ReliefSource

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was going to write something about blogging in the aid world. I never got round to it, partly because there isn’t much of it about.

Mark Snelling of the Red Cross, whose online journal for the BBC recently covered his work in Niger, is one of the few people who has tried this out. When I met him recently, Mark said that it was one of the most satisfying things that he’d done as a journalist, and that he’d received more positive feedback from it than he’d ever expected. We both agreed that blogs have tremendous potential, specifically for giving the general public a better picture of what the situation is like on the ground, and how the aid industry actually works.

This seems vital to me for two reasons. First, the public provide us with financial resources to do our work, and as such we have an obligation to tell them how their money is being spent. Second, the public are one of our key audiences for advocacy work; we need to engage them in order to bring about wider change in the system. Blogs work very well in both these areas, and in addition can provide an excellent forum for discussion through comment threads.

There have been quite a few blogs by private individuals during disasters such as the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, and blogs such as Passion of the Present do an excellent job of advocacy around complex emergencies such as that in Sudan. So the question is, why don’t more aid organisations make use of blogging as a tool in their work? The International Rescue Committee has set up a blog for the Pakistan Earthquake, and it will be interesting to see what sort of issues it might cover.

But IRC are in a minority right now, and that’s a wasted opportunity. Blogs are increasingly vital tools in journalism and politics, not just in the west, but in the developing world (check Global Voices if you don’t believe me). Blogs are connectors, and one thing the humanitarian community needs right now - in a year when our resources are being stretched beyond breaking point - is more connection with the societies that support us.

“Information and communications technology must be recognised as a form of aid in itself.” - Tony Vaux, World Disasters Report 2005

Yesterday the Red Cross launched its annual World Disasters Report. Each year the WDR takes an issue to focus on and presents a series of case studies by independent researchers. The report is intended for a general audience, not just the professional community, so it’s more accessible than many similar publications.

I went to the press launch in London, which was attended by a variety of journalists, all of whom wanted to know if the Red Cross was criticising the UN for a poor response to the tsunami. After about 2 hours of saying “No” in various ways, the press went away disappointed, forced to lead with poor alerts ‘raised tsunami toll’.

It’s a shame, because that coverage obscures the main thrust of the report; that “Information and communications technology must be recognised as a form of aid in itself.” The “accessible ICT” that I covered in my paper on Hurricane Katrina isn’t just accessible to US citizens; mobile telephones are becoming ubiquituous globally, and internet access is spreading to many areas that we would previously have considered off the net entirely. Technology (and therefore information) still tends to be the preserve of elites, and the poorest of the poor still have very limited access; but the technology is there. The only question in how to use it to best advantage.

The World Disasters Report is available online, at the IFRC website.