humanitarian.info

I’m making my way through Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart‘s Fixing Failed States, something which I should probably have done a while ago.¹ The book, which is a fairly straightforward trot through some post-Washington consensus theorizing about the fate of failed states. It’s a valuable contribution to a debate which is unlikely to settle down any time soon, but – being who I am – I object to much of what I’m reading.

Even the starting point – the “failed state” – doesn’t seem to make any sense if there wasn’t a state there to begin with, but many of their set of solutions seem to be built on a number of assumptions that don’t make for very strong foundations. For the purposes of this blog – information management, remember – there’s a particularly telling example early on in the book, which is reproduced below the fold:

The presidential election of 2004 offered the Afghan population the first opportunity in their long history to elect their leader through a direct process. It also gave them a chance to leapfrog history and create a unified database of the country’s citizens based on reliable biometrics that would have enabled the state to function and increase citizens’ access to certification of their own identities.

Ah yes, biometrics. We all love biometrics, right? Well no, we don’t. The notion that a “unified database… based on reliable biometrics” would enable the state to function is more than a little bizarre, since many states seem to function quite well without. Indeed, looking at Afghanistan’s state dysfunction, it’s near-impossible to see in what way a unified database would enable it to function, and given the level of dysfunction the reverse² is true – it’s almost impossible to see how Afghanistan would enable a unified database to function.

Afghan authorities had detailed discussions with UN staff prior to the election and had urged them to use modern iris-based technology to enable the creation of a biometric database that would serve as the foundation for the country’s future planning and social policy. All of the Afghans we polled during this process viewed this identity device not as a threat to their civil liberties but as a vehicle through which to realize their identity as a citizen of the state, as well as a means to access a range of benefits and for taking part in an array of transactions…

Wow, those Afghan authorities were certainly ahead of their time! Bear in mind that in 2003 – when these “detailed discussions” were presumably taking place – even the Labour government in the UK (who love biometrics more than nearly anybody else) didn’t have the results of their first biometric enrolment trial, and were still quite wary about making claims like this. One wonders where the Afghan authorities³ were getting their information from, and whether we could see those documents.

And those Afghans “polled during the process” – so in tune with the times! Ghani and Lockhart are at pains to explain that those polled didn’t see the database as a threat to their civil liberties, so clearly they’re aware that there are a large number of people who do see such databases as such a threat. Even the most vigorous proponents of these schemes acknowledge that there are serious privacy issues involved, and most people in (for instance) the UK soon become concerned when you explain the details to them; so it seems strange that nobody polled in Afghanistan expressed any disquiet.

In the technological age, where investment in information provides a basis of further savings, the UN system refused our request and insisted on a manual process that was based on giving out cardboard cards and identifying recipients through inked fingerprints. Thousands of people registered to vote multiple times and acknowledged to the press that they had voted more than once. The same process was repeated during the parliamentary elections in 2005 at a cost of approximately $400 million… The alternative electronic system could have been put in place for $140 million and would have generated an estimated $80 million in its first year by issuing passports, drivers’ licenses, and identity cards. Identification of civil servants on a reliable basis was likely to eliminate the problem of “ghost workers” and therefore to reduce the civil service burden by a quarter and provide a basis for human resource planning. The system would also have provided a basis for an e-governance system, whereby citizens could track their interactions with the state. Simultaneously, the government would have been able to carry out user surveys on a wide range of interactions with citizens.

Yes, subsistence farmers in Helmand could have tracked their interaction with the state, something which I’m sure they’ve been waiting for. That interaction would have consisted of… nothing, and they would have tracked it using… I dunno, their iPhones? I jest. Of course they have some interaction with the state, however limited, and are likely to have more in the future, so there may be some value there. The problem with claims like these, though, is that they don’t seem to consider reality an obstacle – this system will simply be introduced and the benefits flow from it like nectar.

The UN’s excuse for not using the electronic system was that one of their donors had supplied $10 million worth of cardboard and would have been offended if it were not used.

That sounds… bizarre and unlikely. However my experience with the UN tells me that nothing is too bizarre and unlikely to be given as an excuse, so I can accept it.

