humanitarian.info » Indonesia

Flood, famine and mobile phones in the Economist

Paul Currion — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 09:55:56 +0000

Quite a long time ago, I posted the story of a starving tribesman who emailed a bunch of people to try and get assistance. The Economist has finally caught up, as it opens this article on technology in humanitarian relief with a similar story.

“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”

A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist? No, Mr Sokor is a much sharper communicator than that. He texted this appeal from his own mobile phone to the mobiles of two United Nations officials, in London and Nairobi. He got the numbers by surfing at an internet cafÃ© at the north Kenyan camp.

The rest of the article then pretty much re-treads my blog (ahem) in an overview of some of the big issues in the sector. Unsurprisingly it focuses on the easy stuff – hardware, particularly telecoms – and misses the more interesting issues. In a single paragraph the article does identify some ways in which improved telecommunications have improved relief operations:

Now, when an emergency occurs, the first people on the ground are often computer geeks, setting up telephone networks so other aid agencies can do their stuff. Donors keep track of supplies on spreadsheets and send each other SMS messages: this road has been attacked by bandits, that village cut off by floods. Transport agencies announce helicopter flights by e-mail. Aid providers can find out where exactly on an incoming ship their medical supplies are, saving hours hanging round the docks. Aid donors find it easier to locate the victims of disaster; and victims queue as eagerly for mobile-phone access as they do for food.

As a result, the organisation of aid is changing.

Well, quite – except that the changes started ten years ago, there’s a whole new set of changes on the way, and we still haven’t solved the problems created by the last set. So what does the article say about all this?

There’s a lot of blanket assertions in the article, such as “Better communications also favour information-sharing and co-ordination between agencies… Things like e-mail service and satellite links help to herd the cats.” That doesn’t tally with the experience of the Humanitarian Information Centres, for whom capturing and sharing data from the agencies is like pulling teeth, and it doesn’t tally with the findings of the ECB assessment, which painted a picture of NGO staff flooded with email, still attending too many “co-ordination” meetings, and limited improvements in information-sharing of any substance.

And as Hugo Slim of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue points out, technology increases the flow of information not just to workers in the field, but to offices in New York or London; this may tempt bosses to micro-manage from afar – which can be disastrous.

Headquarters appear to be largely uninterested in micromanagement, so unless there’s some evidence to back that up, I find it difficult to take a serious concern. Headquarters offices have an extractive relationship with their staff working in the field – so although those staff have access to more information, it’s not thanks to headquarters.

In addition, the overwhelming focus on vertical information flow – e.g. between field and headquarters – is at the expense of horizontal flow – e.g. between different field offices, organisations working in the same response, or colleagues in neighbouring countries, all of whom may have valuable experience to share. The technology is actually cementing in place the hierarchical structures that need to be demolished if aid agencies are to survive in the 21st-century.

The article then moves onto the role of “Those Ingenious Victims”, acknowledging that local people and communities affected by disasters usually provide almost all their own immediate assistance and suggesting that “Their ingenuity is likely to change disaster response by rich-world donors in unexpected ways”. I tend to agree, but the article then describes the least expected way you could choose – the extensively-documented spread of mobile telephones.

There are no actual examples of how mobile telephony has affected disaster victims (as opposed to anybody else), but it then moves on to mention cash distributions – an issue which I think is critical to the sector right now, but has almost nothing to do with technology. There’s a brief paragraph mention of family location, citing the Red Cross’ fairly average familylinks site (a missed opportunity to discuss the PeopleFinder development that came out of Hurricane Katrina), and then it moves on to an interesting Zimbabewan diaspora project called mukuru, through which Zimbabweans can “order and pay for goods such as petrol online – and have them delivered to family members back home.”

This is fascinating, but it’s got nothing to do with humanitarian relief. Basically, the article struggles to find any examples of technology use by the victims of disaster changing the aid paradigm – as do most of us. I have no doubt that something will be changing, although I’m not as optimistic as Toby Porter at Save the Children (who I know is a very smart guy), who’s quoted as saying

In the humanitarian operation of the future… beneficiaries of emergency aid will use technology to tell us what they need – cash, food, or education – find out from us what to expect, and track its arrival, just as we can track an order from Amazon.com now.

This is based on the assumption that if only we had more technology, we’d be able to do these things; in fact this isn’t true (as anybody who has read the Social Life of Information can tell you) and we could do these things right now with the available technology – if we really wanted to. Questions about political will, absorptive capacity, organisational change and the cultural location of technology are completely missing. Let’s be clear, things will change – but what Toby is describing is just an improved version of business as usual, rather than a fundamental re-organisation of how the aid community works.

