humanitarian.info

I did promise a couple of people that I would blog about Mikel’s talk about OpenStreetMap and Disaster Response at State of the Map, but it’s taken me a bit longer than planned. However there was a follow up on “people to people aid” that I wanted to post on following some comments from Louiqa in my previous post.

There’s been a lot of talk about how this might work, specifically in the wake of the Indian Ocean Tsunami and the Hurricane Katrina Debacle, with a couple of projects starting to work on the specifics.  The principle of P2P Aid is to connect donors directly with beneficiaries, using the power of the web to cut out the middleman – person to person, without the need for all that cumbersome bureaucracy.

There are already huge remittance flows which already serve the role that so-called “people-to-people aid” mechanisms are proposing to address. The ODI have carried out research into remittances during crises (definitely worth reading the whole briefing), and found that they’re significantly disrupted in sudden-onset disasters (although not slow-onset). In which case, the key is to help re-establish these flows, rather than create entirely new ones which might undermine the originals.

Such remittance flows already work extremely effectively and reach people who have no access to the Web at all, using facilities such as the Hawala banking system that you can find in many Muslim countries, which requires only a telephone line to operate (and in some cases, only a piece of paper). Of course, since 9/11 the US government has a mad hate on for Hawala because terrorists use it to move their money around and its outside the usual regulatory systems. Whatever.

So P2P aid isn’t necessarily as innovative as it first appears – it’s just an attempt to take the remittance principle, extend it and put it through the web. I like projects like Kiva and Mukuru, and I think they’ll work well, given time, but the question here is – can P2P aid work in an emergency response?

My main issue is with the general model. If it’s supply-driven then we’re likely to get boxes of winter clothes being shipped to Sri Lanka again, a country which is unlikely to have a winter any time soon. If it’s demand-driven then who acts as a guarantor for the request? Beneficiaries can request many things that aren’t necessarily the most appropriate for their situation, or make multiple and exaggerated claims on the assumption that their needs are likely to be only partially met. There still needs to be a “middleman” of some sort.

We might point to a site like Kiva and say that they’ve cut out the middleman, but they haven’t really. Kiva work with existing microfinance organisations on the ground to identify beneficiaries, so in reality they’re just a glossy, high-tech sponsorship charity. In an emergency situation, you are unlikely to have the resources – time, staff or cash – to be able to offer that sort of guarantee, which leaves us back with the standard model of emergency response, provided by large organisations that offer economies of scale and a basic guarantee of quality.

Whether that basic guarantee of quality is worth anything, of course, is another question…