Our ideas were considered too far fetched, as most of the UN officials we encountered lacked elementary schooling in the current trends in information technology. As the UN secretary general’s report of April 2006 revealed, the UN management system was completely out of date and needed significant overhaul.

It’s at this stage that descriptions of the Afghan government wander into the realm of fantasy. Just to clarify, these UN officials lacked elementary schooling in the current trends in information technology, while the Afghan authorities were so ahead of the curve that they were urging the creation of a universal database based on biometrics, something which still hasn’t been successfully implemented in any developed countries, let alone in a country where most ministries didn’t even have computers when I was there in 2002.

You can see where I’m going with this. Ghani’s professional background was in academia and with the World Bank – nothing wrong with that, but it does start to explain the technocratic undertone to this proposal (as well as his relative success as Finance Minister in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban). The technocrat firmly believes that with the right people (experts such as himself) in power and with the right technology (such as biometric databases) in place, problems such as these can be overcome.

The idea that the Afghan government – then or now – has the capacity to manage a system like this is delusional. There are a wide range of ailments in the body of the state, and while technology is an instrument to deal with at least some of these issues, a lot of other things need to be in place before the operation can begin. Perhaps somebody like Ashraf Ghani is qualified to work as an political surgeon in Afghanistan – but his operating theatre isn’t in good enough condition to carry out a complicated operation like a biometric database.⁴

Disappointingly, my blog post has again descended into sniping at people who – whether I agree with them or not – have at least thought about this, worked on this and remain committed to the project. You should read this book for the questions that it asks – perhaps especially with Haiti fresh in our minds, with the horrific opportunity it presents – but you shouldn’t necessarily accept the answers it provides. At least not without asking some of your own questions first.

1. Unfortunately I’m still traumatised from my last meeting with Ghani, which involved him storming into my office in the middle of a staff evaluation and haranguing me for 20 minutes about a dead tree. [↩]
2. The reverse reverse? I confuse myself. [↩]
3. Which in this instance I’m assuming translates roughly as “Ashraf Ghani”. [↩]
4. I should also note that I have an ideological opposition to this type of database, the reason for which I explain as simply as possible in this blog post. [↩]

Chris Blattman’s partner Jeannie is the new research director at IRC, and they’re thinking about “how to assist learning in the field — both IRC’s expat aid workers and national staff”. So here we are, ready for another go-round. What do we know about aid workers and “learning”?

1. Most aid workers learn by doing rather than by reflecting; that’s what lead them into aid work in the first place.
2. Different professions have different approaches to learning. Compare water engineers to child protection officers.
3. National staff have different approaches to learning depending on their social and economic backgrounds.
4. Different organisations have different cultures which affect how their staff will learn. Compare MSF with WHO.

One concern is when Chris says that if aid workers were learning more, “Presumably the quality of aid would benefit too”. I have yet to see any research connecting aid worker learning to improvements in the quality of aid, and I’m not even sure what that research would look like, to be honest – two extremely hard to measure metrics with a very tenuous causal link. Good luck! More worryingly, it overlooks the structural deficiencies that prevent aid workers from improving the quality of aid – but that’s a bigger argument.

Chris believes that “while most research is horrific to read… enough well-written stuff is out there to keep us all busy for a fair while.” This is not true. The quality of writing is irrelevant, it’s the style of wring that’s problematic. My apologies for being blunt, but academic research is plain boring and functionally useless for most aid workers. Your best bet is to hire a professional writer who understands the sector to rewrite academic research in styles that will be more widely appealling (and tailored to the medium of delivery, of course).

One danger of technology-focused solutions: a lot of aid workers spend a lot of time sitting at computers. Yeah, I know he says that “not everyone sits behind a computer”, but not everyone has an MP3 player either and he still think podcasts are a good idea. The last thing I want to do with my spare time is to keep sitting behind my computer. Aid workers who aren’t sitting behind computers are generally the sort of people who don’t like sitting behind computers, so they don’t want to keep sitting behind their computer either. So we have to be careful.

