humanitarian.info

(ZPP Director Jestina Mukoko, in red, and ZPP Provincial Coordinator Brodreck Takawira, in white shirt, entering court in Harare, 24 December 2008 [Source: BBC])

Earlier this month I wrote about my friend Jestina Mukoko, Director of Zimbabwe Peace Project, who on 3 December 2008 was abducted from her home near Harare.

Since then, despite a very loud international outcry from goverments and civil society, no information about her wherabouts was provided by the authorities. The Commissioner of the Zimbabwean Police denied they had her in any premises under their jurisdiction, and then ignored a High Court order to cooperate with her lawyers in finding her. One journalist reported that the Police were very polite to concerned citizens telephoning them to ask what was going on: “We will trace your call you sellouts, we will make you sh*** in your pants”. Nice.

Well, it now turns out the Police have had her all along! From Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights, today:

Lawyers responded with a comprehensive but non-exhaustive search of a number of police stations, including Mabelreign, Marlborough, Avondale, Borrowdale, Mbare, Stodart, Matapi, Harare Central, Braeside, Rhodesville and Highlands police stations. By speaking to various police officials, examining Detention Books and requesting cell head counts, it was established that at least fourteen (14) individuals of the total number subjected to enforced disappearances, twelve (12) of whom appeared on the list of confirmed abductees, were being detained in custody at Mabelreign, Marlborough, Mbare, Stodart, Matapi, Braeside, Rhodesville and Highlands police stations. These individuals include Jestina Mukoko and her two (2) colleagues from the Zimbabwe Peace Project, who are being held at different police stations.

I’m relieved that Jestina is alive, and her family must be totally overwhelmed. But it’s not going to be an easy road to getting her back home and back to work. There are reports citing The Zimbabwean Pravda saying that Jestina will today face trial for recruiting people to undergo military training for the purpose of otherthrowing the goverment. Because it’s so jaw-droppingly craven, I’ll clip a portion of The Herald‘s story here, but read the rest yourself:

A statement from the Zimbabwe Republic Police yesterday said some time in April this year, Manuel allegedly recruited Ricardo Hwasheni, a police constable based at Waterfalls in Harare, to undergo military training in Botswana with a view to forcibly deposing the Government and replace it with one led by Morgan Tsvangirai. Manuel allegedly tasked Hwasheni to recruit four other policemen, promising them US$2 000 each. Later, the statement said, Manuel and Kaseke, who is Hwasheni’s cousin, went to MDC-T’s headquarters at Harvest House, where a man identified only as Josen interviewed Hwasheni.After the interview, Josen allegedly told Hwasheni that he would hear from him within two weeks or that Mukoko would contact him.

In June, the statement says, Hwasheni met Mukoko at her offices in Milton Park in Harare where she further interviewed him before handing him over to Takawira, who told him that he would be contacted within two weeks. The statement further alleged that a man who had been sent by Mukoko met Hwasheni at Girls’ High School in Harare and gave him 200 pula and some Zimbabwean dollars for transport to Botswana where he was to meet a man known as Special. Hwasheni crossed into Botswana in July through the Plumtree border post and met Special at Ramokgwebana Border Post. Special took Hwasheni to a military camp in Botswana where he underwent training in the use of FN and AK rifles, military tactics as well as political lessons together with five other MDC-T recruits. There were, according to the statement, 50 other recruits undergoing military training in the same camp. Hwasheni returned to Zimbabwe with specific instructions to study the mood of junior police officers inasfar as loyalty was concerned and the mood of the public towards Government.

What are the narrative elements here? So far, we have:

1. A single statement from a junior Zimbabwean Police Officer; from,
2. The same law enforcement agency that has openly lied on paper, participated in and failed to investigate a wave of abductions, and directly ignored the the courts; involving,
3. A mystery protagonist known only as “Special”, marshalling a cast of people from an organisation that squarely beat Zimbabwe’s dicatator at the ballot box; and,
4. Staff from organisation that has evidenced tens of thousands of incidences of politically-motivated violence and human rights abuses being kept incommunicado in secret detention facilities by known torturers; and,
5. The alleged support of the only government sharing a border with Zimbabwe that has sustained open and trenchant criticism of the regime’s behaviour.

