The mosaic effect: the revelation risks of combining humanitarian and social protection data
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Jill Capotosto
As the world faces more frequent and intense crises -driven in part by climate change, political and social conflict,
disease outbreak -humanitarians are working to protect vulnerable people beyond the initial shock of each new emergency. While coordinating efforts between humanitarian programmes and social protection systems may help support individual and community resilience, it also creates the risk of new threats to data protection. In this post, ahead of the ICRC Digitharium s Digital Dilemmas virtual debate on social protection systems, Jill Capotosto from the Yale Jackson Institute for Global Affairs reviews one of the key data protection concerns of combining or mosaicking humanitarian and social protection data systems: the risk of revealing new information, or data revelation . Particularly in fragile environments, the unintentional revelation
[1] Using the same population estimates as the 2018/19 Nigeria Living Standards Survey, this means that more than 80 million Nigerians were living in poverty before the pandemic, even without data from Borno state where the survey could not be fully carried out.
[2] However, projections suggest that the combined effects of the COVID-19 crisis and natural population growth could leave 100 million people living below the national poverty line by 2022, rationalizing the government’s ambitious poverty reduction aspirations. Since Nigeria is home to the largest number of poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa the world’s poorest region lifting Nigerians out of poverty is vital for “moving the needle” and reducing global poverty.