Tino Kreutzer is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of humanitarian response and information management. He has more than 15 years’ experience working in the response to humanitarian crises, natural disasters, and global public health emergencies, including in Central African Republic, DR Congo, Uganda, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Liberia, Palestine, Nepal, and Sierra Leone.
Tino currently serves as the Chief Operating & Innovation Officer at Kobo, the nonprofit organization behind KoboToolbox.
KoboToolbox is a free and open source platform for the collection, management, and visualization of data. As the most widely used primary data collection tool in the nonprofit sector, it is the tool of choice for over 14,000 social impact organizations worldwide. In virtually every country around the world, KoboToolbox is used by organizations involved in humanitarian action, global development, environmental protection, peacebuilding, and human rights, as well as by public health institutes, research organizations, and education facilities. KoboToolbox has more than 700,000 users globally who use the platform to collect over 20 million surveys a month.
Through his work at Kobo and through his research Tino works closely with leading humanitarian organizations on improving speed and quality of assessments in humanitarian disasters through KoboToolbox and other initiatives. His research currently focuses on improving humanitarian needs assessments through the use of natural language processing, a type of artificial intelligence. For more details see:
Prior to the founding of Kobo as an independent nonprofit organization, Tino has worked in several leadership positions at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Brigham and Women’s Hospital where he oversaw the creation of KoboToolbox in collaboration with the UN Office for he Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. He was also responsible for implementing large-scale population surveys at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative with more than 40,000 respondents in five countries affected by conflict.
From 2014 to 2015 Tino was seconded to UNMEER, the UN Mission for Ebola Emergency Response where he advised local response teams on data collection and data analysis in the hardest-hit hotspot in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea. In 2015 he was invited by UN OCHA to manage population needs assessments immediately following the Nepal earthquake, and by the International Rescue Committee in Turkey to assess refugee flows from Syria and Iraq.
Previously Tino worked for UNDP, creating new coordination and information management solutions to track and register former rebels in the Central African Republic during the official disarmament and demobilization effort. With UNDP in DR Congo he created a system to support the fight against sexual violence by improving the way offenses were being tracked in the criminal justice system.
Tino has a Ph.D. in Health from York University. His previous academic training is in Political Sciences at Jacobs University and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town, where he published highly-cited research on the emergence of mobile internet usage by low-income youth living in townships. In 2017 he was awarded the prestigious Canadian Government's Vanier scholarship.
Tino fluent in English, French, German, and Spanish and lives in Montreal.