From OCHA News No. 135, 19 March 2004 (pdf)
The world's leading on-line gateway to humanitarian information received prestigious United Nations awards Friday for its audience-focused content and dynamic production schedule.
ReliefWeb, a project of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, was honoured with two "UN21" awards by Secretary-General Kofi Annan on 19 March in a ceremony at UN Headquarters in New York.
Friday's awards were bestowed in recognition of the virtual teamwork performed among three ReliefWeb offices (New York, Geneva and Kobe) in the areas of "knowledge management" and "improvements to the working environment".
The ReliefWeb site, which currently receives about one million hits each day, is updated daily with up to 150 new documents and maps on the response activities of the international humanitarian community to more than 40 emergencies and natural disasters around the world, in addition to policy-oriented and background material.
The project managing the site, launched in 1996, was one of 78 considered by high-level officials from across a range of UN bodies to have introduced "outstanding improvement or innovative change" and to have "increased in quality, impact, efficiency or effectiveness...the organization's programme or service".
"ReliefWeb provides the humanitarian community with up-to-the-minute comprehensive information about crises around the world," said Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary-General of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). "ReliefWeb's role is unparalleled and OCHA welcomes recognition by the UN21 award for the outstanding role it plays."
The site - containing some 250,000 documents and 2,500 maps sourced from a wide range of governmental and non-governmental organizations - is currently undergoing a major redesign to further tailor its content to the needs of the humanitarian community. The redesigned site, to be unveiled later this year, will include new sectoral views of content, an expanded professional resources section and modernized search and navigation tools.
The UN21 awards programme was inaugurated in the latter half of the 1990s as part of a management reform effort by the Secretary-General. |
