Numbers Over Georgia
I promised myself that I’d blog every single day while I was working in Georgia. It should be fairly obvious that I didn’t. I can’t say that I was super productive while I was in Tbilisi – for a variety of reasons, including particularly dysfunctional co-ordination, but also because of the basic difficulty of getting good information in conflict situations.
In a natural disaster, government agencies and international organisations are usually relatively comfortable to share information about the situation – but in a conflict, they clam up tighter than my wallet around Christmas. This is because natural disasters have fewer political implications than complex emergencies; while in a natural disaster the worst thing you can say about a government is that they’re negligent, in a conflict situation the government is usually a belligerent,
This means that timely / reliable / accurate information is hard to come by in Georgia, as Ivan points out and Ethan overviews (is that a verb?). I find it hard to get too worked up about the lack of “citizen war reporters” even though it is my fervent hope that the web is going to change the way we do business in both complex emergencies and natural disasters. My lack of work-up is simply because even if there were shedloads of citizen journalists covering these events, I would still treat them exactly the same as any other information source – which is to say, I wouldn’t trust them at all.
As an example, the single most critical humanitarian information issue in Georgia was the numbers and locations of people displaced by the conflict. This was problematic for a number of reasons:
- Nobody had a clue how many people had been displaced by the conflict. There were multiple government agencies involved in looking after the IDPs (frequently a euphemism for “ignoring them”, of course), each with their own figures, none of which tallied with the figures that UNHCR or the Red Cross had; and of course nobody in the humanitarian community had bothered to sit down and agree on a number we could all work to. Lesson from Afghanistan, folks: your numbers are never going to be 100% accurate, and it’s better just to agree to a number and get to planning than continually be running after the latest figures – which are also going to be wrong.
- Nobody wanted to talk about the IDPs left over from the previous round of conflict in 1992-93; a staggering 220,000 people (not 100% accurate, of course – just run with it!) have been rotting in terrible conditions for the last 16 years, and some of their stories can be found on IDP Voices. Nearly all of us who were new to Georgia found this astonishing, since it raised a rather difficult question: what the *&%$ has the government and the UN been doing for the last 16 years? It also confuses the picture because in purely humanitarian terms many of these “old caseload” IDPs were in a worse situation than the “new caseload” – and many of the “normal” citizens live in conditions as bad as either.
- For both old and new caseloads, the main priority is ensuring their basic shelter, which comes under the Emergency Shelter cluster. Unfortunately the UN in Georgia had decided that they didn’t want to activate the cluster system (because it’s a bit of a hassle and you have to actually take responsibility for your actions) but they did want to use some of the cluster tools (particularly the ones that give you a fat sack of cash to spend). This meant that it was like stepping into a time machine to 2004 – you remember, when “co-ordination” was a competition to see who could hold as many meetings as possible with as few outcomes as possible.
- Notwithstanding the co-ordination problem, nobody had a clue what to do with all them displaced. The government unveiled a not unreasonable resettlement plan for the new caseload at the start of September, but that plan rapidly ran aground on the harsh reality that the stock and state of public buildings in Georgia are likely not sufficient to house the IDPs according to basic humanitarian standards, even on a short-term basis. (Some interesting discussion on this at the Social Science in the Caucasus blog.) The question is whether that government plan can be reshaped into a more realistic framework that will engage the entire humanitarian community as well as being attractive to donors…
One of the things about shelter issues is that they tend to get worse the longer you leave them. Conditions deteriorate, particularly when people are housed in buildings that were never designed for residential use. In this case, many of the new caseload had been placed in schools and kindergartens around Tbilisi and other towns – which meant that we also had to deal with the fact that those institutions were needed for the start of the new school year. This was a particular tension for UNICEF, who often run a “Back To School” program – which wouldn’t look too good if there weren’t any schools to go back to. In addition winters in Georgia can get unpleasant, especially the closer you get to mountains, and thus another constraint on resettlement.
You might have noticed that there wasn’t much talk about information in this blog post. That’s because there wasn’t much information, as I explained previously. We got hold of the complete set of school locations from the MInistry of Education (shape files ahoy!) but nobody seemed that interested. We tried to persuade the different actors – Red Cross, UNHCR, Ministries various – to consolidate the figures for collective centres and the IDPs therein, but with little luck. Paolo Palmero from OCHA had gathered a lot of data during his 2005 visit, but none of it seemed to be circulating in the agencies.
Summary version: this response showed yet again the importance of investing in information resources before an emergency hits. That doesn’t just mean getting loads of satellite images (although UNOSAT did some impressive work on damage levels) but investing in relationships with government, relationships that can be leveraged quickly to mutual benefit. It means having a basic picture already in place – locations of schools, for example – that you can then overlay new data on top of – such as the estimated IDP numbers in those schools. This really needs a collective approach – one agency alone isn’t sufficient to achieve success, although you need a focal point for the effort – but it continues to make me wonder if we should be thinking about setting up an organisation that collects and disseminates operational data like this.
At least that would avoid me feeling like a numpty, turning up at meetings with my tiny spreadsheet of schools that might need some watsan rehabilitation…
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[...] frustrations on the situation there. One particular quote stood out to me (though you should really read it all): “In a natural disaster, government agencies and international organisations are usually [...]