The Economist believes that the story of Mohammed Sokor texting UN officials is “a sign that technology need not create a digital divide” – although it doesn’t tell us if the UN officials bothered to text him back. The story notes that “the WFP did boost rations in the Dagahaley refugee camp, albeit citing other reasons” – not surprising, since a text message really isn’t a good enough reason to revise a distribution plan. I imagine that the rations were increased on the basis of WFP staff on the ground re-assessing the situation, rather than technology empowering beneficiaries. But the Economist buys into the classic technotopian vision:

The age-old scourge of famine in the Horn of Africa had found a 21st-century response; and a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been reversed.

No it hadn’t, and no it hadn’t. The response to famine was exactly the same as it has always been – send more food. Mohammed Sokor is in exactly the same position of supplication as he would have been ten years ago, only now his begging letter is a text message that can be quickly deleted, rather than the “crumpled note” passed on by hand. The aid world is about power relations, with beneficiaries at the bottom of the pile, and there are limits to how much technology can change that. The “familiar flow of authority” is still intact, except now it comes with a customised ringtone.

Humanlink now!

Paul Currion — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 09:58:49 +0000

One of the projects I’m involved with (as a Board member and general layabout) is HumanLink, the brainchild of Jonathan Thompson. Jonathan decided that not enough is being done to develop technology solutions for the field, and decided to use his expertise and connections to set up an organisation to do just that. That new HLink website is now up and running (and looks good – well done, guys!) and we recently had a link in from the smart fellows at Ogle Earth, with a few links on to some new imagery in Tagzania. Good news all round, and hopefully the momentum behind HumanLink will build from here to expand the service delivery.

(Jonathan and Jeff Allen have also been playing around with Clark Connect, a Linux server gateway which I didn’t know much about previously, but looks interesting as a way of providing connectivity over low bandwidth.)

Simulating Disasters with ADRA

Paul Currion — Fri, 24 Nov 2006 17:25:16 +0000

Interesting news from Gregg Swanson of Humaninet, who recently attended a simulation exercise held by ADRA in Indonesia. (Incidentally, the ADRA Indonesia home page is funny as hell for all the wrong reasons, mainly due to the font.) Gregg has written a series of blog posts about the experience on the Humaninet blog, as well as an accompanying article at their ICT Features page. It sounds as if the exercise went really well, so congratulations to all involved!

On another page Gregg has written 12 reasons why relief organisations should conduct simulations. There’s some useful ICT-related findings on that page, but I was more interested in those 12 reasons, because we’re discussing a similar project for the ECB agencies – to do an inter-agency simulation either at HQ or field levels. I’m going to quote all 12 reasons here, and not just to pad out this blog post either – they’re genuinely useful:

1.	Preparedness – only by practice and training can teams and individuals gain and practice the skills needed in a very demanding environment.
2.	Does your plan work? Only by testing your plan will you know.
3.	Identify gaps, weaknesses, and needs – you won’t find them out without a field exercise or an actual response, and it is easier to determine and record these findings in a field exercise.
4.	Teambuilding – there is no better way.
5.	Motivation – just ask the ADRA Asia team members. As one told me: “If there is a disaster, that is where we want to be – that is our job.”
6.	Evaluate your personnel – managers need to know who is good at this, and who is a top performer.
7.	Try out new processes and procedures – an exercise is a great laboratory for testing new concepts.
8.	Try out new enabling capabilities, including ICT equipment. Providers of services and equipment are often delighted to loan their newest products for field testing by “real relief workers.”
9.	Acquaint your senior management (and other internal management) with your plan, your capabilities, your people. They may not know how challenging it is.
10.	Show external organizations, including government and U.N. agencies, what you can do.
11.	Show your donors what you can do. They want to know, and they will probably be impressed. Invite key donors as observers.
12.	Publicity of your simulation is healthy and should be welcomed by all employees, volunteers, donors, and other supporters. The press and the public are very interested – and this is not only at home. The press and public in countries like Indonesia are very aware of the dangers of natural disasters, and they have a stake in relief capabilities.

That’s it right there. The military do exercises literally all the time (when they’re not actually fighting, that is); civilian response agencies also carry out simulation exercises on a regular basis. It’s about time that the NGO community started doing the same, and stop relying on excuses that we don’t have the resources (staff, time or money).

We all agree that preparedness is better than response, and carrying out this sort of exercise is a critical part of that preparedness. We’ve persuaded ourselves that it’s not practical, and so we often don’t even seek funding for these exercises. But the UN seems to manage to do simulations – for example, the annual Triplex exercise – and Strong Angel managed to get funding (DoD, ahem), so there must be some opportunities out there.

I think the problem is that nobody has yet proven the concept to the big agencies, the ones that could field the resources to make a full simulation work. But as ADRA have demonstrated in Indonesia, it is possible to do this kind of thing on a small scale and learn valuable lessons in the process.