Who does What Where (3W)

Overview

The main purpose of a basic 3W is to show the operational presence by sector and location within an emergency. At this basic level, the 3W Operational Presence (3W: OP) can help identify potential partners, give a very rough understanding of an ongoing response, and superficially identify potential overlaps or gaps in response.

When paired with other data, the 3W: OP produces specialized 3W products which can be used by responders to ask more informed questions, to feed into an analysis of a response, and to identify a variety of overlaps/gaps such as need versus response and need versus funding.

Although a simple classification, there are two types of 3W product consumers: 1) in-country responders and 2) global/headquarter based humanitarians. Distinguishing between the two is critical as in-country responders are usually looking for quick, detailed products to help make decisions, whereas global audiences tend to be looking for more general and well-styled products.

The 3W could be considered a monitoring tool as it tracks progress in the implementation of the response. It is thus part of the Implementation and Monitoring phase of the HPC Cycle.

OCHA Field Information Services (FIS) in partnership with OCHA country and regional offices has created the Global 3W dashboard (3w.unocha.org) showing the Global Humanitarian Operational Presence at the country level. Its purpose is to increase the exposure of organizations undertaking humanitarian work and to continue the path to a more efficient, harmonised and standardised approach to OCHA’s operations and products. OCHA country and regional office work will gain exposure as the site directs people to the detailed 3W products of each office. There are links from the Global 3W site to data, dashboards and infographics at a country and regional level. See links at the bottom of this page.

Process

In contexts where clusters/sectors are active, an agreement will be reached (in the IMWG if there is one) on a 3W template that includes standard vocabulary (admin data, activities, etc), and a reporting schedule. In other contexts, the coordinating entity will approach individual organizations directly.

The clusters/sectors are responsible for their own more detailed 3Ws whereas OCHA is responsible for collecting the common information among the clusters to create the inter-cluster emergency 3W products.

Clusters/sectors will either expand the inter-cluster 3W template to include the intra-cluster additional details or extract data from their own template into the inter-cluster template before sharing the clean & p-coded data with OCHA.

OCHA then generates inter-cluster/sector products at national and, if applicable, at the sub-national level.

Examples of presentations of the 3W process: