WASH/Center on Forced Displacement (Amira Aker)

The client is collaborating on a UNICEF-supported initiative focused on understanding and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks in humanitarian settings, with particular attention to WASH (Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene) conditions and environmental factors that influence disease spread. Currently, outbreak and WASH-related data exist across fragmented formats including narrative reports, spreadsheets, embedded tables, and Power BI dashboards. There is no centralized or standardized database, and direct access to raw datasets or APIs is limited. Much of the available data must be manually extracted from reports or dashboards, creating a significant time burden and slowing analysis. Additionally, inconsistencies in reporting over time make it difficult to build coherent trend analyses or compare outbreaks across locations. In some cases, data governance constraints (e.g., ministry-controlled reporting) further restrict direct access. As a result, although substantial data exists, it cannot yet be efficiently used to answer critical operational questions about outbreak dynamics, case and death trends, or WASH-related risk factors. ​​The primary goal of this project is to create a centralized master database that consolidates all available WASH-related and infectious disease outbreak data so the client can: • Understand what data currently exists • Identify which indicators are being tracked • Analyze cases and deaths over time • Enable future outbreak monitoring, comparison, and predictive analysis To accomplish this, students will focus on automating data extraction, cataloging indicators, and building a standardized dataset that replaces manual collection workflows and lays the foundation for future analytical work.