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.
Related posts:
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.
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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
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.
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