So UNHCR releases a Google Earth layer to great fanfare:

Unveiling a new UNHCR layer in Google Earth before invited guests at UNHCR’s Geneva headquarters, Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees L. Craig Johnstone hailed the project as means to educate people worldwide on the plight of refugees and on the humanitarians who help them.

“Google Earth is a very powerful way for UNHCR to show the vital work that it is doing in some of the world’s most remote and difficult displacement situations,” said Johnstone. “By showing our work in its geographical context, we can really highlight the challenges we face on the ground and how we tackle them.”

I download the UNHCR KML file, fire up my creaky old version of Google Earth and have a look. The first thing I notice is that every time I click on a link for more information, it tells me how much it costs to buy school or farm equipment, and gives me a link to UNHCR fundraising so I can cough up right there.

So Google Earth - one of the most powerful yet accessible technology tools ever created, at the vanguard of a geospatial data revolution - is reduced to lining the pockets of UNHCR - an agency, incidentally, that recently came bottom of Ranking of Donor Agencies on Best Practices in Aid (Where Does The Money Go? [pdf], Easterly and Putze 2008). I don’t think that this is the best way to reach out to the public if you’re serious about educating them about refugee issues.

Now that I’ve got that rage off my chest, what’s positive about the UNHCR Google Earth layer? Well, it’s a start, and there are some interesting features; if you click on the layer for accessibility, it presents you with a visualisation of the catchment areas of water points in a refugee camp.

This is useful because it starts to give people an idea of one of the key issues for refugee management and the complexity of running a refugee camp. However it doesn’t really go much further than that - there’s no explanation of why those catchment areas are important, or how this information could be used. I’d also be surprised to hear that UNHCR staff working in the field are using this sort of tool to plan camp construction and management, but I’d love to hear from any UNHCR staff if I’m wrong… but that’s exactly the sort of thing we should be doing.

It does give a sense of the global span of refugee issues, and by focusing on three different locations it does present a range of different environments. However it’s still peddling the message that refugees are fundamentally people who need help, and that international organisations are the only ones that can help them. There’s nothing (that I saw) about the primary responsibility of governments to address the needs of refugees, or about the fact the primary source of support for most refugees is the refugees themselves.

If you’re interested in finding out how great UNHCR is, it’s a fantastic resource. If you’re interested in getting a deeper understanding of refugee issues, you probably want to look somewhere else. I realise that I’m starting to sound really bitter in these sorts of posts, but please understand - that’s because I think we should be doing better. Much, much better.