humanitarian.info

• Following my mini-rant about how ReliefWeb hasn’t made the most of the potential of the web, a couple of projects surface which point the way to a better future for the humanitarian community’s hub. The ReliefWeb News Monitor is JRC on the pipes again, with an aggregated feed of news stories that can be sliced for your serving pleasure; more interesting for the aid worker is the Briefing Kit, which gives you the opportunity to build your own document package by country or emergency. One of the primary uses of ReliefWeb is for pre-deployment briefing, so this is a definite value-added service.
• More MapAction… er, action, at an Alertnet-hosted workshop in London on June 4 looking at how the aid community can use maps effectively. I understand from Liesbeth that the event is fully booked, but Mapping for communications, planning and advocacy will be streamed live for those of you who can’t make it. Plus:

We want your questions. Given the rise and rise of mapping technologies, what would you like to know about how NGOs can better use geospatial tools in their work? Use the comments section below, or submit your questions using the Twitter tag #askmaps.

• In the Financial Times: Tainted data hide the cost of Africa’s upheavals. Slightly contrarian article about the use and abuse of statistics in conflict situations. The FT casts its beady eye over IRC’s DRC statistics (which always looked a bit fishy to me) and UN statistics more broadly, and who knew I’d have an ally in the FT regarding funding for government statistics offices?

The first step towards compiling an accurate picture is to make assistance to Africa’s under-funded statistics departments a priority in international aid programmes… Accurate statistics, objectively gathered and responsibly used, are as essential as compassion in tackling Africa’s plight. Tracking its crisis without reliable data is like exploring the continent without a compass.

• Amnesty rolls out the sms bad times: Guatemalan activists receive death threats by text message. Part of the ongoing debate about how technology empowers both sides in a conflict. If there are in fact two sides in any conflict like this, which I somehow doubt. There’s even more complexity at the tail end of the “Twitter Revolution” story – I had so much to write about this nonsense. Now everybody except Evgeny has forgotten it by now (because yes that is how long the web’s attention span lasts), but this article is still worth reading:

So, while the events don’t fit the Western media’s narrative of a city full of protesters converging on Twitter and almost pulling off a revolution, technology did play an indispensable role in telling the story of April 7.

• From the Just Shoot Me files, In Iraq with Web 2.0 luminaries, as if they weren’t already filled with their own self-importance. If you don’t think this entire concept is self-parody, then read this extract and see if you can spot the deliberate mistake:

The idea is to use the brains of this small collective to give ideas to Iraqi government officials, companies and users that will help it rebuild. Iraq is short on the mojo that widespread internet can bring and the fast-track economic jolt that entrepreneurs feed on. Who knows that stuff better than a contingent of internet goombahs heavy on the Google juice and includes the guy who thought up Twitter?

Following my thoughts about being mapless in Gaza, I wanted to follow up on the work of UNITAR-UNOSAT, who have made the leap from the more basic satellite images that they used to provide, and are now regularly providing damage assessments. Their analysis of postwar damage in Georgia was very interesting¹ and now they’re producing similar damage assessments over Gaza, with a commitment to update as often as they get new images.

I mentioned the .kmz file that Stefan at Ogle Earth has been putting together, which includes the UNOSAT layer. Stefan also lamented the fact that – while they provide frequent updates and quality outputs – UNOSAT products are only provided in PDF format.

And yet, the result, always, is a PDF map, which is great for printing out but not any good for any other kind of use. In some cases, the PDFs are locked against everything but printing, which means taking screenshots in order to rasterize them for placement in Google Earth… Given the global scope of these maps, their timeliness and usefulness, wouldn’t it be great if these were automatically published as KML to the Global Awareness default layer in Google Earth? People wouldn’t even need to go look for maps when they zoom in on a region hit by an emergency.

