Tag Archives: Haiti

Response to Chris Blow 1: Why We Fight

Posted on January 17, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Chris Blow left a comment on one of my previous crowdsourcing posts. I’m reposting it here, since he makes good points from the point of view of somebody closely involved in developing crowdsourcing solutions, and specifically Ushahidi. I felt it was particularly important to give his comment attention given that nobody else involved with Ushahidi thought it was worth their time engaging in a public discussion about the role of crowdsourcing in humanitarian operations.

I’ll then reply to his points in two separate blog posts. The first reply deals with why I wrote the MobileActive article in the first place, and why I took the tone I did. The second reply addresses Chris’ substantive points about the role of crowdsourcing in emergencies. This might seem like a lot of energy to expend on a single topic, and it might make some people think that I dwell obsessively on “crowdsourcing”, but please rest assured that, when I’m not writing this guff, I don’t think about crowdsourcing at all.

I read your short post last winter “The Bear vs. Shark of Data Entry” and was quite moved by the notion that ostensibly “inefficient” modes of communication could fuel essential humanitarian motivations in all of us.

Your post must have had great timing for me, as it sparked a number of thoughts: it helped me consider the extent to which I was implicitly working to eliminate my contact with people “on the ground.” It made me think more critically about streamlined systems that removed the need to actually “touch” anything. And it reminded me of the essential role of empathy and connectedness as aspects of long-term, systemic value. Yours was a simple and profound critique, and it really pushed me toward in a richer, more engaged role. Thank you.

When I read “How Useful is Humanitarian Crowdsourcing,” I was struck by the difference in tone.

Your criticism, while well-intended and I think quite necessary, struck me as an unreasonably narrow thought experiment. I realize that assuming the role of a UN officer was a productive critical lens for you, but it did not sound like the Currion who had previously so informed my sensibilities, and by design it excludes many of the aspects of Ushahidi that I think are the most important.

For me, the value of the 4636 system was never been just about the actionability of the data — I saw the reports were profoundly flawed as soon as they began to arrive. There were amazing sparks of actionability — glimpses of something we can all fumble toward somehow — but it was always clear that these were no replacement for well-tested logistics plan.

But, while I was quite aware of how utterly limited the data were, this never made me question the basic value of an open communications system during this crisis. When I am in a crisis, I want strong systems in place that let me text anything I want. The poor state of these communication systems in the developing world is not a substitute for robust analysis and filtration on the part of relief agencies. The inadequacy of the network should not be a “first pass” filter. There may be a limited amount of resources on a particular day in a particular crisis — but in the long term I believe that there are millions of people who could be engaged in productive and powerful work through diverse and open platforms. Particularly I see a great promise in networks which help people in crisis see their own neighborhood, to help each other, rather than always relying on the aid worker. So, information which seems predictable and “not novel enough” to an aid worker might be quite powerful to someone who lives down the street. In this sense, I could never reject this data any more than I could reject the howl of a grieving father. These are not always “useful” voices in a logistical sense but rather a natural outgrowth of people having visibility on the network, and I think a critical aspect of civic capacity on a local level. There is also qualitative value in having a connection to these voices across cultural and national borders.

In this sense, I have a hard time understanding how you could question whether it has “any substantive value.” To me the value is self-evident, if complex, and problematic for traditional patterns of response.

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A feature not a bug

Posted on July 16, 2010 by | 6 Comments

I have avoided even thinking about Haiti for the last six months, for reasons which I explained previously. Sanjana just circulated a couple of articles, In Haiti, the Displaced Are Left Clinging To The Edge and Haiti At Six Months After Earthquake, both of which lament the lack of progress in Haiti after six months. I challenge anybody to find a large scale natural disaster which didn’t follow exactly the same pattern.

I find this pantomime of surprise astonishing, but for this we can largely blame the media, old and new. The old media has a narrative template which they apply as a way of avoiding having to think too hard, and the story of dashed hopes is a key part of that template. In this they are largely responding to the expectations of their audience, even if they played a large part in shaping those expectations.

New media has less of an excuse, which makes the breathless coverage of projects like Ushahidi all the more annoying. Let’s be clear – at this stage there is precisely no evidence that the benefits of these projects outweigh the costs of implementing them. I say this with love, having been involved with Sahana for many years; but one one of the reasons my involvement ended was the lack of interest in even defining impact, let alone measuring it.