Sounds like a trustworthy, watertight case to me, and I’m sure that the Harare courts will scrub the bias from it, and test the evidence with their customary rigour. After all, Mugabe was right about the Wonga Coup, wasn’t he? Saracasm aside, a few days after Jestina’s abduction, one sharp commentator and Zimbabwean political insider argued that this would be the likely outcome of the this wave of abductions:

I now believe strongly that the next time we see Gandi Mudzingwa, Jestina Mukoko and the two staff members from the ZPP will be in the company of the eleven or 15 MDC activists who were also abducted as I explained above and as widely reported elsewhere. They will be appearing together as either “co-conspirators or architects of the insurgency” in the evidence to be put forward [to SADC] by Mugabe.

And there’s more, before today’s news:

…[the Attorney General's office] is being readied to carry out the mass prosecutions of MDC “terrorists” (I am taking bets on how long it will be before we start hearing this word, reading it in the Herald). From the silence of SADC on the matter, it would appear that there is nothing much anybody can do about it, except maybe shout a bit now and again.

I disagree. This conspiracy is convoluted even by the desperate standards of Mugabe’s regime, and will fall as flat in the courts as it will in the public’s eye. The question is whether this will matter, and how we can make it matter.

I promised Lorant Czaran¹ that I would post something about ReliefWeb‘s job vacancies mash-up – and then realised that it would fit perfectly with this discussion about innovation. I’ve written about ReliefWeb before, but it’s not exactly noted for cutting edge web 2.0 efforts. However, no matter what its faults, it’s the single most important website for the humanitarian community, which is why it’s good to see them trying some new approaches.

I’m not claiming that searching for jobs on ReliefWeb is an especially humanitarian activity, but it is an activity that a lot of humanitarians do. One of the things that I completely failed to understand about their redesign a a couple of years ago is why they relegated the Vacancies section to the bottom of the “Professional Resources” part of the site, rather than foregrounding it. The reason for foregrounding? Simply that vacancies are one of the main reasons that people go to the site in the first place.

Vacancies shouldn’t be the focus of the entire site, but they should be a focus of the user experience. Lorant and his team took a strong step forward here, introducing a new way of interacting with the site – a Google Maps mash-up which can also be downloaded as a Google Earth KML file. This is a great idea, and well executed, given ReliefWeb’s disturbingly 90s website design – but why does this fit with the innovation theme? AFter all, Google Map mash-ups aren’t exactly new, even in the humanitarian sector.

What’s innovative about it is that it shows the way forward not just for job searches but for the entire ReliefWeb site. There’s no reason why the enitire site couldn’t be organised in this way, with navigation based entirely on geography – after all, that’s the way the humanitarian community itself works. I’d love to see this approach extended to become the front page of the website, offering a way into the main Countries and Emergencies section. There’s very few parts of the site that don’t offer themselves up to a geospatial interface.

So what about those few parts that don’t – Policy and Issues, for example? Well you couldn’t do a Google Maps mash-up for those things – but why couldn’t you do a policy map instead, showing the different links between sectors and institutions? Or a tag cloud approach, showing which issues are the ones that are generating the most publications and discussion? Either of these would offer a better user experience that would make ReliefWeb not just important but innovative as well….

1. Ex-ReliefWeb, now UN-Spider, which is the most awesomest UN acronym ever, by the way [↩]

Innovation! I’ve been writing and you’ve been reading (and occasionally commenting):

Part 1: What is innovation in the humanitarian sector?

Part 2: Why is innovation in the sector unsuccessful?

Part 3: Is innovation always a good thing?¹

Interlude 1: Why are there so many questions about innovation?

Interlude 2: Are we really talking about the same innovation?

Part 4: So how do we successfully innovate?

Also available shortly: Growing Innovation in a Networked Garden, in the Peace IT! newsletter.

1. Short answer: No. [↩]

I promised in the last post that I would present some suggestions that have come out of reader comments as to how the humanitarian community might generate more successful innovation. Bear in mind that I’m not promising that any of these suggestions are guaranteed to work – they’re not – or that, if they do work, they’lll be spectacularly successful.

