humanitarian.info

Six months ago, Pakistan and India suffered a massive earthquake that devastated a large area along their mutual border; Kashmir and the surrounding areas in Pakistan were worst hit. As is the way of things, news of the humanitarian situation has all but disappeared from the mainstream media, so spare a thought for the thousands of families whose homes were destroyed in the disaster and who are trying to rebuild their lives. Now that the winter is over, hopefully the humanitarian situation will improve, but the reconstruction process will take a long time and will be fraught with difficulty.

I’m posting to draw attention to some of the work that has been happening on the ground in those six months, specifically related to information and coordination issues. In particular, I never got around to pointing to RisePak, a “collaboration between academics, researchers, and policy makers at US and Pakistani universities, multilateral organizations, various government departments, and individuals dedicated towards helping in relief efforts.”

I met with Jishnu Das, one of the leads for RisePak, while I was in Pakistan last year, and I was very impressed with his explanation of how RisePak worked. These are the kind of initiatives that we need to collect the necessary humanitarian information to ensure that assistance reaches the right people; the only outstanding question is how these initiatives can be integrated with the humanitarian relief community for maximum leverage.

RisePak’s work continues, and to me their team represents the best of Pakistan. This year they started to post documentation on both their findings and their methodology for survey work. In particular their Technical Assessment of District Level Data is a fascinating insight into the difficulties of data collection in a post-disaster environment, as well as many of the specifics of the environment in Pakistan.  The team also used Flickr to post photos from the assessment, which are worth a look.
Unsurprisingly (well, it didn’t surprise me), one of their main conclusions was that:

the largest issue is the management of information and a lack of process regarding data flow. It is nearly five months after the earthquake, and despite the millions of rupees that have been given out in compensation there is still no idea as to how many persons have received funds and what proportion of the population still remain to be compensated.

This is a common problem, and completely understandable in the aftermath of a disaster on the scale of the earthquake. The RisePak conclusion confirms that many of the problems relating to humanitarian information in the Pakistan earthquake have already been encountered in other places – but that nobody has yet managed to create and replicate a solution to those problems.

In this spirit, I’m also posting a note by Neil Bauman, who was working for the IFRC during the response, specifically supporting the Shelter Cluster – probably the most important of all the clusters in the response. Neil correctly identifies the critical issues in the humanitarian community when it comes to information sharing – again, issues that have been the same for the last six years.

I remain hopeful that we’ll deal with these issues. The past two years have seen a significant improvement in our capacity to manage information in emergency response, and more and more people are now coming into the discussion. Go over to RisePak and see how new ideas can make a difference.

[A more informal explanation from Jishnu can be found at Kathryn Cramer's blog.]