humanitarian.info

The humanitarian community and the aid worker blogosphere are afire with responses to the ICC indictment of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir – which was a long time coming – and the subsequent expulsion from Sudan of at least 10 major NGOs currently working in Darfur – which was pretty much immediate. The general consensus seems to be: it was a stupid idea, and we knew it would have terrible consequences.

In some respects, this line of thinking is entirely correct. From the humanitarian perspective there are many, many arguments against indicting Bashir, and the Sudanese government’s response – coming down hard on humanitarian organisations as a way of drawing attention away from how politically impotent they are – was entirely predictable. The government will kick you out of the country at the drop of a hat, and one of the key factors in undermining organisation and staff confidence has been the uncertainty about whether your next action might see you on the next plane out of there.

The debate focuses on whether peace or justice comes first, and most people agree that peace must take priority. Not least of those people are those in Darfur themselves – the priority of most communities displaced by war is to regain some sort of security so that they can rebuilt their lives.We have conflicting reports of the response in Darfur – on the one hand Reuters gives us:

Darfur activist Hussein Abu Sharati, who says he represents residents of 158 displacement camps, said most people there were overjoyed by the ICC’s decision, but were too scared to show it.

While Rob Crilly reports that, of those in the camps,

Few have time for this debate. Few have heard of the International Criminal Court. Those that have are worried the government will come down hard on anyone celebrating Bashir’s indictment. And most seem to think that going home is more important than anything else.

These two perspectives are not mutually exclusive, since IDPs are rarely a homogenous body of opinion. Frankly, however, I’m in a difficult position. I welcome the expansion of the mechanisms available for extending (and hopefully enforcing) human rights law, but at the same time I don’t want to see communities in Darfur suffer any more than they already have. Given what’s happening now, how can I reconcile those two?

The short answer is that I don’t think I can. I think I have to make a choice and come down on one side or the other. The side I choose is the side that presses for justice, no matter how ill-conceived it might be. My reasons are cloudy, even to myself, and I hope that I can clarify them over the next few weeks. The feeling that drives this is the same feeling that drove me into humanitarian work in the first place – first a desire to prevent genocide, then a desire to see justice done more generally, finally translated into the practical action of humanitarian work. It wasn’t the perfect match, but it was close enough.

I understand the Thirsty Palmetto’s frustration with those who argue that you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs, and I have no desire to be painted as the sort of person who’s willing to gamble with people’s lives in order to prove their point. Yet it’s vital to remember one thing here: any suffering that occurs in Darfur is the responsibility of the Sudanese government. They are the ones who have failed the citizens of their country, and I’m not prepared to feel any more guilty about the situation in Sudan than I’m prepared to feel guilty about any other humanitarian crisis.

One reason not to feel guilty is that it’s exactly what the Sudanese government is banking on. Generally speaking, the government does not particularly care about its citizens, and the reason that UN and NGOs were allowed to operate in Darfur in the first place was because it suited their broader political purposes. Their calculus was that our self-imposed sense of responsibility would outweigh our sense of anger, that we would continue to work in appalling conditions to help people whose terrible lot was unlikely to get better any time soon – and more, that we wouldn’t kick up too much fuss about the role of the government in perpetuating that lot.

This is a difficult line to walk, and it’s one which the humanitarian community wrestles with continually in every complex emergency, one way or another. Yet one of the reasons that we continue to wrestle with it is because there have been no mechanisms which might really bring the justice that we want to see. The ICC might not be that mechanism, but I find it impossible to discount. At the same time, I don’t feel very comfortable standing alongside those standing outside the humanitarian situation entirely; perhaps the reason is because it feels like giving up the sense of solidarity that is vital for humanitarian work.

So I swing back to the other side: the unforeseen consequences (and the foreseen consequences, for that matter) from the indictment are potentially colossal, and not necessarily in the best interests of the people of Sudan. Some of those potential consequences I’m not that concerned about – the breakup of Sudan, for example, seems inevitable within the next 50 years (one for the prediction fans, there) – but some of them are serious enough to weigh against. Maybe I’m wrong – this isn’t the first stone in building an international order based on human rights, but a crisis in human rights that will pull the whole house of cards down. What choice do we have? These things have to start somewhere, and it’s hard to believe that the situation can get worse for the people of Darfur.

I told you I wasn’t clear, didn’t I? Oh well.

No sooner had I written yesterday’s post about digital security than the New York Times has a piece by Nicholas Kristol on how the Save Darfur campaign website has been under attack recently – from Chinese IP addresses.

As the coalition’s China advocacy campaign has intensified, officials have noticed increasingly sophisticated and subversive attempts to intercept emails and infect computers with malicious programs.

