humanitarian.info

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if a previous census was taken, the high birth and death rates in developing countries tend to quickly make censuses outdated.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.

I’ve written about the role that mobile telephony can play in humanitarian assistance quite a few times now, without really talking about it directly. The one line I have consistently taken is that cellphone coverage is not reliable or secure enough to be used as the primary means of communication in an insecure environment. Putting that to one side for a moment, however, it’s clear that mobile telephony really is the key communications technology for the poor – and that means it should be the key communications technology for the humanitarian community.

Now, via the NGO Security Blog, I read that UNHCR and WFP have been using SMS to notify Iraqi refugees in Syria about upcoming food distributions. A total of10,000 SMS have been sent out, which should be enough to reach the 50,000 planned beneficiaries (although it’s only a drop in the ocean if Syria’s numbers are accurate and 1 .4 million Iraqi refugees have arrived in Syria). This is fascinating stuff, and I’m interested to find out how SMS fits into their overall strategy, since it’s the first time that this has been tried.

At the same time, Jonas Landgren asks

What could it mean if future emergency response information systems would be based on the fact that mobile phones are the only information technology in common for emergency responders across all sectors in society?

and proceeds to draw on Swedish experiences to look at what the implications might be in terms of system design. Obviously Sweden is not Syria, but given the impact of mobile phones in the Arab World, the possibilities are certainly there for more creative use of SMS and other mobile formats.

Text messages are more likely to make it through a degraded or overloaded network than voice, especially if the system has been set up to prioritise emergency calls, and notifications for non-urgent events – such as upcoming food distributions, which will be announced in other places – are perfect for this kind of medium. However I hope that we’re going to start to develop more creative approaches to this – perhaps using mobile phones to enable people to register for distributions remotely – and perhaps even using their unique SIM number to identify who has received a particular distribution, instead of relying solely on ID cards or other paper documents.

p.s. Good luck defending your thesis this week, Jonas!

UPDATE: This post is cross-posted on Mobileactive, which is a very useful resource if you want to find out more about how mobile technology is being used by activists around the world..