Ushahidi.com Blog » Political Conflict vs Natural Disasters
22 Sep 08 at 2:33
Nice grumpy post Paul. Interested to hear what you were doing in Georgia, and sorry I didn’t know you were there. We probably overlapped.
Agree on your warcitjourno thoughts – and add that not only professional journalists but a lot of humanitarians and government people had poor information sources as well. This isn’t surprising to me either. I’m more interested in resetting expectations for what cit media, or regular media for that matter, can do in such circumstances.
I wish I could say that the fact of functioning, redundant info networks + citizen media and sousveillance + humanitarians and activists + good mainstream media = panopticon of conflict, but that’s going to remain a theory for a long time. Practice will be that we get pieces and bits from new sources that make it a little bit easier to understand what’s happening, assuming that we’re attuned to it and also coming up with projects that can do something useful with that information.
I know for instance that the government of Georgia was sending out mass SMS messages to tell people where to go and what to do. They might not have always been timely though, and their effects might not have always been desired – because not many people in Georgia really trust their government. Imagine you get a text from Saakashvili saying – the Russians are patrolling the exurbs of Tbilisi but are not coming into the city, and the bombing is only hitting the outskirts, don’t flee. What would you do? I’d start packing my bags.
As far as refugees goes – I first visited Georgia in 1996 as a photographer. I was working on a series about IDP and refugee populations displaced by various Caucasus wars: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Prigorodniy district of North Ossetia/Ingushetia, Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh and so forth. The pictures were mediocre but the lesson I took away was that IDP populations were essentially being held captive by authorities as political pawns. They weren’t resettled, reintegrated, or given new residency and work permits. Instead they were isolated and put in limbo. As far as I know, that’s still the case. The humanitarians I met at the time knew it, and probably, still know it. But you won’t catch governments talking about them in those terms.
Last comment – whether it’s 7000 or 10,000 families of IDPs, there’s a weird disconnect between the size of the give to the government of Georgia (let’s call them GoG) and the overall number. $ 1 billion from the USG plus EU money plus the World Bank offer is much more than reconstruction and rehabilitation; it’s economic stabilization and a whole lot more. Given that, it’s downright startling that the shelter problems seem so drawn out and difficult. Yes, it’s a temperate zone, and yes, a lot of housing stock is shoddy, but you’d think with so much cash on offer we’d see some creative solutions for resettlement that get people in semi-permanent shelter faster than the end of 2009. The real question is: will this latest batch of IDPs be allowed and encouraged to resettle and start new lives, or will they, too be in limbo for the next 20 years?
Ivan Sigal
22 Sep 08 at 11:39
Hi Ivan -
My general position is that in a crisis, “good” information is always going to be hard to come by. What worries me about some of the web 2.0 discussion is that there’s an assumption not just that web = better but that more = better, which simply isn’t the case. For me, more = more confusing… and the “bits and pieces” model that you mention is going to remain the norm, just with more sources available. So the question remains the same – how do we parse and prioritise those sources to get the most out of them?
On the shelter question: to be fair, there are practical constraints on shelter if it involves a) resettling people, b) improving existing stock and c) developing new stock. There are political and legal questions around resettlement (as well as the obvious social issues), and there are blank physical constraints on construction that can’t be beaten no matter how much money you throw at it. My prediction: a lot of the new caseload will be joining the old caseload in semi-permanent collective centres. But I hope I’m wrong.
Paul Currion
22 Sep 08 at 22:38
Great post. Thanks.
On this:
”This really needs a collective approach – one agency alone isn’t sufficient to achieve success, although you need a focal point for the effort – but it continues to make me wonder if we should be thinking about setting up an organisation that collects and disseminates operational data like this.”
Perhaps you mean that the UN, and the like, meaning other stakeholders who are in the picture, are not a learning organisation/learning organisations. ?
Senge’s view of a learning organisation has five pillars:
personal mastery
shared vision
mental models
learning in groups and teams
systems thinking (dynamic systems)
Perhaps these five should be fundamental to individual performance evaluation systems, designed and rigorously implemented. These five should also be part of project and programme evaluation, as well as a basis for donor participation in the initiatives donors fund.
I think if the above were to be true, what you tell us about in your post would be different.
Nadejda Loumbeva
23 Sep 08 at 17:58
Possibly it would be true – and definitely it would be desirable – however I think it could be solved by much simpler means. Organisational change is a long-term process, but there are steps that could be taken that would fix this very quickly. The UN has tried to set up some of these fixes, but they haven’t been successful (for a number of reasons) and most importantly they aren’t as accessible as they should be if we were serious about making a change in the sector.
In this context I wonder – the learning would only be as good as the weakest part of the group, so is it possible to build collective learning solutions prior to individual ones?
Paul Currion
24 Sep 08 at 8:46
[...] over at Humanitarian.info I thought it justified that I post him instead. Anyway, Paul recently posted about his work in Georgia and South Ossetia and for those of you interested in an insightful and clearly written first hand account of the [...]
Humanitarian.info’s first hand account of the humanitarian response in South Ossetia « Aid Worker Daily
24 Sep 08 at 23:11