The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) is where operational humanitarian data gets shared. Managed by UN OCHA, it aggregates datasets from UN agencies, governments, NGOs, and research institutions into a single platform organized by country and crisis — making it the central open data hub for anyone working on conflict, displacement, disaster response, public health, or food security in a spatial context.
Unlike most data sources on this page, which are produced by a single organization with consistent schemas, HDX is a marketplace: the data comes from dozens of providers, varies in format and quality, and ranges from polished population grids to rapidly assembled field datasets uploaded during active emergencies.
That variability is both HDX's strength and its challenge. It means you can find datasets that don't exist anywhere else — displacement tracking from IOM, conflict event data from ACLED, market food prices from WFP, Common Operational Datasets that serve as the agreed-upon boundary files during a crisis — but you need to evaluate each dataset's provenance, update frequency, and licensing individually.
For GIS analysts supporting humanitarian operations, HDX is the first place to check for country-specific spatial data: administrative boundaries, health facility locations, settlement layers, population estimates, and hazard maps. The platform's crisis-specific pages curate relevant datasets together, which is especially valuable during rapid-onset emergencies when assembling a situational picture quickly matters more than waiting for perfectly standardized data.