The two ideas that they have so far are: podcasts for Landcruiser journeys, and reading clubs for aid workers.

• Podcasts, sure, I do think they’re a good idea. I like podcasts, but I listen to podcasts that have nothing to do with my job, because podcasts are entertainment. If you’re chugging 6 hours through the forest on bad roads, do you really want to listen to a detailed discussion about a book on nutrition? I’m not sure, but worth a go.
• Reading clubs – myself, I hate book clubs, but I’m probably not the target audience. If you emphasise the social element, then people will go for it, but I’m just not sure how it’s possible to create a top-down learning structure like that. And when I say I’m not sure how it’s possible, I mean I don’t think it’s possible.

I just came back from a workshop in an unnamed Latin American country for an unnamed organisation. (Ha!) This is not the first workshop I’ve done, nor will it be the last (hopefully); my experience with technology in the aid world is not inconsiderable; my commitment to improving the capacity of aid workers (particularly national staff) is fairly obvious, blah blah blah. So I’ll go out on a limb, and say that this approach will work in this sector as the starting point for better learning:

1. Holding workshops in the field that bring people together across a) different organisations, b) different countries and/or c) different disciplines, focus on core transferable skills, emphasising practical skills that reflect policy. Old school!
2. Creating structures that enable the professional links developed in those workshops to be maintained more effectively over time. Call it social networking if you must, but stop looking at Facebook. This is where the technology comes in – new school!
3. Then (and this is the really, really difficult bit) let these groups define the direction of future learning. Regularly poll staff to see what they want to learn, how they want to learn and when they want to learn, and shape your approach accordingly.

There needs to be some imagination around these two approaches, a willingness for organisations to give up control of the learning process, and a long-term investment that will definitely see mixed results. Unfortunately these are three things that aid agencies are really, really bad at – however I am available for consultation should funding be in place cough cough cough.

IRIN reports on how the financial crisis is affecting the NGO community while Michael rounds up the details (and will be keeping a running tally, no doubt):

“Clearly the impact of the financial downturn on charities is widening and deepening,” said Dame Suzi Leather, chair of the Charity Commission, the independent regulator for charitable activity in England and Wales. “Some charities still face that double whammy of a drop in income as well as an increased demand for services.”

When I was last in the UK, those I spoke to in the NGO sector all had the same story to tell – budgets predicted to fall and programmes scaling back. It’s likely that the programs that will be affected are long-term development rather than emergency response, since money tends to come through for the disasters no matter what, and it’s going to be core staff that disappear while consultants take up the slack.¹ My main recommendation for the NGO community would be this: if you’re going to be receiving less money, and you’re going to be doing more work, then you need to work smarter, not harder.

The NGO community is quite smart at the tactical level – in the field, where resources are constrained, as we discussed in the series on humanitarian innovation. It’s not so smart at the strategic level – at headquarters, global or regional, where those resources are allocated and where the big picture thinking usually gets done. It’s not because there aren’t smart people thinking about key issues in the NGO community – you only need to read Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power blog to realise that there’s a very high level of analytical capacity out there. However much of that thought is directed towards the issues that the NGOs deal with, rather than the effective functioning of the NGOs themselves.

There’s been a big push in recent years towards redressing the balance – the ECB Project being the most notable example – but there are certain institutional constraints built in. One of them is that we’ve had it drummed into us for decades that spending money on the organisation is a Bad Thing. You must spend as little money as possible on the organisation, the reasoning goes, because then you’ll be spending more on the communities that you work with. The basis for this is public perception as much as anything – imagine what the average private donor would feel if they knew you were spending 50 cents in the Euro on your running costs. Those running costs have to be paid for somehow, though, which has lead to all sort of budgetary trickery to hide the fact that – gasp! – we actually pay staff. I’d argue that this is a communications failure, that it’s an inevitable byproduct of the way that we treat private donors in general², but that’s (yet again) a discussion for another time.

