Automating Area-Based Planning for Safe and Resilient Cities The IOM LOCALISE - google Partnership

This networking event will introduce IOM’s LOCALISE toolkit, the organization’s flagship area-based planning framework for crisis-affected and displacement-impacted communities. LOCALISE supports integrated, evidence-based decision-making through settlement profiling, service and infrastructure mapping, risk and gap analysis, and strategic action planning, linking humanitarian response with longer-term recovery and development objectives.

The session will first present the LOCALISE approach, followed by a case study from South Sudan demonstrating its application in practice. It will then showcase the new automated version of LOCALISE, developed in partnership with Google and NGIS.
The automation pilot integrates Google Cloud, Google Earth Engine, and generative AI to dramatically reduce the time and technical barriers required to produce high-quality settlement-level analysis, from weeks to days. By automating key analytical steps and combining spatial and non-spatial data, the tool makes advanced geospatial analysis and AI-enabled insights accessible to field practitioners, local authorities, and partners, even in data- and capacity-constrained contexts.

The session will demonstrate the automated tool in practice and explain how automation strengthens the settlements approach by improving consistency, comparability, and transparency across contexts, while accelerating decision-making, supporting multi-sector coordination, and better integrating community perspectives and local knowledge.

The target audience includes humanitarian practitioners, recovery and development actors, government counterparts, donors, and cluster partners with an interest in area-based planning, housing and settlement responses, digital innovation, and geospatial analysis.