Day 8 - The Humanitarian Data Exchange

November 12, 2024 · 2 min read

The Humanitarian Data Exchange

The challenge for day 8 is to find data from the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) and figure out how to map it, showing anything from food prices to population or disaster response. Although these are all important topics, I didn't quite know where to start with this challenge and it didn't spark an interest in me. It's not that I don't believe in the importance of mapping for social good, but digging through HDX was quite the hurdle for me. I spent a good hour or two just perusing through the various data available, downloading CSVs left and right and digging through to try and understand how I would convert the data in those files to something visual on a map. I eventually stumbled across a food prices dataset from Zimbabwe with a date range from 2010 to 2024. Filtering out all of the columns I wasn't interested in and focusing solely on rice prices, I pulled data from 2018 and 2024 to compare the two years, averaging the price of rice per kg over each year for the entire country. The results were staggering, I couldn't believe how much the price had gone up in just 6 years. In 2018, the average price of rice per kilogram was only $0.0003 USD and eventually went up to $0.08 USD in 2024. That's an insane increase of 26566%, I'm having a hard time even believing the data. I wasn't aware of the hyperinflation going on in Zimbabwe. Below is nothing more than a map of the border of Zimbabwe, also pulled from HDX. I probably could have done something more interactive here but I need to move onto the next day.