Women in Tech with Gaia Rigodanza: Unlocking Geospatial Technologies in UNDP’s Crisis Response
The Women in Tech series puts the spotlight on women who are championing the advancement of transformative technology and digital innovations across UNDP. By sharing these inspiring individual stories, we hope to encourage others to choose this path and spur gender equality in the digital sector.
Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) provide invaluable data that helps guide UNDP’s crisis response efforts. Crisis Bureau Data Scientist, GIS, Gaia Rigodanza, embraced these tools when she joined UNDP in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
With a Master’s degree in Economics & Econometrics from the University of Southern California, Gaia was initially brought on as an economist consultant. Soon, her analytical skills were recognized and she became a vital part of the digital assessment team.
“I joined at the peak of the pandemic when there was a large demand for socio-economic assessment to understand the effects of the pandemic on developing countries”, Gaia recalls. “I quickly got immersed in the team’s crisis support work.”
Gaia, one of a five-person team delivering rapid assessments following disasters and conflicts, is helping UNDP country offices plan their crisis response. Early on, she saw the potential of GIS and remote sensing technologies when assessing natural disasters. However, she noticed that as many offices did not have GIS expertise so they struggled to fully utilize the geographic and remote sensing data provided by partner agencies like United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT). This challenge motivated Gaia to expand her own GIS analysis skills through open self-paced courses including ArcGIS training and NASA’s remote sensing programme: Arset Applied.
One of her first projects was to assess the socio-economic impact of the Taliban shift of power in Afghanistan using night light data.
“I did a remote sensing analysis looking at artificial lighting that is visible from outer space. At that time, there was an expectation that the country’s economy was going down, which my analysis confirmed. We could see that people were using less electricity, businesses were closing, and people were leaving the country.”
For UNDP Country Offices, presenting GIS analysis to stakeholders, including policymakers and funding partners, provides crucial information to secure crisis support. GIS visualizations are in fact key to Crisis Response Assessments such as Gaia’s Libya flood analysis, produced in the immediate aftermath of 2023 flooding.
She has also introduced a GEO-sampling method to improve the accuracy of data collected in the field, which is now a standard tool for the socio-economic impact assessments and household and building damage evaluations. It has been used by UNDP Country Offices in Afghanistan, Dominica, Guatemala and Madagascar to collect data after natural disasters.
Gaia and her team deliver an annual Social Media Analysis in Crisis Settings as part of the learning opportunities to further assist UNDP colleagues in leveraging GIS and satellite image analysis. This training is targeted at technical UNDP staff in Country Offices, Regional Hubs, Headquarters, and Accelerator Labs involved in early warning and crisis response efforts.
Her passion for learning has resulted in her continually expanding her skills. She has taught herself coding in Python, which she uses to enhance her GIS analyses, and she has integrated advanced functions into platforms like PowerBI to optimize data visualization and decision-making processes. Recently, Gaia began exploring the potential of artificial intelligence in crisis response, focusing on change detection using satellite imagery.
“I’m always interested in integrating more tools into my work — like artificial intelligence and advanced data analysis techniques — to better understand and respond to crises,” she adds.
Looking to the future, she hopes to further develop the tools she’s working on, particularly to integrate crisis response efforts with long-term reconstruction together with other UNDP units. Gaia is also eager to continuously find new ways to leverage technology in her daily work.