1. Overcome fear. “Many humanitarian organizations, especially larger NGOs and the UN, fail to embrace failure. Innovation requires a willingness to fail, perhaps repeatedly. For every successful innovation there are numerous failures… People who are afraid to fail don’t innovate. They follow the rules. They preserve the status quo. The bosses who brought the best out in me were the ones who let me take risks and even fail. They didn’t punish failures other than those that were due to negligence.” – Kevin Toomer
2. Create incentives. “So, how do we know what we know and judge it, use it, teach it, reward it? Paul (and the comments/replies) wrote a whole lot about that, but some of this comes down to simple professionalism/best practice (which sometimes goes AWOL on an institutional level particularly) and some of it is that we do need a cultural change. A recognition of innovation as necessary, worth sharing, celebrating. Spectacularly hard when it’s really the grinding day-to-day of just getting stuff done or just surviving that’s most aid work, let alone the brick-wall-headbutting of preparedness in and by local communities.” – Nigel Snoad
3. Look out! “Perhaps pursuing innovation within organizations from the start is the barrier. Innovation is happening outside traditional structures, where those creative types can act as individuals, collectively .. in open source projects, mailing lists, unconferences. The loose network of creative technological humanitarians is growing, and growing more exposed. We can concentrate our efforts there for now, to the point where they can’t be ignored.” – Mikel Maron. However bear in mind that “Folks that haven’t spent time in the field have a very hard time understanding the nuances so they develop solutions that will never hold up. They waste all of our time chasing ghosts and fixing things that they think need fixing. In the mean time all we can do is watch them run around in circles.” – Jon Thompson
4. Only Connect. “I agree that the answers lies in better connections between field offices and head offices, among organizations AND ALSO between different field offices. I think that head offices could play a better role in facilitating the transfer of solutions between field offices. Currently all the interaction I have with head office and field offices in different countries has been based on personal relationships with people I have met. I do think that INGOs could do a better job of connecting their staff around the globe.” -  Michael Howden
5. Technology > Network. “I’ve been involved with a number of projects that demonstrate innovation, all focused on introducing new technology to the sector, with varying degrees of success. None of these projects were technologically innovative themselves – their innovation was in using existing technology more effectively for the benefit of the sector – and all of them relied on network effects to create the value that make their innovation more or less successful. As soon as their focus on or their leverage from networks lapses, their success starts to disappear… What made it possible for each of them to create those networks in the first place was technology, creating the possibility of overcoming many of the organisational problems that plague the sector, from organisational silos to staff turnover to insecurity in the field. It is not that technology will solve these problems, but it does offer us the possibility of working together more effectively to solve them ourselves.” – Paul Currion

So there’s a starting point based on actual practitioner experience. All of these recommendations are realistic, and can already be found in various organisations, so the question then becomes – how do we implement them in our own organisations, and spread them across the sector? Approaches will vary from organisation to organisation, location to location – but in 2009 we’d better get the message out there, because otherwise the traditional humanitarian sector is going to be left behind.

(Jestina in Geneva, 2008)

In Norton, just outside of Harare, in the early hours of yesterday morning, 15 armed men identifying themselves as police surrounded and broke into the house of Jestina Mukoko, the National Director of Zimbabwe Peace Project (ZPP).

They abducted Jestina in her nighty, without her glasses, which she needs, and without some prescription medication. Her teenage son reported the abduction to human rights organisations in Harare a few hours later. As at 0830 this morning, when I texted with ZPP staff, Jestina’s location remains unknown. Lawyers from Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights are now going from police station to police station to try and find her, or a paper trail leading to her.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2009, the 6th ISCRAM is going to be held in Göteborg, Sweden, from May 10-13. This conference series goes from strength to strength, and although I can’t be as involved as I’d like to be, I’m very proud to have been involved with these guys. So, the paper submission system for ISCRAM2009 is now open and you should start thinking about submitting. The deadline is Sunday January 11, 2009, and they’re looking for both Academic Research Papers and Practitioner Presentations.

GENERAL TRACKS AND SPECIAL SESSIONS

Papers for ISCRAM2009 cover all aspects of information systems for crisis response and management, broadly defined but still related to the 10 general tracks, and may take the form of completed research papers, research-in-progress papers as well as practitioner presentations.

• Humanitarian Actions and Operations
• Collaboration and Social Networking
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Geo-Information Support
• Intelligent Systems
• Standardization and Ontologies
• Research methods
• Technologies, Tools and Demos
• Open-track

In addition to the above general tracks, there is also 18 special sessions covering specific aspects of this domain. Please have a look at at the ISCRAM Community website for detailed information of the tracks and special sessions CFPs – you can also join the ISCRAM Facebook group.

