Flood, famine and mobile phones in the Economist
Quite a long time ago, I posted the story of a starving tribesman who emailed a bunch of people to try and get assistance. The Economist has finally caught up, as it opens this article on technology in humanitarian relief with a similar story.
“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”
A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist? No, Mr Sokor is a much sharper communicator than that. He texted this appeal from his own mobile phone to the mobiles of two United Nations officials, in London and Nairobi. He got the numbers by surfing at an internet café at the north Kenyan camp.
The rest of the article then pretty much re-treads my blog (ahem) in an overview of some of the big issues in the sector. Unsurprisingly it focuses on the easy stuff – hardware, particularly telecoms – and misses the more interesting issues. In a single paragraph the article does identify some ways in which improved telecommunications have improved relief operations:
Now, when an emergency occurs, the first people on the ground are often computer geeks, setting up telephone networks so other aid agencies can do their stuff. Donors keep track of supplies on spreadsheets and send each other SMS messages: this road has been attacked by bandits, that village cut off by floods. Transport agencies announce helicopter flights by e-mail. Aid providers can find out where exactly on an incoming ship their medical supplies are, saving hours hanging round the docks. Aid donors find it easier to locate the victims of disaster; and victims queue as eagerly for mobile-phone access as they do for food.
As a result, the organisation of aid is changing.
Well, quite – except that the changes started ten years ago, there’s a whole new set of changes on the way, and we still haven’t solved the problems created by the last set. So what does the article say about all this?
There’s a lot of blanket assertions in the article, such as “Better communications also favour information-sharing and co-ordination between agencies… Things like e-mail service and satellite links help to herd the cats.” That doesn’t tally with the experience of the Humanitarian Information Centres, for whom capturing and sharing data from the agencies is like pulling teeth, and it doesn’t tally with the findings of the ECB assessment, which painted a picture of NGO staff flooded with email, still attending too many “co-ordination” meetings, and limited improvements in information-sharing of any substance.
And as Hugo Slim of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue points out, technology increases the flow of information not just to workers in the field, but to offices in New York or London; this may tempt bosses to micro-manage from afar – which can be disastrous.
Headquarters appear to be largely uninterested in micromanagement, so unless there’s some evidence to back that up, I find it difficult to take a serious concern. Headquarters offices have an extractive relationship with their staff working in the field – so although those staff have access to more information, it’s not thanks to headquarters.
In addition, the overwhelming focus on vertical information flow – e.g. between field and headquarters – is at the expense of horizontal flow – e.g. between different field offices, organisations working in the same response, or colleagues in neighbouring countries, all of whom may have valuable experience to share. The technology is actually cementing in place the hierarchical structures that need to be demolished if aid agencies are to survive in the 21st-century.
The article then moves onto the role of “Those Ingenious Victims”, acknowledging that local people and communities affected by disasters usually provide almost all their own immediate assistance and suggesting that “Their ingenuity is likely to change disaster response by rich-world donors in unexpected ways”. I tend to agree, but the article then describes the least expected way you could choose – the extensively-documented spread of mobile telephones.
There are no actual examples of how mobile telephony has affected disaster victims (as opposed to anybody else), but it then moves on to mention cash distributions – an issue which I think is critical to the sector right now, but has almost nothing to do with technology. There’s a brief paragraph mention of family location, citing the Red Cross’ fairly average familylinks site (a missed opportunity to discuss the PeopleFinder development that came out of Hurricane Katrina), and then it moves on to an interesting Zimbabewan diaspora project called mukuru, through which Zimbabweans can “order and pay for goods such as petrol online – and have them delivered to family members back home.”
This is fascinating, but it’s got nothing to do with humanitarian relief. Basically, the article struggles to find any examples of technology use by the victims of disaster changing the aid paradigm – as do most of us. I have no doubt that something will be changing, although I’m not as optimistic as Toby Porter at Save the Children (who I know is a very smart guy), who’s quoted as saying
In the humanitarian operation of the future… beneficiaries of emergency aid will use technology to tell us what they need – cash, food, or education – find out from us what to expect, and track its arrival, just as we can track an order from Amazon.com now.