Since this is supposed to be a blog primarily about humanitarian information management (although that feels increasingly tangential these days…), I suppose I should point out that investing in technology can offer ways of leveraging scarce resources. Although I tend to agree that the productivity revolution promised by technology hasn’t actually arrived yet, there are a range of smaller impacts that are blindingly obvious. For example: if you haven’t moved most of your main office communication  to VOIP now, then why not go into the carpark with a big pile of dollar bills and set fire to them? The NGO community shouldn’t be exempt from the evolutionary algorithms that drive organisational developments. There’s a good chance that some organisations will collapse if funding streams dry up to the extent that some people fear they will – but there’s also a  good chance that some organisations will find this is the opportunity to radically change the way they do business, and they’ll come  out of that process working smarter  than they did before.

That’s the theory, anyway.

1. I could be particularly provocative and say that I’m looking forward to seeing whether the withdrawal of NGO support makes a significant difference to the lives of affected communities, but I’ll save that for later. [↩]
2. Briefly: as idiots. [↩]

I previously wrote about Imogen Wall’s post-tsunami report The Right To Know: The Challenge of Public Information and Accountability in Aceh and Sri Lanka, which laid out the case that there is a right to information in the same way as there is a right to shelter. The Red Cross World Disasters Report 2005, picked up on this theme and extended it to the technology, demonstrating that “Information and communications technology must be recognised as a form of aid in itself.” Both of these reports were entirely correct, yet the humanitarian community has largely failed to address their conclusions. No surprises there.

Wall has now published (via BBC World Service Trust) a policy briefing that recapitulates and updates her original points, entitled Left in the dark: The unmet need for information in emergency response (PDF) and an accompanying article entitled After Disaster: Information for Life. While I might disagree with some of the solutions she proposes (if you think I ever agree 100% with anybody, you obviously haven’t been reading this blog long enough…), these reports should be on the shelf not just in every communications and public information unit, but all programme units as well – a reminder that our work is not just about providing food, water, shelter, but about enabling beneficiaries to regain control over their own lives.

Strictly speaking, shelter is outside the remit of this blog. However the article The Exigent City in the New York Times was an excellent piece of reporting, and I urge everybody to read it. (HT: Simmy Ross) The article closes with the following lines:

When I first contacted Cameron Sinclair, who started Architecture for Humanity with Kate Stohr in 1999, he replied with a long e-mail message that began, “You’ve stumbled upon the question of the century for those working in the built environment,” and ended with a signature line that listed his title as “Eternal Optimist.” A lot of people I spoke to afterward agreed with the first sentiment; almost no one with the second. The world is short a billion homes. Now all we need are a few million architects to help build them.

I’m not optimistic either, but nor do I agree that we need a few million architects. What we need is to help the people who need a billion homes to become their own architects – to develop simple, workable construction forms that can be disseminated easily and virally. There’s a role in that first part for architects, urban planners and shelter experts, sure – but the second part can only be achieved if we take a different approach to the actual construction process.

We can’t can’t rely on central planning to take into account the massive and growing improvised urban areas – at best they’ll be able to provide basic services, but not even that is guaranteed – so poor communities already build their own dwellings, which is where shanty towns come from in the first place. The poor are already their own architects, so the only solution is to help them become better architects who build better dwellings – better in the sense of being more robust, more environmentally friendly, more durable and more liveable.

So we come back around to the role of ICT, which for the first time offers a way of disseminating this information on a large scale at relatively low cost. The question is, what’s the best vector for that dissemination, how do we ensure access to the information, and what forms do we need to use to make the information relevant to the end users?

Answers on a postcard to the Shelter Centre, I guess….

