Humanitarian Data Exchange

The Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDX) is an open data platform run by the Centre for Humanitarian Data, part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). It brings together crisis and development data from hundreds of contributing organisations, including UN agencies, governments, NGOs and research bodies. By the end of 2025 the platform held around 20,000 datasets shared by over 200 active partners, covering population and displacement figures, food security, conflict events, administrative boundaries, health, and response logistics across more than 20 humanitarian operations.

The catalogue runs on CKAN, so you can browse and search through the web portal or pull records programmatically through the HDX and CKAN APIs, and there is a maintained Python library for bulk and scripted access. Individual datasets download directly, most commonly as CSV, Excel, GeoJSON or shapefiles, and many carry HXL hashtags that make columns machine readable across files. Coverage is organised by location and by crisis, which makes it straightforward to assemble a focused corpus for one country or emergency.

For RAG and AI work, HDX is best treated as a source of structured, geographic and numeric data rather than prose. The reliable pattern is to convert the series and tables you need into short factual statements before embedding them, or to keep them in a database the model can query, rather than indexing raw tables. It suits assistants for humanitarian response, situation reporting, and development research that need authoritative, current figures to ground their answers.

The licence position is the main caveat: there is no single platform licence, because each publisher chooses their own. Most datasets are openly licensed under CC BY, but you will also find CC BY-IGO (intergovernmental attribution), CC BY-SA (share-alike), ODC-ODbL and an Other category that is sometimes limited to humanitarian use. Check the licence on each dataset page before any commercial reuse. For broader country statistics, pair it with World Bank Open Data.