biomass, etc.) to support sustainable locust management, agriculture and food security
  • Enhancing Differentiated Approaches for Fragile and Conflict-Affected Situations at the Asian Development Bank
    • Use Case: Monitoring migration flows from North Afghanistan to South Tajikistan to consistently allocate financial resources
    • Use Case: Assessing and enhancing the CPA indicators through use of EO-based indicators, for better classifying FCAS/SIDS countries and correlating them (Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, Bhutan, Cambodia, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal and Tajikistan).
  • Building Rural Entrepreneurial Capacities Programme in Colombia’s departments Antioquia, Nariño and Cauca at IFAD
    • Use Case:Assessing the impact of post-conflict situations using GIS/EO-based activities to enhance impact evaluation by providing end-users with key drivers/variables of conflict and the impact of policies within Colombian areas.
  • Sustainable Natural Resources and Livelihoods Programme in Sudan (Sennar Region) at IFAD
    • Use Case:Monitoring livestock migration to detect terrain disruption as well as crop encroachment within livestock corridors. Livestock routes are a key intervention in IFAD’s Sudan project portfolio to reduce conflicts between sedentary farmers and herders over water and pasture, which often occur during the migration of pastoral livestock between dry and wet season grazing areas.

  Consortium members