My first job was at a summer camp in the mountains, where I worked as a camp counselor. The camp was rustic, with most of the staff and campers housed in a patchwork of canvas tents on rickety wooden platforms. When staff members would complain about something that needed fixing, we were reminded we had to do the best with what we had, and our camp director would recite this phrase again and again:
“We have done so much with so little for so long, that now we can do practically anything with nothing!”
Through the many twists and turns in my career, this phrase, honoring the resilience and ingenuity of public service, has stuck with me. I started working in youth leadership, then moved to data and analytics, followed by global health nonprofit work, and now I work at the intersection of social impact and technology.
We are entering a new era in the humanitarian and public service sectors, where funding sources are changing or disappearing at a pace that is taking many seasoned experts by surprise. The International Council of Voluntary Agencies refers to this as a Humanitarian Reset:
“This is a defining moment for the humanitarian community, as we face a profound crisis of legitimacy, morale, and funding,” Tom Fletcher, Chair of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, in a message to the IASC Principals and the humanitarian announcing a ten point plan for the Humanitarian Reset, 10 March 2025.
There are two forces pulling in opposite directions: organizations are under drastic financial pressure to cut budgets, while simultaneously reforming and retooling their workforces to become more effective and “do more with less.” Change management in large agencies and international organizations is challenging even in times of stability, and the complexities become exponential in times of great uncertainty.
In this landscape, technology companies can play a key role in establishing “tri-sector partnerships” that engage private, public, and NGO/humanitarian sectors to address these challenges:
- Supporting data collaborations: NGOs rely on data collaboration to amplify their limited resources, combine insights across organizations working on similar issues, and build the comprehensive evidence base needed to drive policy change and demonstrate real-world impact. With the push to benefit from advances in cloud computing and analytics, most large private companies have moved massive amounts of their data storage and computing capability from on-premises data centers into the cloud. This architecture has opened up a host of new opportunities for collaboration across teams within companies, and with business partners: vendors & suppliers, advertisers & content creators, investors & consumers. The data is business critical for these companies and highly valuable for public sector use cases, such as emergency preparedness, disaster management, and response. Advances in privacy-preserving technology make it possible to facilitate real-time data sharing with service agencies at a low cost, without compromising on commitments to security and privacy.
- Unlocking value in operational data: Many NGOs and agencies rely on a mix of data collection methods to understand the activities of frontline workers and beneficiaries. These data sources are vital for programmatic monitoring, impact reporting, and external communications, but they also hold untapped insights that could reveal critical patterns in service delivery and community needs. Private sector stakeholders lack insight at both ends of the supply chain: understanding issues affecting primary producers and gaining insight into last-mile service or consumer behavior. If NGOs were able to leverage privacy-preserving technologies such as synthetic data and differential privacy, they could protect their constituents’ privacy while generating datasets with rich insights for private sector stakeholders. Within a data marketplace, these datasets could generate a new revenue stream for these organizations as they seek to address the constriction in traditional humanitarian funding.
As tech companies forge new strategic partnerships aligned with the SDGs, there is great potential to leverage AI in ways that can accelerate the time-to-value for both qualitative and quantitative data. AI-powered systems are very efficient at synthesizing insights across various data sources and identifying data quality anomalies, especially as organizations struggle with data integrity and completeness from paper-based or form-based entries.
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Additionally, intelligent AI systems can make both structured data and qualitative data available within a unified chatbot interface for exploratory analysis and synthesis using natural language. At Snowflake, we call this capability “Snowflake Intelligence.” This tool displays reasoning in addition to the answer, and data analysts can even write “verified queries” that help provide the necessary guardrails that encourage trust in the outputs. Documents, reports, PDFs, and other “unstructured” data can be analyzed and synthesized alongside traditional analytics, to generate insights across multiple silos, multiple teams, or multiple partner agencies.
Doing more with less is the current reality for many organizations in the social impact and humanitarian space. Leveraging AI capabilities to solve defined problems will open up new collaborations that give more power and agency to organizations that are at the frontlines. When the contributions of all stakeholders in our ecosystems are valued, then we will be able to take concrete steps to End Data Disparity: making global datasets and AI tools more representative and more accessible.
To learn more about Snowflake’s work in this space, please visit our website and follow us on LinkedIn.