Well, I’ll agree with Stefan up to a point. PDF files are useful for nothing except printing – but most of UNOSAT’s potential users only want to print them , and playing around with the data is the last thing on their minds. However the good news is that it looks like they’re already starting – the damage assesssment data is also available as a geodatabase file and as a .kmz file. Einar has been circulating these versions to people working on the response, but has reservations on two grounds.

1. The first is regarding the added value of releasing the data more widely – what is it, exactly? My response is that to fulfill their mission as effectively as possible, UNOSAT should be producing multiple formats and distributing across various distribution channels – and a side effect of this will be an increase the possibility of useful and interesting applications emerging. We can’t predict what they might be – and they might not even appear – but the whole neogeography field is based around innovation – it just needs the data to enable it.
2. The second concern is more difficult to address – the question of whether the data will be misinterpreted or misused. This data will never be 100% accurate, which can lead to criticism of the agency publishing it if people don’t understand that. There’s also a slim chance that the data might be abused – for example, to misrepresent the situation on the ground – although the chances of this seem very small. My response to these problems is that people are free to criticise on the basis of the PDF file already, and releasing the data is unlikely to increase the type or frequency of criticism. We faced this all the time in the Humanitarian Information Centres – people would come in waving a printout and saying “Your maps are wrong!”, to which charge we would patiently explain that all maps are wrong, and would they like to help us improve?

To some extent Open Street Map have already started to deal with these issues using their existing community mechanisms, but UNOSAT is different – it’s a formal organisation in a large bureaucracy without the mandate or means to deal with public enquiries like this. Perhaps the best approach would be a tag-team of UNOSAT and OSM – sharing data as widely as possible, with UNOSAT the corporate source and OSM the buffer to address these issues as they arise?

1. Although under-utilized on the ground – that’s the next obstacle we have to overcome, guys! [↩]

High resolution satellite imagery, that is… zing! While the news from the Middle East may be depressing as hell, it has provided a stimulus for Open Street Map to improve their spatial data for Gaza. Jon has done a comparison of existing online maps, showing Google Maps to the initial winner – although OSM are working hard to update their offering, and as Jon says “the flexibility OSM has shows it’s value as a quickly adaptable humanitarian tool.”

Following OSM’s initial request for support, Alertnet ran the story yesterday, and updates will be posted on Mikel’s blog. This is worthwhile stuff – as well as being potentially useful for people working in that area, it’s a long-term contribution towards the spatial data infrastructure of the middle east. If you have any knowledge of Gaza, then you can contribute via the Wiki – and if you’ve got any of that high-resolution sat imagery, I’m sure they’d love to hear from you…

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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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…

So my holiday is well and truly over, and I’m in Georgia for UNICEF on a ridiculously short contract, providing information management support for the WASH Cluster. Things are never that simple, of course, and so the work has turned out to be significantly more challenging than I expected. Right off the bat, the post-conflict situation in Georgia is a political crisis rather than a humanitarian crisis; yes, there are some tens of thousands of people displaced by the conflict, but almost none of them are in a life-threatening situation (until the winter comes, that is). Their livelihoods have been affected badly, which means that there are going to be ongoing concerns, but the scale of that problem in a middle income country doesn’t feel particularly desperate (especially now that we’re watching the footage of the monsoon floods in India which have displaced over 2 million people).

Of course that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any job here, or that I get to go back to the mountain tomorrow. There’s still a major co-ordination requirement – for IDPs that are stuck in collective centres, for IDPs that are returning home to their villages, for IDPs that have been moved into the tent camp(s) in Gori – and a real lack of decent information to support that co-ordination. Fairly obviously that’s where I come in, but the last week has not been a particularly productive one. Primarily this is because when I arrived there was absolutely no data to work with, and getting hold of it has proven to be an absolute nightmare. Information flows are incredibly weak, dialogue with the government is fragmented, the situation remains extremely fluid and there’s a lot of political sensitivies involved. On top of that, the WASH unit that I’m in didn’t exist until a couple of weeks ago; it’s been created solely because of the conflict and the need that UNICEF has to meet its obligations as the lead agency in the WASH cluster.