This is based on the assumption that if only we had more technology, we’d be able to do these things; in fact this isn’t true (as anybody who has read the Social Life of Information can tell you) and we could do these things right now with the available technology – if we really wanted to. Questions about political will, absorptive capacity, organisational change and the cultural location of technology are completely missing. Let’s be clear, things will change – but what Toby is describing is just an improved version of business as usual, rather than a fundamental re-organisation of how the aid community works.
The Economist believes that the story of Mohammed Sokor texting UN officials is “a sign that technology need not create a digital divide” – although it doesn’t tell us if the UN officials bothered to text him back. The story notes that “the WFP did boost rations in the Dagahaley refugee camp, albeit citing other reasons” – not surprising, since a text message really isn’t a good enough reason to revise a distribution plan. I imagine that the rations were increased on the basis of WFP staff on the ground re-assessing the situation, rather than technology empowering beneficiaries. But the Economist buys into the classic technotopian vision:
The age-old scourge of famine in the Horn of Africa had found a 21st-century response; and a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been reversed.
No it hadn’t, and no it hadn’t. The response to famine was exactly the same as it has always been – send more food. Mohammed Sokor is in exactly the same position of supplication as he would have been ten years ago, only now his begging letter is a text message that can be quickly deleted, rather than the “crumpled note” passed on by hand. The aid world is about power relations, with beneficiaries at the bottom of the pile, and there are limits to how much technology can change that. The “familiar flow of authority” is still intact, except now it comes with a customised ringtone.
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Paul – I did not read the Economist article as yet. How much of the successful information sharing (this road is under attack, flight arrives at 2 p.m.) requires only simple text messages and nothing else? So for example the information about the road under attack may be of interest to someone else 24 hours later? If so the text message will not be sufficient to disseminate this information? The mukuru idea is interesting. I agree that it is independent of aid but having such a capability can be exploited? The Berkeley iCare project for example was going to use Amazon’s catalog system for their request management – an interesting way to exploit existing technology.
Louiqa
30 Jul 07 at 6:12
Probably easiest to break your questions up into pieces:
- You probably wouldn’t send out an SMS saying “This road is under attack” – by the time you’d confirmed the attack, it would be long over. This is one of the big difficulties with security information – timeliness versus accuracy. I think that information about an attack would be more useful as part of building a picture of the patterns of attacks, rather than immediate attention. What you would send out would be a more general security alert, e.g. “This area is now considered Phase 3 security”.
- Flight arrivals and departures SMS makes a lot of sense, and would be a one-off thing – nobody would be interested in it except the people on the flight and their organisations, and nobody would be interested in it 24 hours later. However you wouldn’t be able to rely on text messages to send that information as you can’t guarantee receipt, so it depends on the stance of the organisation managing the flights. UNHAS used to expect passengers to take an active role in checking flight times, rather than pushing the info out to them – I don’t know whether this has changed.
- Mukuru will work well in a situation like Zimbabwe, e.g. very slow onset, where the infrastructure is still operating fairly reasonably. In a sudden onset accompanied with degradation of infrastructure (earthquake, tsunami, etc) such a mechanism would likely be overwhelmed like everything else, and the question then becomes – how quickly can it re-establish itself? I don’t know how Mukuru operates yet, so I don’t know in that case.
- On iCare and other initiatives, I’m going to do a separate post shortly. However the one thing I would say is that request management is not what people seem to think it is. The reason that the big agencies have come to dominate the sector is because of economies of scale – although the transaction costs are negligible in a web-based system such as Mukuru, the logistics cost-per-piece is significantly higher. For example, WFP can distribute more effectively to 4 million people by aggregating and distributing in bulk quantities, which is why we end up with duplications and gaps in the system – they’re an inevitable part of large-scale distributions.
Paul Currion
31 Jul 07 at 8:20
The first thing that leaps out at me is the fact that someone has access to the Internet and a mobile phone, but not food. And that geeks are the first ones on the ground in emergencies? Have we got our priorities wrong somewhere? Despite being a geek, I sometimes wonder if we’ve gotten a bit carried away with technological. I would definitely prefer to spend less time stuck behind my computer.
Never-the-less, I still believe that technology can do good things for the aid world. (otherwise I wouldn’t be developing databases for NGOs!)
