humanitarian.info

Alanna:

Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes no sense to pay an expatriate to do that. Instead, we do what cannot be hired locally: English-language paperwork. We write reports to HQ and donors, proposals, and program guidelines. We write even more reports. We can go days without seeing anybody who is helped by our work.

Owen:

It seems to me that we must de-escalate the amount of paperwork involved in international development. There has to be some record-keeping to enable us to account to the people whose money we are spending.  But the bureaucracy involved in designing and getting funding for projects, for hiring people, and for monitoring and reporting, has become an industry in itself.

All true. The ECB research showed clearly that while nearly every expat staff member – and many of the senior national staff – in an international organisation is required to contribute to situation reporting, donor reporting, co-ordination reporting and so forth, precisely none of them believed that the reporting process added value to their work.

Agreed that reporting has become an industry in itself, as Owen says – but why? Cui bono? The beneficiary of these reporting processes is headquarters (sometimes regional offices) – the senior management and support staff in the organisation. Now this wouldn’t be an issue if we could demonstrate that their receipt of reports had a positive impact on the organisation’s work in the field.

Yet time and again, it seems there is no such impact. Country offices receive little or no feedback on their reports, and individual staff receive none. It’s also hard to identify any link between the reports that are generated in-country and any strategic decision-making, although it’s clear that there is some benefit there. This is a tremendous problem – a waste of money and time in situations (especially emergencies) where those resources are at an absolute premium.

There’s no single solution to this problem, but there are a few strategies you can adopt.

1. Cut reporting to the bare minimum, in terms of both frequency and length.
2. Revise reporting processes so that they add value to the staff tasked with doing that reporting.
3. Develop multiple reports from single processes, rather than having multiple (and redundant) processes.
4. Make use of new technology to cut down on traditional narrative reporting in favour of (for example) SMS flash reporting.

I’ve been advocating these approaches for years now, with almost no impact – organisations are wedded to the idea that reporting is an intrinsic part of their work, rather than a tool that can be optimised. If there’s one critical step every organisation should take, though, it’s that individual reports must be linked clearly with specific decisions that need to be made within the organisation. If the information in a report is not going to be used to make a decision, then why are we asking staff for that information?

• MapAction and BrightEarth both feature in an article in the Independent entitled “Mapping the disaster zones” – how they think up the intensely creative titles for these articles, I just don’t know. Interesting enough, but these articles always leave me with a sense that the writer just doesn’t get it – apparently “Within 48 hours: The latest field information is combined with accurate 1:5,000,000 “base maps” to form the first complete maps of disaster-zone data”, which is news to me.

• At the bottom of the press release Intel, Grameen Announce Joint Business Venture to Fuel Social and Economic Development Opportunities Empowered by Technology, we learn that Intel have teamed up with NetHope to develop new solutions for the field, the first (and possibly last) of which is the Aid Station, a “rugged, purpose-built, low-cost technology platform suitable for use in harsh, remote locations”.

• Jon Thompson sends me links to two initiatives which mainly force me to ask the question “Why?” NGO Post and Commkit are both well-intended, but both seem to be hell-bent on reinventing the wheel. If Digg works, why not just create an NGO channel on it rather than build an entirely new NGO version of it? If you need “a humanitarian communications platform that is autonomous (works with very little infrastructure) and accessible (anyone can use it)”, then why not use the internet with Sahana running on it? OTOH, it’s standard NGO practice to reinvent the wheel, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised – however if anybody can shed any light on either of these, I’ll be more than happy to revise my opinion.

• Development Gateway have launched two new dgCommunities – one for Disasters Prevention and Response and one for Stabilization & Reconstruction, both with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This partnership seems to have emerged out of CSIS giving up on the idea of launching their own community, the Hub, which explains the inclusion of S&R (terminology which the US military loves and the humanitarian community does not). I’ve nothing against community sites, but I’m waiting to see one in this sector which works as a community (particularly following my own experience with AidWorkers Network).

