Reference: USAID Releases Open Data and Maps on Famine in the Horn of Africa
From the Development Seed Blog:
This afternoon at Mashable’s Social Good Summit, USAID launched a new open data and information sharing initiative around the famine in the Horn of Africa. With this, USAID aims to take the lead in providing data to help in the response – and wants to release as much data as they can publicly so it can be easily used in relief efforts.
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We’ve been working with USAID to help them effectively open their data and create new and innovative maps that help with information sharing. By leveraging data from the USAID-funded Famine Early Warning System (FEWS NET), USAID has released a new set of maps that highlight and share information about the famine in the Horn of Africa. This map set shares and visualizes information ranging from the population in crisis to parter organizations providing relief efforts on the ground to the crisis’ impact on local food supplies and prices. These maps are all freely available from USAID’s TileStream account, and they’re encouraging other organizations to use them to communicate about the famine.
SAID has made all of the data powering these maps as well as other related data sets open on data.gov and usaid.gov/data. This is the agency’s first time releasing both data visualizations and the data that powers them in a completely open manner.
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Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, Maps, Resources

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.