Mercy Corps - UCB DisasterHacks
Humanitarian Cash Programming

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We are glad you're here! We're looking forward to this DisasterHacks event! Please note this site will continue to be updated until after the Kick Off event on April 24th.

Problem Statement

Mercy Corps uses Cash and Voucher assistance throughout our programming to ensure our beneficiaries can purchase food and other critical commodities for their household each month. To plan effectively for cash assistance programs, Mercy Corps must track trends in market prices of key commodities and have a firm understanding of cash transfer values (exchange rates) as well as cost of living. This information is found spread across numerous resources including APIs, websites, and social media. The information must be gathered, assessed, and the value of the Minimum Expenditure Basket (MEB) must be calculated each month. This can result in dozens of hours of time spent downloading, cleaning, aggregating, and visualizing data sources. Some data sources are incomplete, necessitating our teams to integrate data sources as well.

Mercy Corps seeks a solution that helps us streamline access to key data sources and calculate the cost of the MEB. The solution should enable streamlined access to APIs or data scrapers, integration of multiple data sources, and calculation of SMEB costs for sub-national administrative areas in each country based on the available data. You may not be able to calculate the MEB or SMEB for all areas at all times, the MEB definition may seem "out of date", and some countries may have the price of the MEB already calculated and available as its own data source. These are all well known issues in the humanitarian data space. At this time, is more important to find a method for users to update and change the MEB definitions in your solution than it is to find the "correct" MEB definition.

For this project, you should focus on developing MEB cost calculators for the Mercy Corps countries of East Africa including: Kenya, Dem. Rep. of the Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan
Mercy Corps Countries

Some data sources will be global and we invite you to go beyond this specified geography if it fits your solution to go "wide". Alternatively, you could seek out additional resources for the countries we've specified to show how your solution could go "deep" for one or more particular contexts.

The solution could take the form of an application or a programming package. The Mercy Corps Image Processing package is an example of a solution that enables teams to access imagery, water, and flood data sources, calculate key indicators, visualize them, and export data for further analysis. You could choose to extend this package or build an analogous one. You can consider including data visualizations and mapping, the ability to identify and/or fill data gaps, the ability to view multiple sources and identify conflicting information for the same market/commodity, calculating the consumer price index in addition to (or in some cases instead of) the (S)MEB, or you could choose to build features we have not thought of!

Why do we need this? Some organizations and websites provide this information in easily digestible, visualized information sources. But often times, we want to go deeper with our analysis, so we need to be able to export the information. In addition, some data sources - while seemingly reliable - may not be the preferred data source for that country. Having flexible mechanisms to conduct data collection, integration, and analysis is our most preferred scenario.

Definitions

* Mercy Corps Countries in East Africa  

* (Survival) Minimum Expenditure Basket