• The OLPC XO2 is announced. Quoth OLPC news:

On top of that it seems as though a new UN Millennium Development Goal is in the works. The press-release quotes Nirj Deva, Member of the European Parliament, as saying: “One Laptop per Child and the XO laptop are crucial to the fulfillment of the proposed UN Ninth Millennium Goal: to ensure that every child between the ages of 6 and 12 has immediate access to a personal laptop computer by 2015.”

Somebody shoot me. Or better still, send me more news for this section.

• 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).

The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

Josiah Charles Stamp was many things during his lifetime, including President of the Royal Statistical Society between 1930-32, and his view on government statistics is well worth bearing in mind whenever we look at the sort of statistics that tend to crop up in humanitarian and development work. International organisations tend to act in much the same way as governments when it comes to statistics, which we usually refer to as indicators.

Until very recently, all the information we had during a disaster was based on eyes on the ground – from residents in or visitors to affected areas. With the advent of remote sensing, we have a new source of information that doesn’t rely on actual presence – but even so, it’s worth noting that remote sensing without some form of ground truthing is frankly useless. I remember when we were looking at crop patterns in Afghanistan – an expert could pick out opium crops from a satellite image, but it was still necessary to send people to verify (and get shot at, of course – all part of the fun). So we still rely on eyes on the ground, which means that there’s always a human factor involved in data collection.

Where there’s a human factor, there’s always the scope for creativity that Stamp noted, or for deliberate manipulation. On the micro scale, that’s unlikely to make a huge difference, since when you aggregate up to a national level many of the irregularities will be levelled out – unless everybody at the micro level is fiddling the numbers in the same way. For example, anybody affected by a disaster is likely to exaggerate their needs if they think it will mean more assistance; any organisation responding to a disaster is likely to accept those exaggerations if it means they are likely to get more funding. As always, it’s good advice to follow the money.

So what does this mean for the poor information manager, tasked by his bosses to tell them what’s going on? Well, Stamp wasn’t saying that statistics were useless, only that we need to remember where they come from, which is rule number one: scrutinise your sources. He wasn’t saying that the village headman is out to cheat you, only that the village headman is human, so rule number two is: minimise the ways in which errors can be introduced to your data collection. As I noted above, those errors tend to get levelled out when you aggregate up – or at least to get less obvious amongst the mass of data – so rule number three is: where possible, always cross check your data against other sources.

Rule number four, of course, is: don’t expect statistics to solve all your problems. We tend to get a little fixated with a fetish for figures in this field (and I’m as guilty of that as anybody – look at the pretty pictures!) but, if our analysis or presentation aren’t solid, those figures aren’t going to be much use to managers.

Marla Petal at RiskRED emailed me following my recent post on PreventionWeb. RiskRed is concerned with promoting education about disaster risk reduction, but its most interesting project from my perspective is the DRRlibrary, a DRR resource site with a social bookmarking approach, using tags to classify useful websites and documents.

When you visit the DRRlibrary, what you see looks almost identical to del.icio.us, the mother of all social bookmarking sites, with a few extra functions. Searching through the tags is quite simple – as well as being able to sort by date, title or URL of each link, there’s also a tag cloud on the main page and a browser (which works fine but is a little confusing). It’s great to see this approach being used, and I assume that Ian O’Donnell at ProVention had something to do with it – I’ve had too many discussions with him about just this approach for it to be a coincidence!

Any downsides? Well, tagging can get very unwieldy very quickly, and tags like “seismic-resistant construction” are a little too specific to make for simple searches. (I blow hot and cold on this – when I look at my own del.icio.us links, I have problems understanding my own tags, which is a bad sign.) However this isn’t a show-stopper, and it’s the sort of thing that will sort itself out as the project grows. From a technical point of view, the only potential spanner in the works is that the DRRlibrary is based on Scuttle (open source, hooray!). Scuttle is only at release 0.72, and the lead developer has announced that although the project isn’t dead, it is dead slow.

The big questions aren’t about the site itself, but about how it relates to other sites. How, for example, can we ensure that the DRRlibrary is interoperable with PreventionWeb, particularly if the latter starts to offer more social networking features? At the moment there’s no tagging on PreventionWeb, but it’s the sort of thing that could appear; and even if it doesn’t, there’s a danger of duplicating resources and creating confusion amongst users.

