humanitarian.info

Let’s take a break from the more negative posts of the past few days to congratulate the members of NetHope who recently won Intel’s INSPIRE•EMPOWER Challenge.¹ Catholic Relief Services’ Great Lakes Cassava Initiative (GLCI):

… a pilot project using laptops to help cassava farmers increase food availability and incomes. Millions of families in East and Central Africa rely on cassava as a primary food source, but two virulent diseases are wiping out fields across the region. GLCI aims to educate 1.15 million farmers in six countries about these diseases and provide them with disease-resistant cassava plants. The laptops will facilitate information exchange among farmers, field agents and project managers; support remote distribution of training modules; and improve disease monitoring through automatic data transfers.

and WinRock International’s² Rural Livelihood Enhancement:

… to deliver information and communication technology (ICT) services to rural communities in Nepal. To address the lack of grid electricity, the project will utilize renewable power from micro-hydro stations and solar photovoltaic panels. The goal of the project is to bring about economic development and improve access to energy, education, employment and information in remote areas. The ICT service centers will serve as computer labs for students and will be open to the public during off-school hours to provide services to the community.

Both of these projects take the right approach – looking at an existing problem from the perspective of the affected communities and applying technology to solve that problem, rather than taking a technology and trying to find a problem to apply it to. Congratulations to both organisations, and good luck with the projects!

1. Not strictly humanitarian, but NetHope gets a free ride on this blog. [↩]
2. Another interesting article about WinRock’s work at Ken’s blog – by Gary Garriot, a legend in the development tech sector. [↩]

In the last post in this series, many moons ago, I listed five practitioner-based approaches to successful innovation – but are there any concrete examples of innovation? In the first post in the series, I said that I’ve been involved in at least five projects that I believe demonstrate innovation in the sector, and regular readers of this blog will recognise most of these names. Naturally these projects generally involve technology, but that’s not what makes them innovative – so what does?

Humanitarian Information Centres.The original concept of the HICs was that they were a field-based focal point to deliver a range of information services, especially introducing Geographic Information Systems to actors in the field. While the Kosovo HCIC wasn’t the first information centre, the HCIC’s innovation was to package this delivery in a coherent way yet still serve people at different levels – from individual refugees to UNMIK. The HICs in general started to fail as soon as they lost sight of that, in my opinion.

NetHope. In their own words, NetHope is a “nonprofit IT consortium of leading international NGOs”, but their innovation is in their approach – creating “the ability to collectively solve common problems and leverage their technology investment to achieve higher levels of efficiency, quality and reach for their organizations’ programs so that communities in need can be better served.” What this means in practice is sharing the burden of e.g. testing and deploying new communications equipment, leveraging economies of scale to get better deals on hardware and software, and – perhaps most importantly – encouraging open discussion about how to solve common organisational IT problems. This works because IT departments are non-competitive – unlike Programme Units, they are not competing with each other for funding – and because IT staff are often isolated within their own organisations. NetHope’s innovation was to create the space for these people to network with each other – everything else is built on that.

Sahana. As everybody should know by now, Sahana is an open source platform for disaster management, originally intended to enable developing countries and organizations to manage disasters more effectively but now seeing wider application (for example, it’s being used by organisations as diverse as New York City Council, Huridocs and Uncle Tom Cobbley) despite the serious limitations of open source as a model for crisis response. Sahana’s innovation was to harness the open source model to the needs of humanitarian response – a natural fit, in my opinion.

Aid Workers Network. Still crazy after all these year, AWN is a web-based community of practice to enable aid workers to share expertise. This project has never had it easy – Mark Hammersley was frankly way ahead of his time, and many of the principles that he espoused when developing the project are now commonplace in the sector.¹ AWN’s innovation was to use the web to connect aid workers, the most geographically and culturally diverse professional group that has ever existed – a similar principle to NetHope but a completely different approach. AWN has never taken off the way that it should have – not due to the technology, but due to the inability of its guiding committee to market the service successfully.

I’d be interested to hear whether people think I’m wrong, but it should be obvious that I don’t think that any of this innovation was technology innovation. In fact none of these projects were technologically innovative in themselves – their innovations were introducing or applying existing technology and techniques for the benefit of the sector. Looking back on these projects, the common denominator that made each of them more or less successful was their construction and use of networks amongst their target market. It was this network – whether more or less formal, composed of individuals or organisations – that made it possible for their impact to spread through the sector – in other words, to become both enduring and widespread.

However as soon as that focus on or leverage of networks lapses, success starts to disappear. For my money, we can see this most clearly with the HICs – as their focus shifted from supporting the entire humanitarian community to supporting OCHA and/or the Humanitarian Co-ordinator’s office, they gradually found it more difficult to be able to leverage network effects to act as an information broker. Without that role, it was increasingly unclear what their added value was to the bumanitarian community, at the same time as other actors were starting to provide similar services (notably GIS). OCHA, meanwhile, mistakenly assumed that it was the technology that was the innovation – in fact, that it was the technology that drew people to the project in the first place, which I would contest vigorously.

