humanitarian.info

When various members of the elite are asked how they’d spend $10 billion dollars for charity, most of them respond exactly how you’d expect:

1. The obvious. “Stimulate job creation in developing countries”? Why didn’t I think of that! Wait there for a moment, I’ll just go and do that.
2. The vague. “Tackle climate change”? With goals that laser-focused, no wonder Oxfam’s strategic direction seems to change every five minutes.
3. The self-defeating. “Develop carbon-capture toilets”? Only later do we discover that “the viability of this kind of initiative depends on the price of carbon” – not a hostage to fortune at all then.

It’s easy to be cynical, but that’s partly because $10 billion is a meaningless figure to me because I’m not part of the elite. However one respondent made a specific and concrete proposal that wouldn’t rely on fantasy elements to become a reality – suggesting that he’s thought through the concept, rather than just trading around dinner parties. I like Mo Ibrahim and his proposal is simple yet obvious for anybody who’s seen how development actually works:

I would use the $10 billion to fund the development of national or regional statistics offices. They would improve data collection and dissemination to ensure public access to, and sophisticated application of, these data. Better data will support improved policy making by governments and interventions by donors. The data will enable them to identify needs, to make better use of existing resources and to assess results. In the case of donors this will finally lead to aid that is “smart”—for both donor nations’ taxpayers and recipient countries’ development needs. The private sector would be able to make more targeted investment decisions with this data. Citizens would be able to see where their country was succeeding and where it was failing. This would support targeted pressure on government and prevent false claims by either state or citizenry.

Coming hot on the heels of Tim Berner-Lee’s infectiously enthusiastic TED talk and the long-awaited launch of AidData, I can seriously get behind an intitiative like this. I don’t necessarily share all the assumptions about how that data will be used – but we’ll never know if we don’t put the data out there, will we? On the other hand, as a fully-paid up member of the international anarchist conspiracy, I do wonder if I’ve started seeing like a state…

• 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).