Enhancing early warning capabilities at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (BZ) serves as the Dutch government's main interlocutor with foreign governments and international organizations. BZ coordinates and carries out Dutch foreign policy, including development and trade policy, from both its headquarters in The Hague and missions abroad. Maintaining a global presence, BZ oversees 114 embassies, 24 consulate-generals, and 345 consulates.
ACLED underpins these efforts by providing BZ continuous access to its full global conflict dataset and innovative data platforms, supporting trend analysis and, specifically, early warning and forecasting capabilities.
Challenge
Operating in a complex and rapidly evolving global landscape, foreign ministries worldwide struggle with a "reactive trap," constantly responding to crises after they erupt. This reactive approach is costly, inefficient, and risks national interests, humanitarian efforts, and the safety of citizens. For BZ, the urgent challenge is to move beyond crisis response to build sophisticated early warning capabilities to anticipate instability and enable proactive, preventative policymaking.
Solution
BZ enhances its early warning and forecasting with ACLED data and data platforms. Leveraging ACLED's API, BZ data scientists integrate granular, real-time conflict information into their internal dashboards, which BZ staff use to continuously monitor emerging hotspots. This seamless integration provides actionable intelligence for anticipatory action and conflict prevention. ACLED's tailored training and forecasting data platforms, like the Conflict Alert System (CAST), further empower BZ to predict political violence, alleviating the need to build proprietary systems and enabling a focus on proactive diplomacy.
Why does BZ choose ACLED data?
- The availability of a user-friendly API allows automated downloads to directly feed into in-house dashboards.
- The dataset includes at least seven years of available historical data for each of the 244 countries and territories ACLED covers, which is critical for early warning and forecasting models.
- ACLED offers tailored training sessions and consultations by its experts and data scientists.
- BZ also has access to ACLED's own robust and easy-to-use early warning and forecasting tools.
A key data visualization platform that BZ leverages is ACLED CAST. This conflict forecasting platform predicts political violence events up to six months in the future for every country in the world. Predictions are updated monthly, alongside accuracy metrics for previous forecasts.
Impact
Governments that are empowered by ACLED's advanced early warning capabilities gain the foresight to act before crises escalate. ACLED data and predictive platforms allow foreign ministries to shift from reactive damage control to proactive prevention in a manner that mitigates risks to national security, prevents widespread human suffering, and ensures that diplomatic and humanitarian resources are deployed with maximum impact for a more peaceful and secure world.
What is your key challenge?
Speak to one of our specialists and find out how ACLED can support your data needs.