No, I haven’t left Sudan. But the humanitarian community working here does suffer terribly from memory loss. A new project here – the Sudan Open Archive Project – aims to address that, by recording and sharing every last piece of documentation they can find from Operation Lifeline Sudan (the UN-NGO consortium set up to provide cross-border relief to southern Sudan from 1989 onwards).
This project addresses a lot of the questions facing the sector. Dan Large, the project leader, has identified a problem that continues to make relief work more difficult – our seeming inability to learn (whether from our successes or our failures).
As this article states,
In [Dan Large's] view, just as information is fundamental to the effectiveness and impact of emergency response, knowledge of the history of aid and development operations is important to programme design, implementation and evaluation.
It’s the same in every response; high turnover of staff, poor archiving of documents, and lack of investment in learning all lead organisations to make the same mistakes over and over. The work of groups such as ALNAP try to make changes at the headquarters level, but this isn’t usually matched by progress in the field.
A couple of interesting asides: first, the project uses Greenstone, an open source archive software application, which some NGOs have also experimented with (notably Mercy Corps). (We like open source!) Second,
The project’s next step will be the creation of a real digital archive; in other words – a sort of capacity-building vehicle that is to be used as a means to train Sudanese staff in IT and knowledge management.
In other words, it’s a long term investment in Sudan’s future – and possibly an example for other countries emerging from a long-term conflict. This is something we need more of, although funding for it remains elusive.
All this takes me back to a project that we tried to start in Liberia a few years ago, recovering the data from government computers (located in a pile in a dusty back room of the Ministry of Finance) and scanning documents and maps from different institutions. In turn, that was inspired by the moment in 2001 when I first set foot in the AIMS basement (then in Islambad) to be confronted by the accumulated documentation of 20 years of UN programmes.
We never managed to capture and preserve all that information, so I hope that the Sudan Open Archive project will succeed where we failed. Read the full article at http://allafrica.com/stories/200601300943.html.
[Update 19 Feb: John Ryle of the Rift Valley Institute - who are developing this project - has sent me the link to the Archive at http://www.sudanarchive.net/.]
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