The Common Humanitarian Dataset (CHD) is a specification defining several hundred key categories of humanitarian data, based on existing data groupings used by the humanitarian community. While creating the first version of the CHD, the HDX team reviewed existing systems and established data schemas for humanitarian response data across the programme cycle.


The CHD includes data from the IASC-defined Common Operational Datasets, the types of data typically found in appeals and humanitarian reports, data from OCHA’s Financial Tracking Service, and common administrative data such as surge deployments and the number of vacancies for humanitarian posts. We discovered that there was no existing high-level definition or guideline for what constitutes useful country context and pre-crisis data; the data we have included in the CHD is a step in that direction.

The CHD is divided into five sections, each of which contains indicators grouped around various sub-themes.

Sample of Variables and Indicators
Country context
Country description
Country name, location, time zone, geography, language, religion, ethnic groups
Pre-crisis indicators
Economic status, crisis vulnerability, health, food security, nutritional status
Total population, GDP per capita, under-5 mortality, life expectancy, literacy rates, access to sanitation, access to electricity
Operational indicators
Needs assessments, response activities, gaps, monitoring
Crisis name, disaster type, affected people, people in need, houses damaged, displaced people, who is responding with what
Funding indicators
Humanitarian financing
Appeal status, CERF, common humanitarian fund, emergency response fund
Administration indicators
Support to the crisis
Budget, number of staff, surge deployments, vacancies, information products issued

We will introduce the CHD in more detail over the initial phase of the project. We welcome your feedback about the indicators we’ve included, and suggestions about what we might have left out.

The CHD is the foundation of the HDX Quality Assurance Framework.