It is a commonplace that there is an abundance of information available about humanitarian situations; the key issue is not how much information we have at our disposal but how we present it in the most user-friendly manner, so that our audience can tap into it quickly and easily.

The selection filters and advanced search on ReliefWeb have improved over the years, allowing users to quickly narrow down their searches. But topic pages have also helped to better frame specific issues, whether they are:

Regional crises that warrant increased attention, including large movements of refugees and migrants:

• Refugees/Migrants in Europe
• Southern and Eastern Africa
• Sahel (Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali)
• Lake Chad Basin Crisis
• Refugees/Migrants in Asia

Or

important thematic topics such as:

As an outcome of the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit, the Grand Bargain aims at improving the efficiency of humanitarian action. Among the commitments made were increasing the transparency in financing and support to local responders.

Publish What You Fund, the global campaign for aid and development transparency, was tasked with researching the information needs of humanitarian actors, specifically local and national responders. This work is being conducted in partnership with Ground Truth Solutions and Development Initiatives, and funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The topic is certainly of great interest to ReliefWeb, which, 23 years after its launch, is often cited as the “go-to” information platform for the humanitarian community.

While ReliefWeb was first created as an information-sharing platform to support well-informed decision-making in humanitarian crises, over the years the variety and comprehensiveness of its content have also made it a go-to resource for the academic community. Not only the humanitarians of tomorrow, but also many students and scholars in development and international relations are tapping into the tens of thousands of items collected and processed over the past 23 years.

We spoke to several academics to glean insight into what they deem particularly useful for their studies and research:

→ Background information

Many of you (more than 150,000 subscribers at the last count!) receive various updates from Reliefweb, including OCHA situation reports, disaster updates, jobs, training and other country-specific information. To make your user experience much better, we have revamped our inbox updates to include the following features:

Les récents visiteurs du site mobile de ReliefWeb auront remarqué un nouvel outil... Un sélecteur de langue est maintenant disponible dans le coin supérieur droit du site.

Cliquez dessus, et vous verrez trois options après l'anglais : espagnol, français et russe.

Il faut préciser que cet outil ne permet pas de traduire le contenu du site (la traduction de quelque 650 000 rapports de l'anglais vers trois autres langues mériterait une annonce beaucoup plus importante… par ailleurs c'est aux fournisseurs de contenu original de le faire). Les documents, offres d'emploi et de formation apparaissent toujours dans leur langue d'origine, mais l'interface du site a été traduite, ce qui devrait faciliter l'accès aux 10% du contenu qui sont en français et aux 7% qui sont en espagnol.