• Katrin Verclas at MobileActive and Sheila Kinkade (of ShareIdeas.org) have finished Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs [pdf]. The report covers a wide range of uses, including public health, advocacy and disaster response, with some interesting case studies (including the recent post-election riots in Kenya). You can read more about it at the MobileActive website.
• The National Library of Medicine have published Information Seeking Behavior and Viewpoints of Emergency Preparedness and management professionals concerned with Health and Medicine (snappy title, guys). Murray Turoff has the entire text online there, or you can dowload the complete report [pdf]. “The emphasis of the study was on determining the current information seeking behavior, existing preferred sources of information, and unmet information needs of professionals involved with the medical and public health aspects of emergency planning, preparedness, and response.”
• A CSM article on Patrick Ball of Benetech. No great insights into human rights documentation and analysis, but a couple of nice stories about Ball’s experiences (HT: Flowing Data).
• NetHope have opened their West Africa Chapter - very gratifying for me to see these Chapters spreading ever wider. The ICT Skills Building Program is also going from strength to strength this year, with trainings announced for Nairobi, Johannesburg and West Africa.
• LINGOS have their new community website up and running [Warning: SharePoint alert!], with the invitation to register with them. The community is very active, and LINGOS offer a lot of resources on the website. Oh, and I’m sorry we never managed to organise that Webinar, Linda!
• The Economist realises that mobile phones are being used for election monitoring, public health, and advocacy – only a couple of years late, guys! – with the article A world of witnesses (HT: Katrin at MobileActive).

Well, not yet, but they will [pdf]. Janet Ginsburg explains the development of the idea of the Humanitarian Technology Review, while Bruno Giussani covers the recent TED breakfast, where Eric Rasmussen gave an update on InSTEDD.

Initially the idea of a Humanitarian Technology Review sounds like a good idea – if it’s done right. The first two questions – remember the first two questions, everybody! – are: who is the target audience, and what do you want them to do with the information you’re providing? The briefing paper I linked to above says

The Review’s readers, like the Review itself, span many niches: medical researchers, software developers, policy-makers, funders, doctors, veterinarians, communities trying to prepare for or reeling from disasters – even other media.

The one group that is noticeable by its absence is – well, me. People like me, anyway, who seem to fall under the catch-all term “practitioner”. I see doctors and veterinarians in there, but which doctors and veterinarians, exactly? I think it’s likely that I’ve misunderstood – the briefing is explicit that this is about building connections between disciplines, and it’s clearly aiming at a wider audience than the humanitarian community.

If we look at the disciplines that they’re talking about, it’s a wide selection, so it’s probably easier for me to focus on the technology examples given in the review:

• lightweight fabric + satellite technology = a cheaper portable satellite dish
• software + cell phones = real-time surveillance for bird flu
• GIS + interactive mapping = real time tracking of fires and floods
• solar panels + refrigerator = reliable field transport for vaccines
• filter + straw = a mobile water purification device
• open source water tech + microfinance = funding for small water projects
• genetic sampling + fast data analysis = identifying a pathogen in hours

I’m going to think about those examples over the next few days, but I’m struggling to see how a publication can cover all of these and still appeal to a coherent audience. That’s why communities of practice exist around epidemiology, water and sanitation, and the like – because they’re focused enough to hold peoples’ attention.

The success or failure of the HTR will be in the delivery, and on that front I’m very positive about their proposal to combine different delivery streams. At the very least, InSTEDD’s deep pockets will enable them to experiment and see what works, although I’d warn them not to expect collaboration to magically appear – two years on ECB teaches you that for nothing.

(NOTE: Full disclosure – I thought about a similar idea a few years ago, but gave it up because I didn’t think it was viable. Two attempts have been made to develop this sort of thing previously – ReliefWeb’s HIN and CMI’s PeaceIT [pdf] – but the InSTEDD concept is much wider.)

