Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Using infrastructure & analytics to plan for humanitarian disasters (IMP105)

Summary

Mike George, a principal solutions architect at AWS, introduces the session on using infrastructure and analytics for planning humanitarian disaster responses.
Julia Daly from the American Red Cross and Alicia Morrison from Mercy Corps join the session to share their experiences.
The United Nations reports a significant increase in people needing humanitarian assistance, with the climate crisis and conflicts like the Ukraine crisis being major contributors.
The Red Cross and Mercy Corps have leveraged AWS services to deploy technology solutions rapidly and effectively in crisis situations.
Julia Daly discusses the challenges and solutions in implementing a new technology during the onset of a crisis, focusing on the Ukraine crisis response by the Polish Red Cross.
The Polish Red Cross utilized AWS Amazon Connect and Zendesk to create a multilingual contact center to assist Ukrainian refugees in Poland.
Alicia Morrison from Mercy Corps discusses how they use AWS services for data-centric projects to respond to complex crises, such as forecasting global food prices and developing systems dynamics models.
Mercy Corps' Global Food Crisis Hub is hosted on AWS Elastic Beanstalk and uses various AWS services to manage data and create actionable insights for decision-making.
The session concludes with a Q&A, emphasizing the importance of speed, partnerships, and data fluency in humanitarian responses.

AWS's suite of services, including serverless offerings like AWS Lambda and Amazon Connect, can significantly aid humanitarian organizations by allowing them to focus on their mission without the overhead of managing infrastructure.
The ability to rapidly deploy technology solutions in multiple languages and integrate with existing systems is crucial for effective disaster response, as demonstrated by the Polish Red Cross's use of AWS Amazon Connect and Zendesk.
Data fluency and the ability to use data to tell a story are becoming essential skills for leaders in humanitarian organizations, as data-driven decision-making can greatly enhance the effectiveness of their programs.
Partnerships, such as the one between Mercy Corps and AWS, can enable humanitarian organizations to experiment, innovate, and scale their data-centric projects without the fear of financial repercussions from failure.
Investing in fundamental data architecture and ensuring that data science is integrated into an organization's strategy are key to sustaining and scaling data science programs in the humanitarian sector.
The session highlighted the transformative impact of cloud technology and data analytics on humanitarian aid, providing a blueprint for other organizations to follow in their disaster response efforts.