113 MapAction volunteers also provided maps that identified dozens of locations where service organizations could initiate contact with refugees. Humanitarian Response Spreads across Europe After about 10 days in Krakow, the World Food Programme and other global relief organizations were mobilizing their own GIS teams to sustain operational awareness and collaboration. MapAction volunteers moved to other locations. Claire Byrne, a spatial data scientist with the EPA in Ireland and a MapAction volunteer for more than 10 years, traveled to Moldova. She and Chris Jarvis, who also represented MapAction, assisted the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), which were working to support the Moldovan Red Cross. “Since the start of the emergency, about 300,000 people crossed the border into Moldova,” Byrne said. “Around 98,000 had remained in Moldova, but only about 5 percent of those had stayed in reception centers. So the majority of them had gone to host families, but there wasn’t a clear, central picture of where they were and who they were with and what they needed and also what the host families needed.” Byrne and other responders worked with the IFRC to establish a needs assessment survey that would collate all information into a centralized information system that would allow Moldovan Red Cross headquarters staff to coordinate with the IFRC to serve the needs of refugees and host families. Relying on the data management capabilities of GIS software, MapAction volunteers created a map of border crossings. UNHCR released a dashboard in mid-April 2022 that continues to provide border crossing data. Finally, the world had a way to understand the scale of the exodus. Calculating the Value of Volunteer Support MapAction concluded its two-month-long support efforts on April 5, 2022. Volunteers created more than 30 digital map products that conveyed the breadth and scale of the emergency. Volunteers also assisted with data and analysis, computer programming scripts, and other forms of support for more than 25 organizations. “We had positive feedback from some of the NGOs saying, ‘It made a massive difference having that context in our planning meeting,’” Davies said. The displaced Ukrainians may never know that eight MapAction volunteers traveled far from home to mobilize on their behalf at a tragic time in Ukraine’s history. The volunteers serve for reasons other than recognition. Instead, they wanted to make a difference for tens of thousands of strangers who’d lost sight of the dream for peace that most of humanity clings to. “We’re often there at the start of something, and then we’re gone,” said Byrne, “But the analysis and visualization products we provide during that emergency phase can be invaluable in shaping the humanitarian response.” Humanitarian Assistance MapAction mapped the preconflict availability of 4G connections across the country to relate the most developed and most populated parts of the country.
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