• The Economist article Of internet cafés and power cuts was passably interesting on the subject of technology in developing countries, although it takes the usual optimistic approach that the Economist favours. The Economist picked up on this issue was the publication of this year’s Global Economic Prospects by the World Bank, with a focus on technology adoption and a barrel full of blindingly obvious conclusions.
• More interesting is the research that both of those draw on quite heavily, building a Historical Cross-Country Technology Adoption Database. You can download the database itself from that page, but the overview article Cross-Country Technology Adoption: Making the Theories Face the Facts by Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn is much more manageable. I haven’t dug into the data yet, but the initial Economist article made me suspicious – the data itself may suffer from survivor bias (e.g. the many failed technologies don’t feature), doesn’t explain disrepancies such as the dominance of VCDs in developing countries as opposed to DVDs in developed countries, and the focus on mobile phone uptake doesn’t take account for the nature of that particular technology. I’m not sure I can face the data itself, as the sun is shining.
• Eagle-eyed Declan Butler (a literal description; he’s at the cutting edge of trans-species surgery) quotes short-sighted Paul Currion in Nature magazine. Declan’s article Satellite can spot razed villages in Darfur on the fantastic work of Erik Prins for Amnesty International on monitoring burnt villages using remote sensing. Amnesty used his research as part of their campaigning back in 2004-5, but Erik has just published an article, Use of low cost Landsat ETM+ to spot burnt villages in Darfur, Sudan, in the International Journal of Remote Sensing. The research is right on the mark, although it’s unlikely that the large-scale study that he calls for in the conclusion will happen any time soon; lack of funds, lack of will.
• I’m angry with Firoz, who published his dissertation without telling me. Or maybe he did tell me and I just forgot. Anyway, my revenge for his oversight and/or my memory loss is to link to it here: The Utility of GIS Analysis in Coordinating Humanitarian Assistance. Congratulations, Firoz; now get back to work.

An email from CEO Eric Rasmussen tells me that INSTEDD is finally flying in radar (and apparently I’m mixing metaphors, unsure of whether INSTEDD is a whale or a plane). In his words,

InSTEDD has been invisible, a rumor and a ghost, for the few past months, but we surfaced today in a media call with Google.org in the launch of their first-ever Initiatives.

I’ve known Eric virtually for a couple of years, although we’ve never managed to actually meet in person. He’s a very solid choice for CEO – his thinking on civil-military affairs was always more lateral than I expected for somebody in his position, and I think that it reflected his willingness to listen and learn from others. That open attitude will be the single most important tool in INSTEDD’s box, at least in its early days, and in fact that’s why they are only launching now – for the last few months, the team has been travelling around meeting with various actors and hearing out what their needs might be.

If you don’t know anything about INSTEDD, I recommend that you visit the website, as it gives you the right flavour. It’s moved away from Larry Brilliant’s 2006 talk at TED and morphed into something that’s somehow broader yet less ambitious (a good combination if you can manage it). Yet I still harbour doubts about how successful it will be, doubts which don’t have anything to do with the goodwill or competence of the staff (or the fact that they’ve got a ton of funding behind them, not least from Google.Org).

Where do my doubts come from?  I’ll freely admit that part of my concern is rooted in my essential antipathy towards advice from experts (yes, including myself – it keeps me on my toes); part of it is based on my lack of faith in the power of technology to save us from ourselves; and part of it is linked to my sense that the entire system of disaster response has been built with a fundamental flaw at its foundation, and trying to make it more effective may simply be throwing good money after bad.

Having said that, INSTEDD’s philosophy is healthy.  It’s not proposing overarching systems that will solve the whole set of problems in one go, but a piece-by-piece approach that addresses key problems in the field as they arise.  So I welcome their launch, and I definitely welcome their presence on the scene – it’s definitely healthy for the sector to have more non-traditional actors bringing some new perspective.

And new tools, of course!  INSTEDD will be releasing any tech tools it develops, and it looks like on an open source basis (more specifically, the MIT license).  First out of the gate is a GeoSMS system, which is built on a bunch of existing Google tools and some GeoRSS.  And yes, we hope to discuss how Sahana might fit into these developments…

I’ve corresponded with Mikel Maron for a while now, interested particularly by the work that he’s been involved with introducing Wikis into the UN. However his first love is geospatial and his favourite project is OpenStreetMap, which is a free editable map of the whole world that can be viewed, edited and used in a collaborative way from by anybody, anywhere.

Mikel has been thinking about how this type of approach might be used in disaster response, and he recently gave a presentation at the State of the Map event in Manchester in which he outlined his thoughts so far – you can hear a podcast of his talk, view the slides that accompanied it and read the notes from it. Mikel acknowledges that he’s not an expert, and while there’s a lot of things that I agree with him about, there’s also a lot of assumptions built into his talk.

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