Back to Haiti, and the title of this post. The lack of progress in Haiti is a feature of the international system, not a bug. All the “humanitarian reform” in the world will not fix this “problem”, because it isn’t a problem. I’d be going a little too far if I said that the system had been designed this way, because nobody designed the system – but it has clearly been guided by the interests of those governments who participate in it.

The system was built by governments nominally on behalf of the citizens of the countries they govern, but in fact to service the needs of governments themselves. (The most visible evidence of this is the continuing resistance to any attempt to erode the principle of state sovereignty.) This is compounded in a disaster by the vastly diminished accountability both of host governments, donor governments and their respective agents – government ministries and NGOs, with the UN agencies acting as intermediaries.

A newcomer to this game might prick up their ears at the word “accountability” and argue that if we increase accountability then we can diminish this effect. This is where the new media narrative comes in, because the new media claims to have elements which lend themselves to levelling out. This is true in some ways but not in others – a discussion which could fill a book rather than a blog post – but the important thing is that technology alone cannot increase accountability.

[T]he biggest problem in every disaster area I’ve ever worked in… It’s the housing issue… But it’s quite complex and it’s the one area that President [René] Préval has wanted to keep the Haitian government directly in charge of because of all of the legal issues involved.

Did you catch that? Clinton genuinely believes – or at least wants to maintain the fiction – that Préval wants to keep the Haitian government directly in charge because of “all of the legal issues involved”. It seems more likely that Préval wants to keep control because property ownership is the basis of power for the ruling elite – an elite that includes Préval and the entire government. If you don’t understand or won’t acknowledge that basic dynamic, then you are frankly part of the problem.

Even if you do understand and acknowledge, you may still be part of the problem. I include myself in this – one of the reasons that I withdrew from humanitarian work a couple of years ago (sort of) was because I couldn’t resolve this issue, and I still can’t. When I go to work, I am part of the international system that by its very nature will fail to address anything more than the most basic needs (and sometimes not even those) of the people of Haiti.

It is a feature of the system that people with the power to change the system achieve and maintain that power through the system itself, and so are disinclined to make changes. This is true of politics and business alike; I respect Bill Gates for committing to giving away his money1; while his astonishing wealth will help many of the poorest, he never publicly questions the system that enabled such massive disparity between his wealth and that of the poorest.

Back to Haiti one last time. To some extent the continued suffering of Haiti is inevitable because of the sheer scale of the disaster and the pre-existing situation in Haiti. As I said before, however, I don’t know of a major disaster where, six months later, commitments had been fulfilled and serious progress made. That alone should make it obvious that this is not a bug in the system, but a feature – and that feature is the persistent exclusion of affected communities even while the language of inclusion is spoken.

  1. As I respect Bill Clinton for committing to Haiti – although, 3 years? Yeah, that’ll fix it. [↩]

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The Bear versus Shark of Data Entry

Posted on February 21, 2010 by | 4 Comments

Tales from the Hood lays out the harsh reality of aid work - lots of manual data entry. How does that stack up against Robert K’s Talking Papers?

About two thirds of the form was numerical, and so entering that data got to be pretty mechanical after the first hour or two. But that last third was all qualitative stuff: open-ended interview questions where at times the respondents appeared to have rambled or gone on wild tangents.

The first two thirds could be covered more easily by automation (although you’d still need somebody to feed the machine and to check the OCR) but that last third – the qualitative stuff is never going to fit into the machine comfortably.

But let’s forget the information management and keep in mind the “description of chronic, always-in-the-back-of-your-mind hunger by someone who’d lost everything” that the Hoodie passes on to us from a scrap of paper in Port-au-Prince:

The hunger is… a hole beneath our hearts.

Now that I think about it, that’s the reality of aid work – that and these lessons from Catherine at AIDG. Sometimes it helps to have non-aid workers tell the rest of the world what it’s really like…

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Reinventing Haiti

Posted on January 24, 2010 by | 12 Comments

Some people are attached to “Build Back Better”, and it bothers me. If we want to “build back” a country that was such a nightmare that most of the citizens basically wanted to get the hell out, build back better is the way to go; if we want to participate in a project that has clear ideological intent to sustain the status quo with marginal improvements in people’s lives, then build back better is the slogan to front it. I don’t want that; I want something new, something better than Build Back Better.

