Hope in the Hardest Places: How Medair Uses Data to Rebuild Communities and Save Lives

I’m lucky to call Switzerland home. Living on the shores of Lake Geneva, with the French Alps just across the water, the views are breathtaking. Surrounded by so much beauty, it’s easy to forget that human suffering is everywhere — and on a scale unimaginable to those of us in safe and stable environments.

Conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East grab the most headlines, yet other crises in Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo barely register. Droughts, floods, food insecurity, economic shocks, collapsing health systems — the ground feels like it’s constantly shifting beneath our feet.

While humanitarian needs are rising sharply, funding is falling far short.

As Tom Fletcher, the UN humanitarian coordinator, said: “If we stop providing care today, [people] will die.”

Work that’s simple, but never easy

We live with that urgency every day at Medair. Wherever there is conflict, disaster, displacement, or despair, we’re there. We’re on the ground in the hardest-to-reach places, providing healthcare, delivering life-saving medicine, feeding malnourished children, and supporting communities where suffering is most severe.

The quality of our work and our people defines us. From doctors and nurses to builders and data experts, we’re united by one purpose: to bring life, dignity, and hope to people who have lost everything.

“When we have the right data at the right time in the right place, we can respond faster and more effectively It can be the difference between life and death. In that way, Qlik saves lives.”

I often say our work is simple, but it’s never easy. Technology is a critical part of our toolkit. When we have the right data at the right time in the right place, we can respond faster and more effectively. It can be the difference between life and death.

In that way, Qlik saves lives.

Data that drives the right action

I first encountered Qlik in 2013, when I was the country director in the Philippines. Typhoon Haiyan had just hit, and the scale of destruction was staggering. More than a million people lost everything.

I arrived in the middle of the chaos with nothing but a SIM card and a laptop. We had to collect data on scraps of paper, bring it back to the office, and manually enter it into spreadsheets. We were trying to solve urgent issues like determining where to dig latrines, but the information was buried in messy spreadsheets.

During that time, I heard that a group of people from this company called Qlik were visiting so they could better understand our work. In all honesty, we were struggling. The data was scattered, what we collected had inconsistent formatting, and how were we to extract all of that data anyway? One day, a Qlik team member bumped me off my chair, installed the platform on my laptop, and showed me how to extract useful insights from our limited data set.

That was a lightbulb moment. We achieved incredible results during our time in the Philippines: building over 1,600 homes and repairing another 1,200 in just 18 months. Even with a small, unstructured dataset, Qlik showed me with the right data, we could make things happen.

Revealing the unexpected

That was the beginning of a major shift for Medair. We began using Qlik for needs assessments so we could gain an accurate account of what people on the ground needed — not what we assumed they needed. This distinction became clear during the Rohingya refugee crisis. Nearly a million exhausted and traumatised displaced people were crossing the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh, and we expected them to request the basics: food, water, and shelter.

Qlik surfaced something completely unexpected.

The number one request? Solar panels. People needed to charge their phones because they were the only link to missing loved ones. Thanks to Qlik, we saw this insight early and could respond quickly, with relevance and dignity.

“Good data isn’t about pretty graphs. It’s about finding truths and taking action based on those facts.”

That’s what it means to do data differently. Good data isn’t about pretty graphs. It’s about finding truths and taking action based on those facts.

Bring a bold data vision to life

When I became IT director, I got the opportunity to uncover insights like that at scale. After years of making do with what we had, we developed a bold vision: to be ready to respond using accurate, secure, and complete data available anywhere, anytime, at the click of a button. This vision wasn’t Medair’s reality, but it became our North Star.

Assembling the right people would be key. Our existing IT team was great with infrastructure, but we needed data specialists. Our search took us to Lebanon.

At the height of the Syrian refugee crisis, our Lebanon team had developed an app that mapped informal settlements using GIS. They fed that data into Qlik, creating a centralised, comprehensive view of the scenario on the ground. The tool was so effective that the UN and other humanitarian organisations across Lebanon adopted it.

We clearly had incredible engineering and BI talent in Lebanon, so we brought them into our global support office and gave them a new challenge: to build a global nutrition app that would provide a clear, actionable picture of malnutrition that we could use globally to respond more effectively.

They delivered, and it’s hard to overstate the app’s impact.

I remember being in Kenya, where someone proudly showed me their new dashboard. Before they had the global nutrition app, a team member would spend eight days every two weeks manually compiling data. Now, they could do the same job in seconds. It blew me away. Instead of spending days building reports, that team member could spend more time directly serving people.

Qlik Talend® Cloud delivers smarter integrations

The app became a model for something much bigger. We began working towards unifying all our data streams: nutrition, health, water and sanitation, shelter, finance, human resources, logistics, and our supply chain. But good data needs good systems, and we didn’t have them.

Donor funding often bypasses technology in favour of frontline needs, so we needed to find a smarter way to modernise. We adopted a “best of breed” strategy, selecting the best solutions in their class and prioritising partners who wanted to support our work instead of charging huge license fees.

Despite having fantastic tools, none of these systems spoke to each other. We adopted Boomi for integration, but its limitations eventually caught up to us. Then, at a Qlik Luminary event, I encountered IT consulting company cimt, who introduced us to Qlik Talend® Cloud as a more comprehensive integration platform.

With CIMT’s support, we’re now migrating to Qlik Talend Cloud to:

• Synchronise data between our systems

• Cleanse and validate data

• Apply business rules

• Increase availability via modern APIs

With high-quality data and a single source of truth, we’ll create products and dashboards that will remain relevant into the next decade.

From reactive to predictive response

We expect to fully deploy Qlik Talend Cloud by October 2025, which will give us scalability, simplicity, and security. We want to empower our teams with self-service reporting so they can pull the insights they need when they need them. We also want to move into advanced analytics, such as predictive reporting, which helps us recognise patterns and make smarter, faster decisions. Ideally, we’ll be able to anticipate crises and act sooner to save more lives.

We also need to improve data literacy across the organisation, which is a big challenge. In the areas of deep crisis where we work, education systems have often collapsed, and many people joining our teams have low digital literacy skills. That’s another reason why Qlik is so useful. It’s intuitive and approachable, so we can quickly show people what data means and how to use it safely, securely, and effectively.

“When we see clearly, we can act boldly. And that’s what the partnership with Qlik is all about.”

Regardless of whether a crisis stems from an armed conflict or a natural disaster, the challenge is the same. We need clarity, and data gives us that. When we see clearly, we can act boldly. And that’s what the partnership with Qlik is all about.

Large donors rarely fund technology, but Medair believes technology can exponentially grow their impact. Their technology fund will secure the future of their IT team and keep their data program moving well into the future. If you or your organization would like to contribute, click here to learn how.