Bags of fun, which explains why I haven’t posted anything since I arrived. I promised myself that I was going to blog daily on the issues I was coming up against, but that’s clearly not worked out. However I will be writing a few pithy posts on specific issues, since as of two days ago data started appearing. It’s not great – patchy demographics, an improvised camp registration process, a few lists from government agencies and NGOs – but it’s a starting point. My job is to turn that data into something that can be used by the cluster to address the 5 strategic areas which we’ve identified, which are broadly:

1. Site planning of tented camps in Gori
2. Refurbishment of proposed Temporary Shelters
3. Cleaning of schools and kindergartens at national level (esp. Tbilisi)
4. Rehabilitation of existing Collective Centres (CCs) for longer-term caseload
5. Provision of village watsan for returning IDPs

As you can see, it’s not a particularly coherent set of requirements, which will make co-ordination even more difficult. The first step is to work out where the IDPs are and where they’re going to be going; the next step is to work out where the agencies are and how they’re working. Sounds simple, right?

Right.

I feel duty-bound to direct you towards two exciting articles which are also quite brief, so they won’t take up too much of your day. I realise that you’re busy.

First up, it’s Sahana getting a mention in the Wall Street Journal, in an article with the snappy title of (sigh) Managing Disaster. Actually it’s just a puff piece written by the Business Roundtable, but it’s nice to see IBM and Sahana getting mentioned for the Chengdu earthquake deployment.

Second, it’s another insightful article by me for ICT Update magazine, entitled Communicating Peace. In it, you’ll find words of wisdom like ” What is important is not the technology itself, but how people use it.” It will only take 5 minutes of your time to read it – but a lifetime of enlightenment will follow.

As everybody realises by now, technology is neutral when it comes to issues of war and peace. A lot of the positive stories around the use of sms to mobilise activists need to be balanced out by a recognition that in many cases, the government and private sector are in a position to challenge that use – and of course to use the same technology to promote their own messages. The Eldis community board picks up the story in Kenya:

As tensions and violence began to spill into the streets in Kenya in late 2007, the government decided to ban local live broadcast. Whilst this is obviously controversial, there were fears that radio, in particular, could be used, as it had done in Rwanda, to incite violence. The ban of live reporting meant that SMS began to be utilised as an update method and thus ‘mobile reporters’ were born.

The Government realised that they couldn’t control the internet or the text messages which were being sent to incite hostility, so they countered them with their own blanket text messages stating that the violence was illegal and that Kenyans should be concentrating on peace.

The role of radio broadcasts in supporting the genocide in Rwanda is well-documented (see the Nahimana and Barayagwiza cases at ICTR) and is a valuable cautionary tale. However few people have stopped to think much about how SMS could be an even more powerful tool for those inclined to mass violence. Radio broadcasts can incite the mob, but they are a weak tool for co-ordinating the mob; SMS, on the other hand, has the capability to be much more dangerous in the wrong hands. But when I say “the wrong hands”, what do I mean?

The Kenyan government were acting benevolently in attempting to curtail the bloodshed but others could use it for their own means… It demonstrates how the same information can be used for very different ends and poses questions about safeguards: can and should they be put in place to ensure that ICT tools are used for empowering and not repressive purposes?

The Kenyan government may have been acting benevolently – although it’s worth pointing out that it was in their interests to prevent violence simply because they hold the monopoly of violence. In most countries in the world, if not all, governments are not naturally inclined to empower their citizens. Communications technology should be available as widely as possible, and I don’t want anybody – least of all the government – legislating about who should have access to it on the basis of their ideology.

I think it’s dangerous to talk about “safeguards” to ensure that ICT tools are used for empowering and not repressive purposes; there’s no such thing as the wrong hands. The short version: technology can be used for good or ill, and preventing people using it for ill can only be achieved if you also prevent people using it for good. I’m happy to be challenged on this one – are there cases where I might be wrong?

