Project Overview

The Goal

To provide real-time situational awareness on the impact of the 2025 global funding crisis on the humanitarian workforce. This project moves beyond anecdotal evidence, utilizing data to track how funding cuts and the "USAID stop work" directives translate into actual recruitment freezes and market contraction.

The Solution

A self-hosted Metabase dashboard that automates the collection and visualization of job market data. By maintaining a sovereign data stack, the project ensures historical data is preserved despite external platform changes, allowing for longitudinal analysis of the "Great Aid Recession."

Key Objectives

• Quantify the Funding Gap: Correlate the decline in ReliefWeb job postings with major 2025 funding milestones (e.g., the February 2025 USAID payment freeze).
• Operational Transparency: Provide an open-source repository of all SQL queries used to process the data, inviting peer review from the humanitarian IM community.
• Public Accountability: Deploy a public-facing Metabase instance that allows stakeholders to see the human cost of budget reductions in real-time.

Key Insights & Interpretation

1. The "Scaling Down" Pattern Data indicates a proportional decrease across all position types. Key functions like Project Management and Operations maintain their relative weight despite lower absolute numbers. This suggests organizations are implementing broad, non-strategic cuts rather than structural pivots—using their expertise in "exit strategies" on their own operations.
2. The Shift to Consultancies While permanent job postings have been in a sustained downturn since February 2025, short-term consultancies remain stable. This points to a market shift: organizations are mitigating risk by favoring flexible, low-overhead contracts over long-term staff commitments.

Technical Implementation

The Stack

• Data Source: Automated ingestion from the ReliefWeb API (/jobs endpoint).
• Orchestration: n8n (Self-hosted) handles the daily ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) process.
• Analytics: Metabase (Self-hosted) for visualization and public dashboarding.
• Database: PostgreSQL for high-performance storage and complex SQL querying.

Technical Highlight: Solving Data Distortion

Challenge: Standard "Last Week" or "This Week" calendar queries distort trends early in the week. For example, running a report on a Tuesday shows a false "crash" in numbers because the calendar week has just begun.

Fix: Implemented Rolling 7-Day Total logic in SQL. This ignores fixed calendar weeks to provide a smoothed, accurate trend line of market velocity based on the last 168 hours, ensuring accuracy regardless of when the user views the dashboard.

Timeline & Deliverables

Major Milestones

• Phase 1: API Integration & Schema design (Mapping ReliefWeb's career_categories to the database).
• Phase 2: SQL Logic Development (Building the Rolling 7-Day and Consultancy-vs-Staff ratio queries).
• Phase 3: Metabase Dashboarding (Creating the visual story of the 2025 funding crisis).
• Phase 4: Open Source Launch (Publishing documentation and SQL scripts on GitHub).

Final Deliverables

• Live Metabase Dashboard: Public link to the real-time hiring trends.
• SQL Blueprint: A GitHub repository containing the logic of the project.
• Technical Guide: Documentation on setting up this self-hosted humanitarian IM stack via Docker.