I agree that all of the examples given are just people using new tools (which as you said, aren’t actually that new), to do the same jobs slightly more efficiently. In order to take full advantage of new technology, you have to implement systematic change, which is a huge organizational challenge.
There is an interesting article on Mastering the Three Worlds of Information Technology. This article uses the analogy of old factories which were run by a single steam engine, all the equipment was powered off a single huge rotating drive shaft, and had to be arranged in a certain manner accordingly. When electric motors were first introduced, they simply replaced the power source for the equipment. Eventually people realize that they were now free to arrange the equipment more efficiently, according to the manufacturing process. It then compares this to the different way in which technology can lead to first small piecemeal change, and then overall systematic change.
It feels like the humanitarian industry is still stuck in an old mindset, and isn’t allowing technology to revolutionize the way it works.
I think UNHAS is a great example of how technology has improved the way things work, but there is room for so much more improvement. Sure flight reservations can be emailed in, and confirmations can be emailed out to the organizations. However, in one case I saw, the entire flight schedule was only managed on Excel spreadsheets, and to make things easier for the UNHAS staff, they insist on each organization having a single UNHAS contact person (which is quite understandable). This mean that for a person to reserve a flight, they had to fill out a form, give it to their organization’s contact person, who typed out the UNHAS form, emailed it to UNHAS, who manually enters the flight details into their spreadsheet. Confirmations are communicated back through similar steps. With better technology (Online Booking) hey could make the process much more efficient.
But in an industry with no bottom line, what’s the point of saving money?
I absolutely agree with what you say about vertical flows of information between field offices, and between different agencies. Technology could offer so much in this respect: organizational intranets, Wikis and Blogs. But regardless of what technology we have, it will be stifled unless there is proper organizational support for it, which usually has to come from the head offices (but doesn’t really seem to be).
Another problem is that the vertical flows of information tend to only be one way, and the summaries and results of reporting often don’t get passed back down to the people on the ground, or to the beneficiaries. The focus is usually on reporting to donors, and seldom to beneficiaries. The people at the bottom of the hierarchies may not have access to the information which they helped to collect. Beneficiaries may be surveyed, but how often are they given the results?
I think that technology could be used to improve multi-directional information flow in the aid world, and provide more accountability to beneficiaries.
I wonder if the thinking about Help Desk Ticketing Software instead of Request Tracking would be useful. Or maybe that still reinforces the power imbalance for the beneficiaries? How do you see technology implementing positive systematic change in the aid world? Can it? Or can it just make the existing systems more efficient?
I wrote a post thinking about the idea of Aid 2.0. My ideas still have their issues, and I’m sure you’ll have some comments regarding “economies of scale” too. However I’m mainly thinking in a development, rather than a humanitarian, framework.
Michael
2 Aug 07 at 6:02
I thought the article more than a little patronizing when it suggests
London recipients of a request by SMS for aid were “bemused” by a
“21st-century response” to African famine. The interesting aspect
that the article touches on is the use of communications for lobbying
about aid, rather than logistics.
Perhaps the best way to use IT for disaster prevention in the long
term would be to use it to help establish efficient, representative
government and an efficient media. Government planning is needed to
prepare for disasters and when they occour access to media is needed
to lobby for assistance. This is one thought behind my proposal to
use IT for remote Australian indigenous communities.
Tom Worthington
4 Aug 07 at 14:37
This is my comment I placed in the blog entry:
“The benefits of easier surveillance are manifold. Take two cases: since the tsunami, Sri Lanka’s largest telephone company has started an early-warning system which would send SMS messages to every mobile phone in an area at risk of flooding.” This is an inaccurate statement by the author. Area based alerting via GSM can be achieved only through Cell Broadcasting (CB), which is yet to be activated in Sri Lanka.
This paragraph was directly extracted from the Dialog website: ” It can be used to issue customized alerts to selected recipients instantaneously, and is compliant with the internationally accepted alerting protocol – CAP.”.
There’s a big difference between “selected recipients” vs “every mobile phone”.
Sometime wonder if journals are simply for commercial hype and not for scientific facts?