Kristol relies mainly on innuendo to suggest that the Chinese government might be behind the attacks, with very little evidence to support the accusation. From a technology point of view, though, it’s irrelevant who’s responsible – this is a cautionary tale for NGOs and other organisations. We can enjoy the benefits that technology brings – but we also need to guard against the dangers. The price of liberty, and all that…

• The Economist article Of internet cafés and power cuts was passably interesting on the subject of technology in developing countries, although it takes the usual optimistic approach that the Economist favours. The Economist picked up on this issue was the publication of this year’s Global Economic Prospects by the World Bank, with a focus on technology adoption and a barrel full of blindingly obvious conclusions.
• More interesting is the research that both of those draw on quite heavily, building a Historical Cross-Country Technology Adoption Database. You can download the database itself from that page, but the overview article Cross-Country Technology Adoption: Making the Theories Face the Facts by Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn is much more manageable. I haven’t dug into the data yet, but the initial Economist article made me suspicious – the data itself may suffer from survivor bias (e.g. the many failed technologies don’t feature), doesn’t explain disrepancies such as the dominance of VCDs in developing countries as opposed to DVDs in developed countries, and the focus on mobile phone uptake doesn’t take account for the nature of that particular technology. I’m not sure I can face the data itself, as the sun is shining.
• Eagle-eyed Declan Butler (a literal description; he’s at the cutting edge of trans-species surgery) quotes short-sighted Paul Currion in Nature magazine. Declan’s article Satellite can spot razed villages in Darfur on the fantastic work of Erik Prins for Amnesty International on monitoring burnt villages using remote sensing. Amnesty used his research as part of their campaigning back in 2004-5, but Erik has just published an article, Use of low cost Landsat ETM+ to spot burnt villages in Darfur, Sudan, in the International Journal of Remote Sensing. The research is right on the mark, although it’s unlikely that the large-scale study that he calls for in the conclusion will happen any time soon; lack of funds, lack of will.
• I’m angry with Firoz, who published his dissertation without telling me. Or maybe he did tell me and I just forgot. Anyway, my revenge for his oversight and/or my memory loss is to link to it here: The Utility of GIS Analysis in Coordinating Humanitarian Assistance. Congratulations, Firoz; now get back to work.

Wired have just published their article on the Crisis in Darfur layers. It’s nice coverage (a little late, maybe), obviously focused on the technical aspect, but it also contains an update about Google’s involvement in this area. They’ve just announced a new nonprofit initiative called Google Earth Outreach, designed to provide more resources for these kinds of projects. There’s a showcase of a range of projects which I didn’t know about, and some nifty tutorials. The really appealling part is the Pro License Grant, which will make the full version of Google Earth more accessible to the sector, so it’s a pretty nice package overall.

However I need to make a correction, which I’ve also added to the Wired site. The article refers to me as the creator of Sahana, which I most certainly am not. However it was nice to see Sahana get linked in the article itself, so I’m not complaining too much.

Immediately after we launched the Darfur layers, somebody pointed out that Google Earth isn’t accessible in Sudan. It’s not because of the Sudanese government (for a change) but because of US sanctions – much more detail at the Export Law Blog, and of course at Ogle Earth. This was something that I had mentioned earlier in the development of the project, but hopefully more people now realise how much OFAC sanctions affect very basic humanitarian projects.

A couple of other interesting Google Earth humanitarian projects are also out there, using the tools in slightly different ways. A new paper on Genomic Analysis and Geographic Visualization of the Spread of Avian Influenza (H5N1) is accompanied by a kmz file from the Society of Systematic Biologists that shows the spread of Avian Flu – not just over space, but over time as well, which creates a startling visualisation of the spread pattern. More information is at Physorg.com.

The Earth is Square blog has add-ons for both World Wind and Google Earth, showing Mogadishu Refugee Migration based on statistics from UNHCR. Yes, I know – it’s UNHCR, the agency with a tendency to make numbers up. Still, the project is an interesting one – there’s a wiki page that acts as a portal with background, screenshots and downloads. Chad at TEiS says, “This add-on is just as important as the Crisis in Darfur layer in Google Earth. Maybe even more important because fewer people seem to know about what is happening in Somalia”, but I think that they’re equally important in spreading the word and showing what can be done with this approach.

That’s right, a two month break doesn’t faze me. There’s been so much happening this year, it’s scary.

To get started, congratulations to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (the hosts for BrightEarth) on launching the Crisis in Darfur collaboration with Google Earth. This is a fascinating project that’s been building for a while now, and I’ve been very pleased to be a part of it. The real credit goes to Michael Graham, who’s really been the driving force behind this.

The best news is that it’s been all over the media. Ogle Earth has a round-up of the coverage, but also makes a very relevant point: “What’s interesting is that there is no consensus among news editors as to where such a story belongs.” Is it a current affairs story, a business story or a technology story? As Ogler concludes, “putting the story in the technology section relegates it to a spot not followed by the people that the technology is most aiming to reach,” which raises questions about how to best bring this type of project to the public.

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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!

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).

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.

People often ask me, “Paul, what was it like in Sudan?” When I tell them it was rock and roll, they don’t believe me – but now I have proof. Ladies and gentlemen, Uz Mamduh’s Al-Sudanieen!

[Thanks for the photos, Maysoon!]