ReliefSource

Oh, and I nearly forgot - I’ve just posted my paper “Better the Devil we Know: Obstacles and Opportunities in Humanitarian GIS” for all you krazy kids who dig Geographic Information Systems.  It’s an attempt to uncover why GIS has consistently underperformed in the humanitarian sector, and to present a more strategic approach to GIS development in the broadest sense.  Comments are, as ever welcome.

Anybody who’s interested in this topic should visit the site for another project I’m involved with - the creation of a humanitarian GIS data model.  This is in the early stages, but Firoz Verjee of the George Washington University and a bunch of other great people are doing great work here.  You’ll find our worksite at http://www.humanitariangis.com.

Well, not exactly famine… but a lot of people in Tajikistan are probably quite hungry, considering how poor the country is. I’ve talked about how NGOs should be blogging more here; now from Steve Buckley at Christian Aid:

“We recently tried a public weblog during a recent trip to Central Asia. The idea was to get away from official accounts of life in the region and try to bring back real time, emotionally charged, stories from the field - mainly for staff but also for supporters, friends and family. The blog turned out to be an unprecedented success for us achieving 6,000 readers from a standing start at the beginning of the year… and also making the site the most visited web site by Christian Aid staff.

“We’re pretty pleased with this first public effort and hope to continue the concept for some other (but not all) staff trips. You can read the blog here - http://nightingalesangatwcc.typepad.com - and note that entries will continue to be posted for a few days more.

“We’re also using web logs as a way to stay in touch with staff who are out on secondment to other organisations, or even those who have left Christian Aid for pastures new. All part of an emerging ‘Orphans’ scheme that tries to keep staff involved with Christian Aid after they have left paid employment with us.

“Most exciting of all we’re also starting to use weblogs internally for team reporting, replacing more traditional after-the-event reports. Early days at the moment as we’re still rolling out our SharePoint system but the signs are encouraging.”

More NGOs are starting to blog from the field, which is great - even though this is more from a development organisation, these perspectives are vital. The next step… I’d like to see Christian Aid use these blogs to give national staff in their country programmes a platform to communicate with Christian Aid’s supporters - and to represent their work within their own country as well.

In other blogging news: I took part in an IRC chat on Tuesday with some of the big names in the blogging / digital divide / online disaster response - names such as Rebecca McKinnon, Dina Mehta, Andy Carvin, etc. The chat also included staff from Alertnet, the Reuter Foundation online news service for humanitarian organisations, and was a discussion about how blogging, wikis, and other services can be organised more effectively to support disaster response. It will be interesting to see where the discussion goes; I’ll update on it as the Wiki gets going.

If you live in the UK, perhaps you were watching Newsnight two weeks ago. Sir Nicholas Young of the British Red Cross was roasted and fried by Martha Kearney, on the basis that the response to the tsunami of the DEC member agencies wasn’t all that and a bag of chips. I watched with an increasing sense of horror as the picture was painted - we were greedy, incompetent and secretive.

Last week, John Mitchell of ALNAP posted a well-thought out response to the Newsnight incident on the ODI blog, the thrust of which is that the media is behind the times. In his words, “by all accounts the evaluation report simply says what one would expect, painting as it does, a mixed picture of what went well and what did not go so well… So, why has old news suddenly become a mini-scandal?”

John argues that the public climate has changed since the 1980s - in particular, the media no longer views us all as saints. I’d like to suggest another, deeper cause behind the Newsnight incident. In this connected world, the revolution in global communication has changed everything - and, as a community, we have comprehensively failed to realise the potential that this brings for our work, or to identify the traps that this new world keeps in wait for us.

The Newsnight incident is another reminder that the patronising attitude that we adopt towards our public will always come back to haunt us. If the public does not have a clear understanding of the reality of relief operations, or of the improvements we have made in accountability in recent years, whose fault is that? Trapped in our ‘traditional’ fundraising strategies, we rely on the public to continue supporting us in emergencies without making much effort to engage them in the issues.

Fundraising for disasters still presents helpless victims waiting for international organisations to rescue them - even though we all acknowledge that the critical actors in emergency response are local people, communities and organisations. But the rush of communications that we have access to now - not just the mainstream media, but the ‘citizen journalism’ of blogging - means that our stakeholders on all sides have access to better information about our work than ever before - and more of a sense that their stake is an active one.

