The Right to Know
The Office of the UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery wins the award for UN office with the most unwieldy title. Forget about UN reform, the real issue is giving all these initiatives names that actually make grammatical sense.
However the Office of the… well, they’ve published a really interesting report on the role of public information in accountability measures, called The Right to Know (pdf file). Once again, I’m several months late, since this was published in October. Sue me.
The report takes a wide-ranging look at the issues linking information and accountability, which has also been identified by the Tsunami Evaluation Coalition, the excellent IFRC World Disasters Report 2005 and my own article for the Humanitarian Practice Network.
The basic message is we need to invest more in the transmission of information to the people most affected by disasters. No surprises there, but this report goes into the practical details a little more than the others mentioned above, and is definitely worth the time.
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Could not agree more – Imogen Wall’s report should be on the shelf of everyone working in communication with affected populations. Don’t publish a newsletter or set up a bulletin board without aborbing the lessons in this report.
Matt Bannerman
2 Jan 07 at 11:26
[...] From Paul Currion comes the pointer to a wonderful new report, The Right to Know – The Challenge of Public Information and Accountability in Aceh and Sri Lanka, now available in the Peace Library. This study breaks the downward communication challenge in post-tsunami Aceh and Sri Lanka into four main areas. The first looks at the nature of communication problems between organisations and communities. The second covers mass information campaigns, including an overview of the information channels in Aceh and Sri Lanka and how best to use them. The third section investigates complaints mechanisms, and, finally, the fourth section is a brief glance at what has been done to bridge information gaps in Aceh and Sri Lanka. [...]
InfoShare Research Unit » Blog Archive » The Right to Know - The Challenge of Public Information and Accountability in Aceh and Sri Lanka
21 Jan 07 at 7:38
Hi Paul,
The link to The Right to Know does not seem to work anymore. Do you know of any place I can get this PDF from?
SH
Sanjana Hattotuwa
14 Nov 07 at 9:09
Good to see the Tsunami Envoy site closed up shop without any redirects, isn’t it? I’ve updated the link on this post, but you can find the report here.
Paul Currion
14 Nov 07 at 16:40
[...] previously wrote about Imogen Wall’s post-tsunami report The Right To Know: The Challenge of Public Information and Accountability in Aceh and Sri Lanka, which laid out the [...]
humanitarian.info » Paper, Rock, Scissors, Information
27 Oct 08 at 9:29