Systemic underfunding of digital infrastructure and data sovereignty gaps undermine global humanitarian tracking systems
Original framing: “Tech gaps and budget cuts threaten global efforts to track and help the vulnerable” — UN News
The current crisis echoes colonial-era data systems, where censuses and surveillance were tools of control rather than care, as seen in British India’s famine tracking or apartheid South Africa’s population registers. Post-WWII humanitarianism institutionalized these extractive practices, with UN agencies adopting Cold War-era data models that prioritized state sovereignty over community needs. Structural adjustment programs in the 1980s-90s systematically dismantled public welfare infrastructure, creating the conditions for today’s digital dependency.
The crisis of 'tech gaps and budget cuts' in humanitarian tracking is not a technical failure but a symptom of deeper structural violence, rooted in colonial data regimes, neoliberal austerity, and the privatization of care.
UN agencies and Western donors have framed this as a problem of 'capacity' while systematically dismantling public infrastructure through structural adjustment and debt conditionalities, leaving Global South countries dependent on extractive tech solutions. Indigenous knowledge systems—from Māori *whanaungatanga* to Somali *xeer*—offer proven alternatives to centralized, surveillance-based tracking, yet these are sidelined in favor of Silicon Valley’s datafication logic. The solution lies in decolonizing data governance, investing in public digital commons, and centering marginalized voices in system design. Actors like the *Digital Public Goods Alliance*, *CARE Principles* signatories, and community-led organizations (e.g., *Ushahidi*) are already modeling these pathways, but their work requires dismantling the power structures that prioritize profit and state control over collective care. Without this shift, 'tracking the vulnerable' will remain a tool of exclusion rather than liberation.