Announcing a New Minerva Initiative Grant to Study Complex Emergencies in Asia

We’re thrilled to announce the U.S. Department of Defense’s Minerva Initiative has awarded a $1.9 million grant to the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law. As a Strauss Center research partner, Development Gateway will support the exploration of complex emergencies in Asia by creating a series of new dashboards to support high-level geospatial analysis and modeling. We hope to learn about the particular dynamics of these emergencies, and how we might build government capacity to respond to and prevent them.

We, as part of the AidData partnership, engaged with the Strauss Center in 2009 to help build an innovative set of maps and dashboards to visualize the effects of aid on climate change and armed conflict. Together with the Strauss Center, we unveiled the Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program maps in 2011, showcasing a climate dashboard that enables high-powered GIS analytics of spatial indices in a user-friendly interface. CCAPs was a recipient of Esri’s coveted “Special Achievements in GIS Award” in 2013. We look forward to building on this work as we embark on this new research project.

AidData and the Strauss Center also collaborated on the first ever multi-donor geocoding exercise, in partnership with the Malawi Ministry of Finance. We are excited to continue our partnership with the Strauss Center, continuing to push new boundaries in our understanding of aid, conflict, and complex emergencies.

You can read the Strauss Center’s press release, as well as learn more about them and the Minerva Initiative. Stay tuned for updates!