Sir Nicholas acquitted himself well in the face of persistent adversarial questioning, but Newsnight framed their coverage in a such a way that he was unable to broaden the discussion beyond the very basic points that John identifies in his post. Rather than seeing this as an example of how an antagonistic media doesn’t play fair, perhaps we should take this as a wake-up call, a clear indicator that we need to improve our currently inadequate communications strategies?

Read John’s post in full here, with an interesting supplement from Maurice Herson.

[UPDATE: John’s blog post seems to have generated more comments than any previous post on the ODI blog - why not join in and make them happy?]

Taran Rampersad gives an overview of his experiences in the last year. Beginning with the tsunami, Taran was one of those with a tech background who took up the challenge of applying technology to disaster response. He’s one of the mainstays of the Mobileactive community, and his focus was on sms (short message service, for those of you who don’t know, which apparently includes nearly everybody in the USA). His overview is a succint summary of my last six years:

“The main problem I saw last year was that the people affected by disasters directly did not have a voice… This was the premise of the Alert Retrieval Cache… The problem in that evolution was that nobody used it.”

The sequence: 1) identify problem, 2) develop solution, 3) get frustrated because nobody’s using it. I share that frustration, and not just because I’m a caring kind of guy, either. I used to subscribe to the “if you build it, they will come” theory - right up until I realised that they were only going to come if I pointed out that I’d built it. The importance of marketing these solutions - now clear. Specifically the importance of marketing through a network, not through the classic producer-consumer relationship. These things live or die on distribution, on building up critical mass in the community and then becoming a standard.

Amongst the other points that Taran raises are the need for the following:

1. Internet Access when the infrastructure cannot support it
2. Independent Power Source for centralized system.
3. Ability to recharge cell phones independent of infrastructure.

The good news is that both 1 and 2 are not a big deal - they’re problems where, if you throw enough money at them, a satellite dish and a generator will appear. This is how most humanitarian NGOs operate, although of course there are very few of those organisations that extend those services to the people in need (Telecoms sans Frontieres being the notable exception). Number 3, no idea - I imagine the solution will turn out to be either solar-powered (weak), hand-powered (tiring) or based on hooking it up to a car battery (fun).

As Taran also points out, ham radio has also been critically important in a number of cases. Old tech still rules, but is anybody paying attention? Of course not…

More blog magic from a man who uses the same Wordpress template as me! Declan Butler is a journalist, writes a lot for Nature magazine, with a particular interest in disasters and a particular particular interest in GoogleEarth. Most recently, he’s posted a great piece on building maps in GoogleEarth for tracking Avian Flu - you can read it here.

I’m not really sure how I missed “How NGOs can harness new technology” by Grey Frandsen, which was published by the Humanitarian Review in their Autumn 2004 issue (currently listed as their current issue, which means that their publication rate is even worse than this blog).

Some of the descriptions of the technology in the article are - how can I put this kindly - inaccurate. Skip to the end, however, and Grey hits a very solid target, namely that “these technology systems are all developed on different platforms and are not yet standard throughout the humanitarian community… Accordingly, it is not clear whether these products will have an impact on the entire humanitarian community and how effective they will be at changing the way the community handles complex operations in total.”

Sounds familiar. The findings are consistent across the board - the need for a common platform is pretty overwhelming and, in the humanitarian context, can’t be argued against on the basis of corporate interests. The other note of interest in the article comes even later, and applies equally to this blog: “Don’t let articles like this one entice you to employ a new, expensive system without making sure it fits into your technology plan.”

Not that I’m cheerleading for a “new, expensive system,” since I can’t even afford the hosting costs for this site….

Rik Panganiban posted some interesting thoughts about our ICT4Peace report - worth reading if you can’t be bothered to go through the entire report. His final point is particularly relevant:

“I hope that this important area of ICT4Peace doesn’t get left by the wayside. But without a specific policy arena for those issue areas to be addressed, that seems to be a likely future.”

