Bernard Heng is a Program Specialist at HOT, where he designs and leads initiatives that bridges local digital divides, harnessing open geospatial data and local knowledge to enhance humanitarian response, public health, and climate resilience. His work focuses on strengthening community resilience by curating multi-sector partnerships that put local data into the hands of decision-makers. By driving projects that range from climate-sensitive infectious disease mitigation to climate adaptation and disaster response, Bernard supports local communities in transforming technical data into actionable insights for humanitarian and development goals.

With a background spanning humanitarian response and diplomacy in Africa and Asia, Bernard has worked across diverse contexts to deliver high-impact programmes. Drawing on experience with UN-Habitat in Kenya and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Singapore, he excels at navigating complex stakeholder landscapes. He is particularly interested in the intersections of health systems strengthening, inclusive humanitarian planning, and resilient climate action, and believes that local communities need to remain at the forefront of equitable futures and should be empowered to leverage their own representative, inclusive, and impactful local knowledge and data.

A strong advocate for scalability, Bernard actively champions People-Private-Public partnerships as a strategic engine for sustainable impact. He moves beyond traditional aid models by fostering ecosystems where governments, philanthropies, and local communities collaborate. His approach ensures that data collection is not an end in itself, but a means to unlock greater investment in vulnerable regions, specifically improving outcomes for women, children, and marginalised groups facing localised crises.

Ultimately, Bernard is committed to ensuring that local voices remain at the forefront of the global data conversation. Whether facilitating dialogue in Myanmar or mapping informal settlements in Bangladesh, his work empowers communities to validate and own their data. He believes that when local knowledge is representative, inclusive, and integrated into national systems, it becomes the most powerful tool for shaping a collective sustainable future.