Sequence of events:

1. Benazir Bhutto assassinated.
2. Pakistan goes postal.
3. Telecoms/internet disrupted.

Although Masud’s post isn’t clear about what specifically brought the internet went down, or how they brought it back up again, he does have a good point about why these things happen, and what urban planners / architects / anybody who’s listening might do about it:

PTCL Telephone exchanges stand out among buildings. Banks, Telephone Exchanges, Shops and the like are the first target of an unruly mob. TWA1 or other small operators are not that evident. No one knows the whereabout of their landing stations,Points-of-Presence etc. So, during rioting, they do not make identifiable targets.

So a) small is beautiful as far as internet providers are concerned, and b) make sure you have redundant connectivity.  I’m glad that the internet was back on after 30-odd hours, but I’m sure that it won’t be the last time this happens in Pakistan.

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 café 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?

More on Flood, famine and mobile phones in the Economist

What a marathon.  Although we actually released the report at the time of the Seattle workshop earlier this year, it was always the plan that we would launch a nicely-formatted final package - it just took a bit longer than planned - and you can now download the complete five-part Report at the ECB website Publications page.

I won’t go into detail about the contents, but as far as I know, this is the first in-depth examination of the information and technology requirements of international NGOs in emergency response.  It’s comprehensive but not exhaustive, and I hope that people will pick up the threads from this report to address specific areas such as security and staff capacity.

We’re now developing projects based on the findings of the report, all of which will be well underway (and some nearly finished) by the end of the year.  Although the projects begin with the ECB member agencies, we hope to have an impact on the entire sector.  So let’s begin!

The winners in the Stockholm Challenge 2006 were announced last week, an event which I singularly failed to attend.  Congratulations are due to RisePak, which won the Public Administration category, while Sahana received a Special Mention in the Health category.  It’s nice to see recognition for all of our efforts, although I’m not sure how much it means.  Stockholm seems very far away right now.

Five years ago, I wrote an article for Humanitarian Exchange, published by the ODI Humanitarian Practice Network, entitled “Learning from Kosovo: the HCIC Year One.” It was the first thing I’d written about information management, and it was right at the start of my learning curve in this field.

I thought it would be interesting to update that article, and revisit some of the issues that it raised. So in the latest issue of Humanitarian Exchange, you’ll find another article, this time entitled “A Little Learning is a Dangerous Thing: five years of information management for humanitarian operations.”

I packed in more points than I probably should have, so it’s quite a dense piece, but it’s probably summed up by these two sentences:

Five years ago, I believed that better information management would enable better management overall. Yet it is hard to determine whether all this activity has actually improved the provision of humanitarian assistance, since there are no clear criteria for measuring their impact.

The good news includes more partnerships, sometimes between agencies, but also with the private sector; the bad news includes a lack of leadership in this area, particularly given the recent implementation of the cluster approach by the UN. The most important point I wanted to make, however, is one that I’ve mentioned before. I’m going to repeat it now, because it seems to me to be important enough:

We are public organisations, funded by public money, working for the public good. In the interests of accountability, all information that we gather in the course of our work should also be public. The only qualification that should be made to this is if that information might in any way endanger the safety or security of beneficiaries or staff. Without the free flow of information, the process of coordination is crippled, and we all must take responsibility for this.

So I guess that’s my new mantra.

Also interesting this month is an article by Jeremy Shoham of the Emergency Nutrition Network and NutritionWorks. The article, “Information is a prerequisite, not a luxury“ expands on the importance of information management in the context of Food Security. Although he makes the case for what I would say is an overly ambitious system, the article is an excellent overview of some current thoughts in food security (along with a jab at the bias towards food aid, which thankfully is starting to diminish).

Six months ago, Pakistan and India suffered a massive earthquake that devastated a large area along their mutual border; Kashmir and the surrounding areas in Pakistan were worst hit. As is the way of things, news of the humanitarian situation has all but disappeared from the mainstream media, so spare a thought for the thousands of families whose homes were destroyed in the disaster and who are trying to rebuild their lives. Now that the winter is over, hopefully the humanitarian situation will improve, but the reconstruction process will take a long time and will be fraught with difficulty.

I’m posting to draw attention to some of the work that has been happening on the ground in those six months, specifically related to information and coordination issues. In particular, I never got around to pointing to RisePak, a “collaboration between academics, researchers, and policy makers at US and Pakistani universities, multilateral organizations, various government departments, and individuals dedicated towards helping in relief efforts.”

More on Pakistan Six Months On

The Stockholm Challenge is a well established global networking program for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) entrepreneurs for over ten years. It continues to be a leader in demonstrating how information technology can improve living conditions and increase economic growth in all parts of the world. One of the main features of the Stockholm Challenge is the ICT prize, the Stockholm Challenge Award, which has attracted over 3000 projects over the years.

This year, Sahana is a finalist for the Award. They don’t have a Disasters category, so we’re in the Health category, which is a little bizarre. But it’s a great recognition of all the work that the Sahana team has put into the project over the last year.

Also nominated from the humanitarian sector are a couple of familiar names. The Fritz Institute has been nominated for their Humanitarian Logistics Software, and the guys at RisePak have also been nominated for their earthquake response work last year.

Congratulations to everybody, although I probably won’t be able to make it to the awards ceremony in Stockholm on 11 May….

For the last six months I’ve been working with the ECB Project, carrying out an assessment of ICT and information requirements in emergencies. It’s been fascinating, taking me to the headquarters of all the member agencies, as well as the field visits to Pakistan and Sudan, and into the heart of the way these organisations do business. The assessment is almost finished now, all the research is done, and now I’m just writing the final report package. On 24 and 25 April, we’ll have a workshop hosted by the University of Washington (thanks to Mark Haselkorn and his team). For a sneak preview, the Pakistan report is already out, albeit with very basic formatting.

The workshop is just the starting point, however, because then the agencies participating in ECB4 will have to actually implement their recommendations. Some of the things we’re going to suggest are fairly simple (such as strategic planning for security communications); but some of them aren’t so simple (such as pursuing a standardised inter-agency assessment format). Most of them require some amount of organisational change, which inevitably will be painful, and will test our commitment to truly building capacity.

I’ve been a bit sneaky with the assessment; I’ve tried as much as possible to make the reports accessible and relevant to a wider audience than just the 7 participating agencies. Since one of the ECB Project’s aims is to identify good practice for the entire NGO community, I feel fairly comfortable with that. The reason is that there are a lot of other players out there - other international and national NGOs, the UN and other international organisations, the private sector, academic and research institutions - who might want to pick up on some of these issues.

Hopefully the reports - which as far as I know are the first to really look at these issues from an international NGO perspective - will be useful for anybody who wants to understand the real constraints in building information systems that will really support our emergency response.

Well, I can dream.

More map madness in Nature magazine, whose 16 February issue has a commentary piece on Mapping Disaster Zones, covering work done by the Global Connection Project in response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the Pakistan earthquake. The entire article is worth reading, but I’d like to focus on some of the lessons they learned:

More on Mapping Disaster Zones (Nature magazine)

Nothing to do with information management or technology, but still quite amusing:

Many of the aid agencies have temporarily re-assigned their national staff from Afghanistan to the earthquake response (it’s all Pashtun, all the time up there). So these Afghan staff are going up into the mountains of NWFP to carry out assessments, and coming back down shaking their heads, saying “Boy, they’re really conservative up there!”

Note to self: don’t visit the mosque this weekend in shorts.