However what made it possible for each of these projects to create their networks in the first place was technology – and it is here that the humanitarian community needs to focus if it is to innovate successfully in future. Technology has created the possibility of overcoming many of the organisational problems that plague the sector, from organisational silos to staff turnover to insecurity in the field.² It is not that technology will solve these problems, but it does offer us the possibility of working together more effectively to solve them ourselves.

1. Although those principles are honoured more in the breach than in the observation. [↩]
2. It is worth noting that these issues need to be addressed on their own terms as well, and that some initiatives are already trying to do that. Collaborative efforts such as the Emergency Capacity Building Project (http://www.ecbproject.org) and UNGIWG (http://www.ungiwg.org/unsdi.htm) are two that are relevant here. [↩]

I spoke last week with Conor Foley, who’s looking at innovation in the humanitarian sector for the next ALNAP annual report. As any fule kno, innovation is a particularly interest of mine, particularly technology innovation, but I wasn’t surprised to hear that most of his interviewees shared my perspective: that the humanitarian community is not much good at innovation.

I should qualify that. The humanitarian community is built on innovation – on just getting things done despite a lack of resources – but successful innovation is very hard to come by. I define “successful” in this context as innovations that become widespread and enduring – that is, that they spread widely and last over time. I should probably qualify that as well:

1. All innovations have a distinct lifespan, and are often superceded by a new innovation (or more rarely a completely new invention). So if an innovation endures over time, that is evidence of its success; but if an innovation doesn’t endure, that isn’t necessarily evidence of its failure.
2. All innovations are context-specific, and sometimes don’t translate into other contexts. So likewise, if an innovation spreads geographically / organisationally, that is evidence for its success; but if it doesn’t, that isn’t necessarily evidence of its failure.

These two qualifications makes successful innovation sometimes hard to identify – but not impossible. In terms of projects that I’ve been involved with inside the sector, I think the Humanitarian Information Centres, the ECB Project and NetHope all qualify without any doubt (although the innovation in each project is exhibited in very different ways). What interests me more is innovation outside the sector.

I’ve been involved with Sahana for a long time now, and I wouldn’t hesitate to identify it as the single biggest innovation I’ve seen – potentially revolutionary. You can also point to projects like Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS and so forth – projects that, while not “humanitarian” in themselves, have definite humanitarian applications – but the strange thing about all these is that they haven’t managed to get significant traction inside the “traditional” humanitarian sector.

The question is, Why is this the case? What makes the humanitarian community unable to recognise and replicate innovation? And that, my friends, will be the subject of the next post…

UPDATE: To my eternal guilt and shame, I forgot to mention a fourth project that I was involved with, Aid Workers Network – again, work that was well ahead of its time, mainly thanks to Mark Hammersley.

• MapAction and BrightEarth both feature in an article in the Independent entitled “Mapping the disaster zones” – how they think up the intensely creative titles for these articles, I just don’t know. Interesting enough, but these articles always leave me with a sense that the writer just doesn’t get it – apparently “Within 48 hours: The latest field information is combined with accurate 1:5,000,000 “base maps” to form the first complete maps of disaster-zone data”, which is news to me.

• At the bottom of the press release Intel, Grameen Announce Joint Business Venture to Fuel Social and Economic Development Opportunities Empowered by Technology, we learn that Intel have teamed up with NetHope to develop new solutions for the field, the first (and possibly last) of which is the Aid Station, a “rugged, purpose-built, low-cost technology platform suitable for use in harsh, remote locations”.

• Jon Thompson sends me links to two initiatives which mainly force me to ask the question “Why?” NGO Post and Commkit are both well-intended, but both seem to be hell-bent on reinventing the wheel. If Digg works, why not just create an NGO channel on it rather than build an entirely new NGO version of it? If you need “a humanitarian communications platform that is autonomous (works with very little infrastructure) and accessible (anyone can use it)”, then why not use the internet with Sahana running on it? OTOH, it’s standard NGO practice to reinvent the wheel, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised – however if anybody can shed any light on either of these, I’ll be more than happy to revise my opinion.

• Development Gateway have launched two new dgCommunities – one for Disasters Prevention and Response and one for Stabilization & Reconstruction, both with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. This partnership seems to have emerged out of CSIS giving up on the idea of launching their own community, the Hub, which explains the inclusion of S&R (terminology which the US military loves and the humanitarian community does not). I’ve nothing against community sites, but I’m waiting to see one in this sector which works as a community (particularly following my own experience with AidWorkers Network).

• The OLPC XO2 is announced. Quoth OLPC news:

On top of that it seems as though a new UN Millennium Development Goal is in the works. The press-release quotes Nirj Deva, Member of the European Parliament, as saying: “One Laptop per Child and the XO laptop are crucial to the fulfillment of the proposed UN Ninth Millennium Goal: to ensure that every child between the ages of 6 and 12 has immediate access to a personal laptop computer by 2015.”

Somebody shoot me. Or better still, send me more news for this section.

It’s the time of year when NetHope like to get together and stare at hardware until it breaks. That’s right, the NetHope Summit 2008 is on again, this time hosted by Cisco – and once again, David Goodman of IRC is blogging from the conference.