It’s early days, though, and there’s plenty of time to address these issues. DRRlibrary is a welcome addition to the range of resources out there – not just for DRR, but for anybody who’s interested in how the web can be used more creatively to share knowledge in this sector.

In the run-up to the OCHA +5 Symposium (which apparently I’m not going to), Dennis King asks:

How do we get more “Non-geeks” to use information technology and tools on a consistent basis?

This has been the central problem with most of our work over the last decade.  It’s particularly obvious in the field, where staff do not have the time to learn how to use new tools.  There seem to be a range of considerations if we want any of our projects to succeed:

1. Embed new tools into existing processes where possible.  New processes are even harder to introduce into an organisation than new technologies, so enhance existing processes first.  This builds the credibility of the technology and familiarises people with it, strengthening your position within the organisation for future developments.
2. Build on existing and familiar technologies (mobile phones) rather than introducing new and unfamiliar ones (standalone PDAs).  If you want staff to use a tool, it will be easier for them to accept and adopt if they are comfortably with it.  This is why Sahana is browser-based, for example, since most people are now comfortable using services on the web.
3. Invest in preparedness by a) training key staff in tools that we want them to use, and b) getting management support for their implementation.  The first one may rely on the second, since you’ll need budgets to pay for training, but as I said above – don’t ever try to introduce something new in the middle of an emergency response.
4. Make them useful.  This might seem really really obvious but it feels like a lot of us forget it.  We might think our project is the best thing since sliced bread, but if the rest of the organisation doesn’t agree, then we may as well not bother.  Let’s start by helping staff to articulate how technology can help them in their work, and then move on to designing what they really need.
5. It’s not just “non-geeks” that we need to persuade.  IT departments in many of our organisations are seldom enthusiastic about new ideas, since they have the tough job of making sure that the old ideas keep working.  We need a) to make sure that our IT strategies have room for innovation and b) our IT staff are aware that it’s acceptable for them to innovate.  This will get ideas flowing.
6. The final issue is our very own digital divide question.  None of the above can be accomplished if we do not build better working (and personal) relationships between tech staff and non-tech staff.  In nearly every organisation I’ve worked with, the links between the IT department and the Emergencies department has been very poor (if it exists at all).  This has to change, otherwise we’ll never get anywhere.

These points were off the top of my head – any other thoughts are welcome.

Did you know that in the 1950s Sweden had the fourth-largest air force in the world? That was just one of the nuggets that I picked up last week in Sando, where the Swedish Rescue Services Agency has their training facility. I spent most of the day with a small group from NATO’s Partnership for Peace programme – they were on a training course for Information Management in Emergency Operations, and I was telling them about how things work at the international level.

We covered quite a lot of ground, and it was interesting to hear their stories, their experiences – some from places like Bosnia or Afghanistan, but more from their home countries. They were all from a military or government background, so very much from the command and control model, and I tried to get everybody talking about how to build more flexibility into those systems. What they really wanted was practical ways they could improve information management in their organisations, which is difficult to do when you don’t really know their organisations…

In the end, I decided to focus on resilient networks as the best approach they could develop, creating multiple linkages within their organisation on the basis of trust relationships. This approach has proven itself time and again, and is probably the only reason that the international community manages to do anything – the same people keep showing up in different places, bringing new people into their networks each time. Our problem is really that we don’t institutionalise these networks – for example, in the form of communities of practice – but for me there’s always the question of whether institutionalisation would actually hinder those processes.

That’s a question for another day. I hope I’ll get the chance to work with SRSA again on this course, but even if I don’t, one of the participants gave me a Kalpak to wear on the flight home. Super!

That’s a trick question. I know quite a lot about peace keeping – working in UNMIK (Kosovo), UNAMA (Afghanistan) and UNMIL (Liberia) will do that for you – although I wouldn’t call myself an expert, more of an engaged observer. So it was interesting yesterday to meet with the information management team at the Best Practices Unit in DPKO, and find out that they’ve got exactly the same problems as the humanitarian organisations that we usually work with.

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