In Science News, Julie Rehmeyer writes a short piece on Humanitarian Statistics, with a focus on the “controversial” Iraq war studies carried in the Lancet. I haven’t posted about the Lancet studies before; I recognise that the Lancet studies have an important role to play in tallying the cost of the Iraq war, but anything I could add to the debate would be largely redundant, since it’s been driven by political rather than humanitarian interests.
Although Deltoid characterises the article as being “about the Lancet studies” – and fair enough, that is his particular interest – it is thankfully wider than that, noting the increase in the use of statistics in the human rights (and to a lesser extent, humanitarian) sector while also being aware of the limitations:

But humanitarian crises pose huge challenges. Little information may be available—even from before a crisis—about how many people live where. Even if a previous census was taken, the high birth and death rates in developing countries tend to quickly make censuses outdated. Areas within continuing war zones can be unsafe for survey workers.

Examples from Sierra Leone and East Timor are referenced in the article. The latter case is particularly interesting because it wasn’t just based on a straight survey – which is what we generally think of when we think of statistics – but on pulling together separate and incomplete datasets to build a bigger picture, which is the norm in humanitarian crises, particularly in developing countries.

In the comments section at Deltoid, commenter Jeff Harvey laments

I can only shake my head in disbelief. Who will do the survey? The US and British governments, who are responsible for an illegal invasion that has turned Iraq into a country of wreck and ruin? This is the bitter irony. Aggressing nations do not tally the numbers of their victims. Ian Gould summed it up in the thread below this: because the real death toll of civilians conflicts with the well-cultivated myth of US benevolence, western crimes are not a part of history because they are never allowed to become a part of history. They thus get sent straight down the memory hole.

Jeff misses the point that (I think) Julie was trying to make. Although he gives many examples of past victims of war who have been lost to history, we don’t live there any more. There are more people working on these issues than ever before, and we have a better idea of how to approach these problems. However it’s this attitude – that information gathering and analysis should be a political project – that is likely to prove the biggest obstacle to moving forward.

The only way to do justice to the victims and to persuade belligerent parties to accept the results is to treat these issues as impartially as possible – and to do so with the perspective that our work is at the service of the beneficiaries, rather than of our own political interests.

There’s been frequent discussion here – and blogs like MobileActive, of course – about how cellphones can be used in humanitarian responses. It’s worth remembering, however, that technology is neutral – both “good guys” and “bad guys” use it (if you can be bothered with that way of looking at the world) – and that, in conflict situations, communications technology is seen as a legitimate target. So for all the talk of how empowering mobile technology is, we haven’t had much discussion about the other side of the coin.

This bring us neatly to an amazingly interesting post by Barnett Rubin on Informed Comment, entitled Taliban and Telecoms — Secret Negotiations Just Got Easier, and at a Price You Can Afford! Rubin is interested mainly in high-level policy issues – the post was sparked by a conference discussing political solutions in Afghanistan – but has some interesting stories about the role of mobile telecommunications in state-building. There are some interesting anecdotes about how reliant on cellphones people have become, as in the case of

a friend of mine who negotiated the release of two of his Afghan staff who had been taken hostage by Taliban in Wardak (just next to Kabul) said that it was always difficult to reach the kidnappers at night, because they moved away from the road up into the mountains where the reception was poor. Finally they had to explain to the Taliban that they needed to stay within the coverage range to reach a deal.

Coverage is not great but, according to the Afghanistan Telecom Regulatory Authority, mobile phone penetration is targeted at 10% for 2008, forecast to rise to 3% by 2013. That’s not bad, although a glance at the fixed line and internet penetration targets is quite depressing. In 2002 I had a couple of meetings with the Minister for Communications, Mohammed Masoom Stanekzai, and it doesn’t look as if the plans that we discussed back then have come very far.

