humanitarian.info

The Disaster Resource Network at the World Economic Forum is an initiative that aims to network the private sector in support of disaster response activities. Generally speaking I’m strongly in favour of this kind of engagement, as long as everybody’s agenda is kept on the table, and it seems like there’s been a proliferation of private-public initiatives of this sort in the last few years. Only time will tell which ones really deliver – in the meantime, it can get distracting.

DRN has just released the report (.doc, 350k) from an interesting survey on the use of ICT in emergencies, based on a desk review, survey and interviews. (Disclosure: I was one of the interviewees.) There’s no revelations in the actual findings, so you might want to skip to the bottom for the recommendations on private sector engagement.

In particular, there are a couple of clear points about providing personnel which emphasise that any contributions need to be based on matching up private and public sector requirements, rather than each side assuming that it knows what the other needs to be effective. DRN will be following this up with more discussions with key actors, including the UN Foundation.