What is the situation in South Sudan? How severe is the crisis in Nigeria? How many people are internally displaced in Afghanistan? The new ACAPS CrisisAlert app aims to provide the answers easily.

Established in 2010, ACAPS is a non-profit project, helping the humanitarian sector to better understand the world’s crises and is supported by Action against Hunger International, the Norwegian Refugee Council and Save the Children International. While the mission of ACAPS has remained the same, the way to achieve it has changed massively over the years. The new app crystallises this new approach.

When ACAPS started, exactly at the same time as the 2010 Haiti earthquake, it sent experts in crisis contexts to better understand the situation and the priority needs. Over the years analysis of existing information has taken over the data collection. “What makes the difference is not collecting data but making sense of it. You can have hundreds of reports, but if you don’t know how to interpret them, it’s useless and time consuming,” said Lars Peter Nissen, ACAPS Director.

Back in 2010 when the earthquake ravaged Haiti, ACAPS sent two experts to conduct field assessment. “During two weeks we conducted more than 200 questionnaires in affected areas. We released our final report two month after the earthquake. This report did not help donors or emergency managers to take any decision. It was way too late to inform them,” said Patrice Chataigner, ACAPS Senior Analyst.

Today ACAPS has a team of 12 analysts monitoring, analysing, ranking and updating developments on a daily basis on more than 40 humanitarian crises. With the new app, ACAPS wants to take another step towards enabling humanitarians to make more informed, quicker decisions and better address the world’s disasters.

This picture was taken in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a few days after the devastating earthquake that occurred in 2010 by Moises Saman, Magnum Photos member: “As a photojournalist I am interested in searching for the positive commonalities in human spirit, to expose those intimate moments among people that remind us of dignity and hope in the face of conflict.”

He signs the book "Discordia", a four-year body of work in the Middle East during the "Arab Spring". The work featured in Discordia has received numerous awards, including the 2015 Guggenheim Grant for Photography, the Eugene Smith Memorial Fund (2014) and the World Press Photo (2014).