Rubin publishes a letter from a Taliban military group to one of the mobile phone companies (apparently the Taliban prefer Areeba, because they have the cheapest top-up cards – good to see that they’re keeping an eye on their budget). As Rubin explains

I have been told that Taliban (or people claiming to represent them) sometimes call up mobile phone companies and claim that they are right at a tower with explosives, which they will detonate unless money is immediately transferred to their mobile phone. This is a new technology that enables migrant workers to send cash home without going through either a hawala or Western Union.

The hawala system has operated on mobile phones for quite a long time – in fact, hawaladars adopted mobile phones almost as soon as they were introduced – but it’s fascinating to see a technology which undermines the hawala grip making extortion so much easier. However it’s clear that the notewriters aren’t that worried about law enforcement catching up with them – because they provide a mobile phone number where they can be contacted.

Rubin’s concern is what the prevalence of these threats tell us about the level of Taliban control (or lack of it) across the country, and he also notes that this demonstrates that the Taliban are trying to work within the existing structures of the nascent Afghan state. However I find more interesting the way in which a new technology is being used in an entirely unexpected way. The Taliban are holding the cellphone network hostage – while at the same time requesting that their protection money be transferred through the same network.

Any lessons for the humanitarian or human rights community? Not really. We already know that cellphone networks are vulnerable in unstable environments, and we already know that technology gets used in unexpected ways by overlooked groups. However there is a significant positive in these developments. Rubin points out that in the 1990s satellite comms contributed to avoiding some conflicts (although they undoubtedly helped to co-ordinate many, many more). Cellphones are cheaper to use and easier to access, creating lines of communication did not exist before – or at least, were the monopoly of a powerful few.

Essentially, the increased penetration of cellphones creates more opportunity for dialogue and negotiation at more levels in Afghan society – even if that’s only whether they can get discount on top-up cards if they buy in bulk.

The White African faces a quandary:

Global tools that have real time read/write access are extremely powerful. Depending on ones motives, your impact can be good or bad. Even if your motives are good, your tool can be used for bad. How’s that for a quandry?

It’s certainly a quandary, but not a new one. It’s the same question that’s been asked about humanitarian aid since at least the 1970s, and has been one of the motors behind the humanitarian reform process. What’s more interesting is the assumption behind that question, an assumption that he describes quite clearly:

Just decades ago those who were not in close enough proximity to an event were unable to do much, if anything about it. Today, we can successfully effect change through digital tools and be thousands of miles away.

As I wrote in the comments, neither of these statements is quite true. Decades ago you could have joined Amnesty International campaign, or given money to a relief agency, or written to your MP; these options are still available, and will make a difference. The problem we have today is that many people feel that such actions don’t make enough of a difference – that they don’t have a big enough impact, or they don’t bring change quickly enough.

We have to start being honest, though; just because the internet works reliably and at high speeds, it doesn’t mean that humans work at similarly high speeds or with similar reliability. The impact of our actions will almost never be immediate, and will frequently lead to outcomes that we didn’t predict. Our expectations have been raised by the relentless cheerleading for the information revolution, and we need to lower those expectations or risk alienating people who want to get involved.

The real questions are the same ones that I ask myself in my own work whenever I approach a new project. What decision or action will this information inform, and who is responsible for making that decision or taking that action? The answers to those questions determine a) whether it’s worth collecting the information in the first place, and b) what we will do with the information once we’ve collected it. Unless we answer those questions clearly, and build our systems around them, we’re unlikely to effect any significant change, no matter how powerful our tools are.

(For a bit more on Ushaidi, Sanjana has a great interview with Ory Okollah, in which she explains clearly that the site has been used as an information-gathering tool, rather than a resource for conflict mitigation or resolution. Just to be clear, I think Ushaidi is absolutely worthwhile – but I’m looking forward to what comes next.)