I love this. Forget about all of our big aid organisations and their assessments - wouldn’t it be great if the beneficiaries just e-mailed us and told us what they needed? I’d like to shake Amadou Doutchi by the hand, and here’s why:

Doutchi, who already had his own account on a free, Web-based e-mail service, came up with a list of governments and aid groups to approach, including the World Food Program… In mid-June, Doutchi traveled 80 miles south to the regional center of Maradi to send the e-mail from an office there. When he checked his inbox a week later, he said several organizations had responded asking for more details on the community and its needs. Doutchi believes a $150,000 donation from the Canadian government can be traced to his e-mail, though Canadian officials could not immediately comment.

The full story is at CNN.

This is fairly old news, but Baseline magazine went tsunami-crazy in May, with three articles on how ICT was used in the tsunami response. I particularly liked the inappropriate “Tidal Wave of Problems” title - sensitivity obviously not the strong point of their editorial team.

A Tidal Wave of Problems

It’s difficult to land planes when there’s cows on the runway. No, really?

World Food Programme: Wave of Support

I’m not entirely sure that WFP’s roll-out was quite as fast as this article makes it out to be:

Unfilled Promise

They managed to get a very long article out of how the latest technology tested by the military wasn’t actually used at all in the tsunami response.

Notwithstanding my criticisms, it’s good to see this kind of work getting coverage, even if a lot of articles out there are just rewrites of agency press releases. Baseline did a good job covering some of the less visible aspects of the response, and hopefully we’ll see more of the same in future.

Incidentally, if anybody has any other stories on these sorts of issues, send them my way.