An invisible infrastructure: how data helps Ukraine to respond in emergency and plan better support for people

A hospital near the frontline must choose which services are needed the most. A community can clear only some of its damaged buildings and mines. A school must decide whether children can safely return. And there’s another one that needs rebuilding. A displaced family needs a home, but so do many others. A veteran needs work, and so does a woman with two kids. These choices affect lives.

The United Nations uses data to provide accurate and reliable information, plan and coordinate humanitarian responses, manage programmes, report results, allocate resources, and communicate with the public. However, the UN relies on data not only in its own work. It also shares international experience with national authorities and institutions, so that, with limited resources and in harsh conditions, they can rely on reliable information to help people and communities.

This is especially important in wartime Ukraine, where data helps answer three essential questions: Where is support needed? When should action be taken? What response will be most effective? Whether public or internal, data is essential for evidence-based decisions during emergencies and for planning recovery and reconstruction. 

Health services are essential

During war, a health facility may be standing but unable to provide essential services because of damaged equipment, staff shortages, interrupted communications, or power outages. Counting buildings is therefore not enough. Local authorities need to know which services people require and what health facilities can provide them. 

Health surveys, conducted by the WHO, document the impact of the war on the Ukrainian population. They are crucial for understanding which healthcare services people need the most, both short-term and long-term. On the other hand, the Health Resources and Services Availability Monitoring System (HeRAMS) helps local authorities to track the real-time functionality of health facilities across frontline and war-affected areas.

For the latter, WHO, in partnership with the Ministry of Health, deployed a unified national emergency reporting system across all 24 oblasts, capturing more than 8,500 acute events and alerts and providing real-time analytics, enabling teams to respond faster, especially when power outages and communication disruptions make every minute critical. 

With data, the teams see not only where a facility is located but also whether it is operating, which services remain available, and where mobile medical teams are required. 

Going further, understanding the long-term impact of the war on the health of Ukrainians helps to plan the reform of the healthcare system as a whole. For example, support for mental health and psychological services has been traditionally overlooked. Now, they are generating more and more attention as more and more people report the psychological impact of the war. 

Understanding population, displacement, and housing needs 

With the start of the full-scale invasion, the population of Ukraine has experienced an unprecedented level of change, caused by casualties, displacements, and hardships. To help Ukraine better understand these changes, the United Nations Population Fund worked with the State Statistics Service of Ukraine (SSSU) to modernize data collection. One important step was the transition from paper-based interviews to computer-assisted telephone interviews, supported by the establishment of the statistics service’s own call centre.

It’s estimated that 3.9 million people in Ukraine are internally displaced, while nearly 5.8 million Ukrainians are refugees abroad. The displacement is not static. People leave, come back, and leave again. 

To strengthen Ukraine’s collection of displacement data, UNHCR supported the addition of displacement-related questions to official household surveys, while IOM continues to operate the Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM). UNHCR also contributed to the Unified Information and Housing Analytical System (UIHAS), IDP Pathways and intention surveys, and the Ukraine Protection Survey in cooperation with the Office of the Ombudsman. 

These efforts translate evidence into practical support for returnees and IDPs, in particular in housing, employment, and public services.

Making vulnerable groups visible

Guided by the Leave No One Behind principle, the UN continues to support vulnerable groups. Children, women, displaced people, people with disabilities, and other groups may face specific challenges that are not visible unless data is sufficiently detailed. 

In 2025, UNICEF worked with the State Statistics Service of Ukraine to include child-focused indicators in the Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) and the TransMonEE database. This allowed us to better understand and generate evidence of the complex realities of the children affected by the war in Ukraine through a target sample of 24,000 households in 1,000 clusters across all government-controlled regions. 

UN Women produced evidence to support gender-responsive energy policy, while ILO and UNICEF studied childcare, women’s economic empowerment, and the war’s impact on employment to inform regional recovery and the reintegration of displaced and vulnerable workers. UNODC research on trafficking and migrant smuggling risks among displaced people also informs Ukraine’s national anti-trafficking strategy. 

In addition, UNESCO supported a number of studies to assess the impact of the war on youth, children with special education needs, female journalists, etc. 

Across these initiatives, disaggregated data serves a common purpose: helping ensure that groups with distinct needs do not disappear inside national averages.

Turning community needs into recovery decisions 

Local authorities understand the needs of their communities and people’s needs in ways outsiders often cannot. They are the key instrument of recovery decisions, but they need detailed information about damaged infrastructure, debris, public services, housing, and displacement trends in their communities.

At the subnational level, UNDP strengthened local data and information management, including for debris assessment and management, while under the Strengthening Evidence-based recovery in Ukraine project, a nationwide diagnostic across 950+ communities generated baseline data that informed targeted GIS support to 5 pilot communities. 

International Organization of Migration, in turn, worked with the Ministry for Recovery, Infrastructure, and Transport of Ukraine to launch a unified geospatial system for monitoring the development of regions and territorial communities (GIS RD). The tool supports Ukraine’s decentralization efforts and will allow local communities to collect and analyze data critical for decision-making on recovery and development. 

Lastly, UN-Habitat worked with partners to improve Ukraine’s national urban planning database, while UNESCO assessed and confirmed damage to 514 cultural sites. 

These initiatives, while being quite technical, answer highly practical questions: What are the safety risks for the community? Which neighbourhoods lack essential services? Where should limited recovery funding go first? And how to build back better? 

From data to action

While data cannot repair a hospital, provide a home, or rebuild a cultural site, it connects needs with decisions and decisions with resources. It also strengthens accountability by allowing institutions and the public to ask not only how much support was provided, but where it went and what changed as a result. 

The data work is often invisible: a dataset added, a database connected, a survey conducted, a reporting system modernized, or a map updated. Yet behind every figure is a house, a community, a family, or a service. Reliable data makes them visible to the United Nations, the government, donors, and partners. So let’s make every count matter.

More information on the UN's work in Ukraine in the field of data is available at the link.