Architecture for Humanity volubly disagreed with me on Twitter, which is ironic, because they’re exactly the sort of organisation that I’d like to see get more play in the great game of aid – see their plan for reconstruction if you don’t believe me. I don’t have a coherent over-arching plan to fix Haiti, because coherent over-arching plans to fix Haiti will fail – that’s kind of the point when it comes to dealing with complex systems like countries, right? So perhaps I should clarify what I meant when I said Just Say No by providing a few examples:

  • Reinvent Building. Shelter is critical to most service delivery in an emergency, but particularly after earthquakes when people have lost their housing. Now’s the time to introduce sustainable housing using techniques such as rammed earth construction, supported by a radical land rights regime based on the work of Hernando de Soto.
  • Reinvent Sanitation. The industrialised model of sanitation simply doesn’t scale in rapidly-growing cities in developing countries, sometimes creating more problems than they solve. There are alternatives to the flush-and-forget toilet, so why not roll out composting toilets that enable more effective management of human waste as well as supporting urban agriculture?
  • Reinvent Agriculture. It might seem strange to talk about farming in the middle of the city, but if it can work in Detroit, then why not Port-au-Prince? Permaculture projects hit several sweet spots all at once – not just food security but waste management, livelihoods and so on – and an alternative to the more destructive patterns that Haiti suffered before.
  • Reinvent Power. Solar solar solar isn’t the answer to every question, particularly at large scale, but it hits a lot of household usage in poor countries (including the ubiquitous mobile phone). There are smart ideas like the FLAP bag floating around, but basic solar – solar cookers, for example – have been around for a while. Anything to shift away from wood.
  • Reinvent Communications. Forget restoring any landlines that might have existed before the earthquake, because I bet that everybody was using mobile phones anyway. Roll out free wireless broadband across the city – maybe find a use for those OLPCs that are hanging around in warehouses (eventually), but more importantly create new business opportunities.
  • Reinvent Transport. Segways! Not really. Roads are for the rich; why not think about the needs of the poor and simply make sure there are pavements? A simple but profound idea if you want to go for a walk without falling into a hole filled with dirty water and metal poles. In an ideal world, there’d be some integrated transport plan that looked at how to convert tap-taps to LPG, but even I’m not that silly.
  • Reinvent Finance. Facilitate the free flow of remittances, even if they’re not the biggest link in the chain of solidarity… but it would be interesting to see what happened if, instead of channelling funding through big multilaterals and the Haitian “government”, cash grants were used to kickstart the economy through community finance mechanisms and plain old cash distributions.
  • Reinvent Governance. We all love democracy, the worst form of government. Unfortunately we tend to forget that democracy comes in different flavours; it’s frustrating when the cloning attempts repeatedly fail and everybody acts surprised. So let’s be more inventive – community-level direct democracy, emergent rather than directed policy, referenda rather than elections, issue-based not party-based, and so on.

Am I naive to think that these things are possible? Well, no, because I don’t really believe these things are possible. To be clear – none of these things are part of the immediate humanitarian response, but we should be thinking about knitting together Haiti’s social fabric before it suffers permanent trauma through a range of small-scale exploratory projects, rather than calling for a Marshall Plan for Haiti.

Unfortunately that’s the way that the international community responds – too much planning and not enough searching. The tool kit available to the aid bureaucracy is almost comically limited; there are numerous small projects going on around the world that can make a difference in people’s lives, but the challenge is placing them in a long-term view of reinvention. We’re not very good at thinking in realistic timeframes for country-level development, forgetting exactly how long it took rich countries to get rich and how recently that wealth arrived.

There are two main obstacles: first, existing institutional structures will work very hard indeed to replicate themselves, and they have the leverage; second, scaling up is incredibly difficult to achieve past anything more than the level of an extended community. The institutional structures are the same ones that brought you – Afghanistan! Iraq! most of Africa! – i.e. structures that have repeatedly demonstrated that they’re most likely not fit for purpose.

And scaling up? That’s where the real work is – trying to rebuild from the inside these systems that have grown up over the years, using the same tools that built those systems in the first place. I’ve been trying to work this out for most of my working life, and I still don’t have many good solutions. So if anybody has any other ideas for reinventing Haiti, plug them into the comments below – and don’t come screaming with approaches that are so radical that nobody outside the US will ever use them, please….

In the meantime, there are lives to save, and I have to write an evaluation report on NGO co-ordination in Southern Sudan.

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Talking smack about reinventing Haiti

Posted on January 22, 2010 by | Leave a comment

First, the bad news: the extended blog post in which I explain what I meant by Just Say No to Build Back Better has been eaten by black hats (probably Chinese, since everybody else wants to blame them for everything else). I’m going to get back to it, but it’s going to take a bit of time to reconstruct, and I’m in southern Sudan, so good luck with that.

