OCHA: Geospatial Data Cleaning and Standardization Support for OCHA Afghanistan – Kabul

Organization Mission

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) mobilizes and coordinates humanitarian action for all in need, in partnership with national and international actors.
OCHA is the part of the United Nations Secretariat responsible for bringing together humanitarian actors to ensure a coherent response to emergencies. OCHA also ensures there is a framework within which each actor can contribute to the overall response effort.

Context

OCHA Afghanistan is obtaining updated administrative boundary and village-level geospatial datasets from the DfA Afghanistan’s ARAZI office. These datasets require technical review, cleaning, standardization, and alignment with existing OCHA geographic standards before operational use.

The online volunteers will support OCHA Afghanistan’s Information Management Unit in processing and preparing these shapefiles to ensure compatibility with humanitarian mapping products, dashboards, and operational datasets. The updated datasets are required to support the 2027 population estimation exercise as well as upcoming Whole of Afghanistan (WoA) assessments, both of which will provide critical inputs for initiating the Humanitarian Programme Cycle (HPC) process.

Key Responsibilities

Under the supervision of the OCHA Afghanistan Information Management Unit, the Online Volunteer (s) will support the following tasks:

• Review and clean district and village-level shapefiles obtained from ARAZI.
• Standardize geographic attributes and naming conventions.
• Align and adjust datasets to match international boundaries currently used by OCHA.
• Integrate and standardize OCHA P-codes within the datasets.
• Validate spatial and attribute consistency of the shapefiles.
• Prepare finalized GIS datasets for operational and mapping purposes.

The final deliverables are expected to include cleaned and standardized shapefiles ready for integration into OCHA Afghanistan information management products and systems. Final deliverables include:

• Cleaned and standardized administrative boundary and village shapefiles.
• Updated attribute tables with standardized naming conventions and OCHA P-codes.
• GIS datasets aligned with OCHA operational geographic standards.

The datasets include countrywide administrative boundaries (province, district and sub-district levels where available) as well as village-level geographic data. While the exact volume may vary, the data consists of several shapefiles and associated attribute tables requiring review, standardization, alignment with existing OCHA geographic standards and integration of OCHA P-codes.

The workload will be evenly distributed between 4 Online Volunteers based on the volunteers’ profiles and experience.

Required Skills and Experience

• Background in GIS, geography, cartography, geoinformatics, information management, or related fields is desirable.
• Volunteers should ideally have access to their own GIS software, such as QGIS (preferred, as it is open-source) or ArcGIS.
• Experience working with GIS and geospatial datasets is required.
• Proficiency in ArcGIS, QGIS, or similar GIS software.
• Experience handling shapefiles and administrative boundary datasets.
• Knowledge of spatial data cleaning and attribute standardization.
• Attention to detail and ability to work independently within a short timeframe.