I’ve already talked about how we need our innovation to be enduring and widespread, and how existing measures of innovation might not be especially useful. I haven’t said anything about what I consider to be innovation – and that’s probably because innovation is a lot like hard-core pornography, as per the words of Justice Potter Stewart:

I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

WIth that linkbait out of the way, and courtesy of JRA, I would present an example of what I would consider innovation. This BBC feature shows the guys that you find everywhere, not just in the ranks of Nigeria’s Repairmen – they’re the people who keep the buses running in Afghanistan, the tractors moving in Cambodia, and my car running in Montenegro.

Now, if you don’t think that what these guys do qualifies as innovation, might I suggest that you are thinking about innovation in entirely the wrong terms? Does innovation mean exciting new technology, or does it mean applying ingenuity to everyday problems? And as JRA asks, how do we harness that ingenuity more effectively? All thoughts welcome…

In fact, the world still looks to the United States for innovation. In a recent survey of venture capitalists completed by Deloitte, no other other country in the world even came close to being the world’s leader in innovation.

1. A “survey of venture capitalists”? I imagine that they would be drawing on a very specific definition of “innovation”, one that might not bear any resemblance to the actual definition – and does this mean that where there are no venture capitalists, there is no innovation?
2. It’s obvious that innovation is linked closely to particular political, economic and social systems, and that the US has an advantage – but isn’t that particular definition of innovation the one mandated by those systems?
3. If the main vehicle for spreading innovation is the free market, what happens when it’s the mania for innovation that brings a key pillar of that market to its knees? How meaningful is it to talk about being a world leader in innovation in a globalised world, if that innovation is ring-fenced for commercial advantage?

The more I think about innovation, the more questions I have.

(HT: Enterprise Resilience Management Blog, via Global Dashboard.)

I started thinking innovation in the sector in the middle of last year, after reading The Shock of the Old – patchy book, but one that helps you to think more clearly about life cycles in technology. At the start of this year, the news about InSTEDD’s Humanitarian Technology Review started me thinking about innovation again. Janet quoted the following:

Lovins had heard him speak about a Sudanese refugee camp where aid trucks dispensed water from spigots three times the diameter of the spouts on people’s jugs, which not only wasted water but created puddles that attracted mosquitoes, triggering a malaria outbreak.

I found this story a little… well, strange. If your taps are too wide for people’s jerrycans, then there’s a really simple solution – a small plastic funnel. The story horrifies me not because of the wasted water, but because the solution is so simple, so cheap and so obvious – and nobody thought of it. But apparently this problem made such an impression that

[Lovins] gathered 300 experts on refugee issues, energy generation, water systems, education, design, telemedicine (and one journalist) for a 3-day brainstorming session to tackle the larger of issue of how to improve the daily lives of millions of people “caught in the middle.”

To me this sounds like Lovins got his sledgehammer and went looking for some more walnuts. I might be being unfair on Lovins and others – this is a third-hand story, after all – but one thing has become clear to me over the last few years. As exciting as many of these new technology developments are, they still don’t seem to have had much impact on the sector.

I haven’t been in the field that much in the last couple of years, but in both Bangladesh and Georgia ICT innovations was conspicuous in its absence. The technologies that have spread are the ones that have been adopted without any prompting – mobile telephony, neo-geo, and so forth (I’m actually struggling to come up with many). There is a generation of technology innovation which is seeking to piggy-back on those (particularly the ubiquitous mobile phone) but it’s too early to tell if they will be successful (remember, successful here is defined as enduring and widespread).

This goes to the heart of my thinking about innovation – because innovation is about the application of ideas. The other thing to remember is that innovation is not inherently positive – it may in fact be a dead end, a red herring or a wild goose chase.¹ Innovation can have a net negative effect if it takes resources (including attention) away from proven technologies – like plastic funnels, for example.

1. I know that I mix my metaphors, but they’re so darn tasty. [↩]

I haven’t gotten around to writing the third part of The Innovation Fallacy yet, as I’ve been finalising some information management training for UNICEF. However I did run headfirst into the following two quotes via two of my fellow bloggers.

First, Mikel, at the UNGIWG plenary, discussing open source:

The common refrain was that “the technological problems are nearly solved, it’s the social process that’s in question”.

Then, Kevin, quoting Bruce Schneier:

If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology.

Have we still not successfully communicated the above two very fundamental points to the people who make decisions? Is the problem that we’re not sufficiently skilled social engineers? Is the humanitarian community structured precisely to avoid social engineering? Questions, questions, questions.