Second, the good news: IRIN just podcasted interviews with Sanjana and myself on the Haiti response. You can hear me talking about Just Say No – think of it as a trailer for the blog post. Bottom line is this: the system we have in place for disaster response and reconstruction is broken, and we need something completely new.

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Haiti: Just Say No to Build Back Better

Posted on January 17, 2010 by | 7 Comments

Haiti is on my (thankfully) short list of “Countries for which I genuinely can’t see a solution”. It’s a possibility that we don’t like to think about – that perhaps there are certain situations which countries (loosely defined) cannot get out of. There’s no logical reason why this couldn’t happen – read Jared Diamond’s “Collapse” and Thomas Homer-Dixon’s “The Ingenuity Gap” back-to-back to get a loose idea of what I’m talking about – but our natural instincts are to deny the possibility.

The argument is simple, and it goes like this. Societies are complex systems that rely on a wide range of mutually-reinforcing factors in order to maintain themselves. We don’t actually understand all the factors that are in play, let alone how they interact with each other, but some of the more visible relationships make it possible to make reasonable estimates of the health of the system.  To anybody who’s investigated Haiti’s situation, it’s clear that it was a complex system that was failing, if it hadn’t failed already.

I refuse to use the term failed state, a political construction used to justify a particular ideological position; Tyler Cowen is closer to the mark when he talks about coming to terms “with the idea that the country of Haiti, as we knew it, probably does not exist any more.” It’s a little mysterious why he thinks that it’s President Obama that needs to comes to terms with it, rather than, say, the people who live in Haiti, particularly because it’s the latter who get to say if their country doesn’t exist any more.

Which brings me to the question: if I’m such a Gloomy Gus about Haiti’s prospects, do I have any positive thoughts about the situation? It’s going to take a long time to clear the rubble – both physical and emotional – but the opportunity before us collectively is huge. Let’s stop talking about reconstruction, when we’d be reconstructing a system that was a failure even before the quake; let’s stop talking about long-term development when long-term development had clearly failed to deliver significant poverty reduction.

Instead, let’s talk about reinventing Haiti. What sort of Haiti would its citizens like to see rise from the ashes of the old Haiti? The answer, unfortunately, will not be to the taste of those in power both inside Haiti and out. We don’t have the tools to respond to the wishes of people affected by the earthquake simply because it’s not within the parameters by which the system was designed. Alternative models of governance, of urban planning, of service delivery – they literally can’t be considered.

What might reinvention involve? I’ve got ideas (what else did you think?) but the whole point is that it’s not up to me. Our job is to look at the role that our decisions have played in building a structure that knew Haiti was an accident waiting to happen but prevented anybody from taking action to prevent it; even now we’re reaping the results of that in the logistics bottlenecks facing the relief effort, in a city built against resilience. Forget about reinventing the wheel; the real danger is reinventing Haiti as it was.

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On not caring about Haiti

Posted on January 14, 2010 by | 10 Comments

The earthquake that struck Haiti is a terrible disaster that requires the international community to provide both immediate aid to save lives and longer-term support to rebuild infrastructure and livelihoods. Even as I write those words, I’m reading between the lines, and my sympathy for the Haitians affected by the quake is tempered outweighed by my anger at an international system that allows Haiti to languish at the bottom end of the Human Development league, but mobilises millions of dollars as soon as infrastructure collapses.

Nobody can deny that Haiti needs assistance right now to save lives, but it also needed assistance yesterday when the infant mortality rate was the 37th lowest in the world. When it comes to natural disasters, we – our governments, our media, ourselves – are victims of the same biases that cause impulse buying at the supermarket. Thousands of people dying from buildings falling on them instantly mobilises a huge amount of resources, but thousands of children dying from easily preventable diseases is just background noise. This is the uncomfortable reality of the aid world, but it’s not one that our media or governments really wants to hear.

I’m not looking to condemn any particular individual or organisation that wants to help in whatever way they can, but if we think there’s something wrong with that picture, perhaps we shouldn’t just be handing over money to our chosen charity, but lobby for the following:

  1. Develop a more consistent and more coherent aid architecture that takes a long view of human capability instead of a short term view of human suffering.
  2. Encourage more creative approaches to rebuilding Port-au-Prince for an urban plan that meets the needs of the poor, not just the rich, and builds more resilient communities.
  3. Put an end to the portrayal of Haitians (and others) as victims and takes notice of the fact that they are the ones who responded first to this emergency.

My thoughts go out to the people of Haiti; first suffering the earthquake, and now the international community.

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