July 5, 2023: Congratulations to the top 3 forecasters — rodeo_flagellum, SpottedBear, and gunturiqbal — and thank you to all who participated! Learn more.

Update March 29, 2023: The tournament end date has been changed to September 1, 2023 (previously January 1, 2023) to appropriately include all questions in the leaderboard. Any question resolving before September 1, 2023, will be included in the leaderboard and used to award prizes, any questions not resolved by then will not be included. Prizes may be awarded earlier once all questions resolve.

This tournament aims to help humanitarian agencies identify potential upcoming conflict zones and economic crises around the world. Even one extra week of warning about a potential crisis can be of significant value, as it allows aid agencies to position resources and personnel to help the affected populations.

The questions in this tournament are guided by the operational needs of humanitarian agencies – our hope is that this pilot project demonstrates the value of forecasting in this domain, and serves as a case study and rationale for embedding forecasting more deeply within decision-making processes in international NGOs.

The three question types below are designed with a specific purpose in mind.

Monitoring questions: Aim to serve as an early warning system to alert humanitarian agencies of an elevated risk of conflict.

Horizon Scan question: Aims to quantify the magnitude of a conflict in an area that is already experiencing some conflict.

Economic Trouble question: Aims to help quantify the extent of the problem in a country already experiencing economic difficulty.

Thank you for participating in this project as a forecaster! We hope that this effort and others like it can increase the agility of disaster response in humanitarian crises, and we appreciate your contribution to it.