We discussed this a lot while I was editing the report. It was clear that, although there was a lot of interest in the subject, there wasn’t anybody jumping at the opportunity to pick up the baton. We’re now looking at how to take the findings of the report forward, but that’s going to be difficult without a specific forum for those discussions.

The knowledgeable Nancy White takes a different tack, from a Web 2.0 perspective:

“For those of you who are big Web2.0 thinkers, how do you imagine the changing web tools and environments might help? How do our grand ideas jive with the electricity, phone and bandwidth scarcity not just in disaster areas, but in 2/3rds world where this is the norm?”

It’s clear that these discussions shouldn’t just be happening at the policy level, but at our level as well - and at the level of affected communities, where possible. In the former case, we can start those discussions right here; in the latter case, we need more imagination if we’re going to reach those affected by disaster. The revolution starts here…

It was impossible to avoid the tsunami last week, even if one wanted to. I spent a while thinking about what I wanted to post, since my original intention for this blog was to focus on information management in humanitarian operations, not to speak more generally about the humanitarian sector. But there’s a lack of other bloggers discussing humanitarian issues, so I guess this will have to do. (Incidentally, if anybody knows any humanitarian bloggers, please send me links!)

While remembering the dead is important, our own thoughts should be with those who survived. As usual, media focus on the tsunami one year on was fairly weak, and has now almost completely disappeared. (Interestingly, coverage of the Pakistan earthquake has also been quite poor, despite the fact that we’re now in the middle of the winter that almost everybody agrees we have failed to address in time.)

The tsunami coverage that there has been in the UK has generally been quite good, but split into two stock articles. One type covers the plucky (white) survivors, especially if they’ve returned to Thailand or Sri Lanka. If I read another article about how a bunch of holidaymakers helped to rebuild a Thai village near their resort, I may become enraged.

The other type - normally a feature article - covers the plucky (non-white) survivors, most of whom are still waiting for somebody to come and rebuild their village, which happens not to have been located close to a resort - bad luck! The general tone of these articles is that there a lot of people waiting around for their houses to be rebuilt, which is pretty accurate.

In December, the Fritz Institute has released its survey of Recipient Perceptions of Aid Effectiveness [PDF file], a multi-country focus group study conducted 9 months after the tsunami. There are no revelations in the study, but it is a useful contribution to the debate that the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition provides the framework for.

The headline findings can be summarised as follows:

• The initial response (i.e. the first 48 hours) was overwhelmingly local - but there are still problems with international organisations not listening to local voices.
• Satisfaction with services provided varied widely from location to location - but interestingly tended to even out after 60 days, irrelevant of location.
• Livelihoods are still not back to normal, and permanent shelter continues to be the main problem.

The first point confirms what a lot of other studies have shown; the second point is far more interesting, as it’s the first time I’ve seen a large-scale survey like this based on “customer satisfaction” with services. Normally we evaluate against our internal (weak) project indicators, and I’d like to see more evaluations based on recipient satisfaction. However neither of these points have an impact on the current situation, and there’s not much we can do about them in the context of the tsunami.

The third point does require action. Neither of them has seen the amount of progress that they need to fully recover from the tsunami, let alone pursue the spurious ‘recovery plus’ policy that was aired in the middle of 2005. (It’s so spurious, I’m not even going to provide any links to explain what it means.)

There are clear practical constraints, not least of which is the fact that it’s damnably difficult to build that many houses (over 200,000 across the region, mainly in Aceh and Sri Lanka); in the UK, the government is on the rack over the construction of just 29,000 new homes. The international community can justifiably claim that various political obstructions have prevented more progress, although these complaints become weaker over time; if there are obstructions, we need to find better ways to work with or around them.

Things look more positive in Aceh, with the recent peace deal bearing dividends, while Sri Lanka appears to be sliding back towards war. Here, the international community needs to make more effort, since the war in Sri Lanka has been a curse to everybody in the country, holding back economic development even before the tsunami.

But if we reach the two-year anniversary without fixing the problems that the Fritz Institute study identifies… well, it will be as embarrassing as the recent anniversary of the Lessons from the Rwanda experience, when we all sat down and realised that, in 10 years, we really hadn’t made much progress in fixing all the things we knew were wrong with the system.

p.s. Happy New Year!