This report examines trends over the first half of 2015 in both open-source and agency-reported data. We are pleased that this quarterly security analysis includes information from 11 contributing agencies - one more than last quarter. As compared to last quarter, this edition contains more reported incidents both from open sources (88, up from 51) and agencies (223, up from 198). As described below, many of the additional reported incidents affected humanitarian infrastructure and occurred in Africa and the Middle East. The number of reported severe events remained constant between the first and second quarters of 2015.
This edition introduces a basic incident rate for hotspot countries, calculated using the number of reported events divided by the number of contributing agencies present in a country (see box, page 6). The regional maps on pages 7 to 11 show those countries that appear on both the total incident and incident rate hot spot lists in orange.
The three hotspot rankings below (open source, incident count, and incident rate) illustrate three options for determining the most insecure countries for humanitarian agencies. Each of the methods illustrates only a selective part of the picture, underlining the fact that each remains an imperfect measure in the absence of better data.
We also carefully examined open-source and agency-reported events to avoid double counting the same event. In this edition, we indicate the origin of the data as open source (OS), agency reported (AR) or dual source events (DE), which refer to events reported in both sources. To our surprise, we discovered only seven events reported by contributing agencies and in open sources over the first six months of 2015. This represents 1.4 percent of all events (8/562) and raises questions about overall scale of threats and violence that affect humanitarian aid.
Page 4 and 5 are dedicated to Yemen. They discuss incidents reported between January and June 2015 in open sources and by the four contributing agencies present in the country.