Crisis Tracker

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Active 2011-Present

In December of 2009, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) killed 321 civilians in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Despite the incredible scale and brutality of the violence, the international community did not learn of the massacre until March 2010—three months later.

Over the last decade, the LRA has abducted and killed thousands of people in isolated areas of northeastern DRC, eastern Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan, exploiting local communities, wildlife, and natural resources alongside several other violent armed groups. However, due to the isolation and neglect which characterizes this region, the movement and activities of armed groups, including the LRA, remained grossly under-reported and difficult to track of. Not only did the general public and the international community have limited knowledge of the frequency attacks on communities, but humanitarians, policy makers and security forces also faced challenges deploying services effectively because of the lack of credible data available. While NGOs and UN agencies independently report information, there was not an effective aggregator of information to facilitate this process until 2011.

Our Response

The Crisis Tracker is a crisis-mapping social web platform that broadcasts the attacks and other activities perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) as well as that of other armed groups operating in the same region, in near real time. 

By the numbers

Over 3000 incidents of armed group activity reported on the Crisis Tracker to date

29 Crisis Tracker security analysis reports shared with key stakeholders

Learn More

In 2011, we teamed up with partners at The Resolve LRA Crisis Initiative to create the Crisis Tracker, a dynamic and publicly accessible mapping tool that displays up-to-date armed group activity data in an interactive format, allowing users to better understand the urgency of the LRA Crisis as well as the broader security threats in the region’s human population, wildlife, and natural resources. The map shows where and how the LRA and other armed groups target local communities with violence and individual incident reports contain more detailed information on incidents involving armed groups in the area.

The Crisis Tracker compiles reports of attacks, sent via Invisible Children’s Early Warning Network with data sourced from the UN, local NGOs, and first-hand research conducted by Invisible Children and peer organizations. The reports are vetted and immediately transcribed into our database, where the information is delivered to the mapping system and directly to humanitarian and security actors operating in affected communities. The information is then made publicly available through a digital map, a breaking news feed, regular data analysis reports, and media documenting LRA atrocities first-hand.

 

 

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