ReliefWeb

Origin and development

ReliefWeb was launched in October 1996 and is administered by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The project began as the brainchild of the US Department of State, Bureau of International Organization Affairs, which had noticed during the Rwanda crisis how poorly critical operational information was shared between NGOs, UN Agencies and Governments. In 1995, the Department's Senior Policy Adviser on Disaster Management led a series of discussions at UN HQ in Geneva and New York City, as well as a conference on the project at the US Department of State in which both ReliefWeb as a product and the internet in general were touted as fresh tools for the humanitarian community. Its official launch was also the launch of the UN's first disaster website. Recognizing how critical the availability of reliable and timely information in time of humanitarian emergencies is, the United Nations General Assembly endorsed the creation of ReliefWeb and encouraged humanitarian information exchange through ReliefWeb by all governments, relief agencies and non-governmental organizations in Resolution 51/194 on 10 February 1997. The General Assembly reiterated the importance of information sharing in emergencies and of taking advantage of OCHA's emergency information services such as ReliefWeb in Resolution 57/153 on 3 March 2003.

ReliefWeb maintains offices in three different time zones to update the web site around the clock: Bangkok (Thailand), Nairobi (Kenya) and New York City (United States). Prior to 2011, the three offices were located in Geneva (Switzerland), Kobe (Japan), and New York (USA). The closing of the Geneva and Kobe offices were due to the higher costs associated with these locations.

ReliefWeb has seen steady growth in usage. In 2013, 11.85 million people visited ReliefWeb and 44,000 updates on humanitarian crises were published.

A first major re-design effort was started in 2002 and completed in 2005, which focused on implementing a more user-centric information architecture.

In April 2011, ReliefWeb launched a new web platform based on open-source technology to offer a powerful search/filter engine and delivery system.

In 2012, ReliefWeb began to expand its focus to become the one-stop shop for critical information on global crises and disasters. In November 2012, ReliefWeb revamped the home page, the "About Us" section and the Blog and introduced "Labs", a place to explore new and emerging opportunities and tools to improve information delivery to humanitarian workers.

Services

ReliefWeb disseminates humanitarian information by updating its web site around the clock. In addition, ReliefWeb reaches more than 168,500 subscribers through its e-mail subscription services, allowing those who have low bandwidth Internet connections to receive information reliably.

Information from ReliefWeb is also available via RSS feeds, Facebook and Twitter.

ReliefWeb posts maps and documents daily from over 5,000 sources from the UN system, Governments, Inter-governmental organizations, NGOs, academia and the media. In addition, a team of cartographers creates original maps focusing on humanitarian emergencies.

All documents posted on the site are classified and archived, allowing advanced searching of documents from past emergency responses. The database contains more than 500,000 maps and documents dating back to 1981.

ReliefWeb is also a major repository of humanitarian job postings and training announcements. In 2013, 2,700 organizations posted 27,000 job announcements on ReliefWeb. The job and training sources include Academic and Research Institutions, NGOs, International Organizations, Governments, Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement and the Media.

Mobile Apps

Mobile visitors to ReliefWeb have increased significantly in the last few years, with a 71% increase in 2015. To meet this growing demand and make information more accessible to users, ReliefWeb began developing four mobile apps for humanitarians in June 2016. In September 2016, ReliefWeb released the following mobile apps for iOS and Android:

As of October 2016, ReliefWeb apps are compatible with Android Kitkat (4.4) and iOS 9 and above.

ReliefWeb apps have been featured in news outlets like the The Huffington Post and Devex as well as blogs such as Appolicious, and Infodocket.com In January 2017, ReliefWeb apps reached over 10,000 downloads.

The next iteration of apps involves an Americas app as well as an improved version of the Crises app with more datasets and visualizations.

ReliefWeb API

The vast majority of ReliefWeb's content is owned by their content partners and contributed for re-publication. The first version of ReliefWeb's API was launched in 2014. The API enables access to ReliefWeb's curated and continuously updated data archive going back to the 1980s. It's now used to serve much of the ReliefWeb products as well as third party sites and apps.

Almost all content visible on the ReliefWeb site is available through its API. The API is built to fit with current API best-practices, and is intended to be friendly to developers, as well as machines. It is publicly accessible using HTTP requests and returns JSON data. ReliefWeb encourages developers to look at the API documentation to start using it. The documents have live examples, which allow users to modify the queries and see the results directly in the help page.

Jobs

ReliefWeb is the go-to platform for both job seekers and recruiters in the humanitarian sphere. The jobs section is also the most popular section of the site. In 2015, over 30,000 jobs were published from almost 1,500 humanitarian organizations, which generated 13.6 million views. In September 2016, ReliefWeb launched RW Jobs, a mobile app enabling humanitarians to search for jobs on-the-go. ReliefWeb teamed up with UNICEF in November 2016 to enable automated jobs posting, where data from UNICEF would be imported via a unique feed. This partnership is aimed to generate more reliable job search results for seekers as well as make the posting process easier for recruiters. Organizations interested in exporting job feeds are encouraged to read the specifications here.

Training

ReliefWeb's training section features training courses and workshops, academic degrees and courses, as well as lectures, conferences, and calls for papers. In 2015, over 3,700 training courses were posted on ReliefWeb, marking a 19.55% increase from the previous year. The training section is most popular with users from the United States, with over 458,000 sessions in the past 12 months. Meanwhile, Kenya hosts the highest number of training courses, with over 4,000 courses in the last year.

ReliefWeb Data Snapshots

In December 2016, ReliefWeb launched the alpha version of Data Snapshots, a tool that allows users to "see how many people access ReliefWeb content online, which countries, themes or disasters are the most read, and where users are based, their main language, their device and browser, and user attributes." Data analysts can gather historical data on content ReliefWeb has published since 1996. The snapshots work well on mobile, tablet, and desktop and data sets are also downloadable in CSV format for further analysis. ReliefWeb Data Snapshots is powered by ReliefWeb API and Google Analytics API.

Awards

ReliefWeb has won the following awards: