Connecting the ‘first mile’ through humanitarian action

Humanitarians often talk about reaching the ‘last mile.’ Yet it’s often the first mile that is most important to us and those that need our help.

Real estate services like Zillow calculate WalkScores to show how accessible neighbourhoods are to local services, and insurance companies often calculate the distance to the closest fire station. This is how we should look at humanitarian services.

Local responders are always first on the scene during an emergency. And, as we saw in the response to the devastating earthquake in Türkiye earlier this year, local responders and community members are often the only ones on the scene for the first few days.

Local communities are often the first link in the chain of response — and never the last. They are also at the heart of all successful efforts to build resilience and reduce disaster risks.

In this context, equipping local volunteers and humanitarian organizations with the right data and digital tools can make a life-saving difference to people at risk around the world.

Efforts are already underway to make better use of location data and to measure humanitarian needs from the perspective of the people who are affected, not just from the supply side where services are made available.

In health, the Professional Health Services Mapping project, which the IFRC is helping to lead, and studies like the Global maps of travel time to healthcare facilities are ensuring that community health facilities around the world are on the map and that humanitarians have the right tools to, for example, measure the distance from vulnerable communities to the nearest health facility or other service centres.

These types of studies can also help provide relevant information to include in OpenStreetMap, Google Maps and other multi-purpose data sets, ensuring that the data is available for a wide variety of both humanitarian and daily needs. This information is vital to understanding community access to healthcare, for example.

Data from the Global maps of travel time to healthcare facilities study:

This is too many miles — especially for people in remote locations, in marginalised communities or without any access to transport.

Community-based services can bridge these gaps, but the world needs many more of them. And the volunteers and staff need to be trained, equipped and connected – as do the communities themselves.

The IFRC is involved in several ground-breaking collaborations with this goal in mind. These include:

These digital tools will put more power in the hands of local communities to find and access humanitarian services and support — no matter their location, the time of day they are available or their preferred language.

With its network of more than 16 million community-based volunteers and more than 197,000 Red Cross and Red Crescent local units across 192 countries, the IFRC has the largest humanitarian footprint in the world.

But we still have some distance to travel if these life-saving services are to be placed within reach of every person who needs them. And to do this, we will need partners for the journey — not for the last mile, but for the first.