Geospatial Volunteer
Your ultimate goal will always be to bring greater insights to humanitarian crises, leading to better outcomes for the people affected. In practice this could be anything from jumping on a plane at short notice to help respond to an emergency; delivering training in GIS and information management to partners around the globe; supporting UN training activities; developing tools or dashboards for partners; helping enhance the organisations data preparedness; researching new needs and opportunities; helping develop new areas of thinking around areas like anticipatory action or AI; or helping expand the kind of geospatial offer we provide.
While there are remote working opportunities as part of this role, there is an expectation that after completing mandatory training you will be able to travel overseas either deploying to emergencies, or travelling to deliver training or other partner visits.
There are lots of varied opportunities for our geospatial volunteers, here is a sample from 2023:
- In February you could have been one of 15 team members who supported the Türkiye and Syria earthquake responses. This varied between a few days of remote support up to 2 weeks in the field in Türkiye, working alongside UN disaster assessment and coordination team members to guide management of the response. (see more)
- You could have responded to one of the many crises less in the headlines like flooding in Democratic Republic of Congo, Kosovo or Peru.
- Maybe you had less time over a longer period and were able to work remotely on a 3 month project for UNICEF managing the response to the growing Cholera outbreak in Malawi.
- Perhaps you would have joined a training mission to deliver humanitarian GIS training in Tanzania, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Senegal, Nepal, Bangladesh or one of 4 Caribbean islands.
- You may have jetted of to Australia to support the International Search and Rescue Advisory Groups simulation training event
- If something more research focused interested you, you could have joined the group exploring Gender in the context of data for humanitarian decision making, or how we better develop products to support the work of the Protection cluster
- You may have joined a scoping mission for part of our growing work on anticipatory action, visiting places like Zimbabwe or Madagascar
- Maybe you had some smaller pockets of time available and helped with ad hoc requests by organisations like the World Bank, or Danish Refugee Council.
- And the list goes on…
Role specific criteria
The criteria listed here are in addition to the general criteria outlined for all volunteers
Essential
- Professional GIS experience
- Experienced ArcGIS Pro or QGIS user (ideally both)
Desirable
- Programming experience using python (other programming languages will be a plus e.g. R, JavaScript, C#) and version control systems (MapAction uses GitHub)
- Practical experience with one or more of these: ArcGIS Online, PowerBI, Kobo, GeoServer, PostgreSQL / PostGIS, OpenLayers, Leaflet, MapBox, QGIS Server, MapServer, Google Earth Engine
- Graphic design/visualisation skills
- Language skills, especially fluency in French, Spanish, Russian or Arabic