The early warning system deployed by Dialog as part of their CSR program was truely for the Government of Sri Lanka; namely the Disaster Early Warning Network (DEWN). I have to agree that DEWN is capable of issuing SMS alerts to selected mobile phones to warn of Floods and other hazards. However, I have my doubts that Gov of Sri Lanka is actually using it.
Nuwan Waidyanatha
4 Aug 07 at 14:40
Here in Iceland the department of Civil Defense has written into their procedures for alerting people of a volcanic eruption the use of cell based alerting. They have practiced this in large scale evacuation drills where all mobile phones within a particular cell range get an SMS and all landline based phones get a recorded message. This has proven to be a much more effective way to alert than the old-style horns that used to sound alarm. I have to admit that hearing every mobile phone and every landline phone beep at the same time really is effective
We use the same system to alert our SAR volunteers, although they are a predefined set of people and the phone system basically sends the alert/message to the list of people (if I remember it does 25 SMS receipients at a time, since the teleco’s can process bulk messages of 25 people at a time). Alerting around 1000 people on a predefined list takes about 3 minutes.
Of course this kind of alerting mechanisms can only be built in close cooperation with the local teleco providers, making sure they provide access to bulk alerts, info on phones within a cell tower, etc.
Gisli Olafsson
4 Aug 07 at 14:41
Interesting subjects. Particularly as I sit here in the West Country
following the so called flood event that took place just over a week ago.
350,000 people without fresh drinking water, 50,000 houses without
electricity and numerous roads blocked, bridges washed away etc etc. Only 3
died fortunately. The emergency services were overwhelmed and people helped
themselves and each other because no-one else was going to do it (as it
takes time to gear up and respond to any emergency regardless of whether it
is a local response or an external one). The only major NGO that was and
still is involved is the Red Cross.
The comments in the article about email overload is a way of working, blind
copies, email everyone everything because it might be important or of use
to someone. Too many co-ordination meetings, well coordination meetings do
need to be held and perhaps the underlying statement should read ‘too many
meetings that acheive nothing’ although this situation is not specific to
an emergency.
NGO’s also compete with each other, they compete for the same funding, to
be the best, for all sorts of reasons, which of course are barriers to
horizontal information flow. Just as a Corporate produces a new product to
expand its customer base, so NGO’s move into different areas to expand
their capability, widen fundraising opportunities, raise their profile etc,
creating even more competition.
Technology has its place, its how people use it that is important and also
whether they have the ability and capacity to use it.
Did a little old lady sitting in a flooded house in Gloucester use a mobile
phone to call her family who then came to collect her? Who knows? If she
did, it served a purpose.
Brian Everard
4 Aug 07 at 14:42
Thanks for the comment, Brian. I think you hit the nail on the head
when you say:
I think that the article is weakest in identifying these social and organisational contexts in which the technology is implemented. I believe that investing in our organisations’ capacity is essential – and I’m happy to have worked with NetHope on key issues such as training development – but I also think that we need to keep one eye out for how the same technology is going to change beneficiaries’ lives, and how we can adapt our response to to those changes.
Paul Currion
4 Aug 07 at 14:44
For what it is worth, we here at the office have had a running debate on
BlackBerries, technology and changes in the speed of our work in the
legal profession — usually when we are stuck here late at night or
being called in on the weekend.
I have always taken the position, since I first encountered this subject
in college, that technology of almost any form is essentially benign,
but what people do not like about it is that technology has a weird way
of stripping away social constructs that we as people leave in place
because, for whatever reason or heuristic, we don’t want to see how
things are really structured or occurring. Law and economics scholars
sometime refer to this as the cost of costing.
Take the BlackBerry – the bane of lawyers and executives. Well, it is
actually really helpful. Many times it has allowed me to send an e-mail
to someone on a thought I just had, or answer something quickly while
out of the office. Yet, it also exposes the power relationships
between, say, my superiors at our law firms and us (the attorneys). People say they
hate their BlackBerry, but it is impossible to divorce this piece of
technology from the social construct that is the modern workplace.
This is a simple example. The ones noted by Mr. Everard are far more
complex, but I suspect, in agreement with Paul’s comments, a significant
aspect of the cell phone is the larger social construct.
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