humanitarian.info

I promised myself that I’d blog every single day while I was working in Georgia. It should be fairly obvious that I didn’t. I can’t say that I was super productive while I was in Tbilisi – for a variety of reasons, including particularly dysfunctional co-ordination, but also because of the basic difficulty of getting good information in conflict situations.

In a natural disaster, government agencies and international organisations are usually relatively comfortable to share information about the situation – but in a conflict, they clam up tighter than my wallet around Christmas. This is because natural disasters have fewer political implications than complex emergencies; while in a natural disaster the worst thing you can say about a government is that they’re negligent, in a conflict situation the government is usually a belligerent,

This means that timely / reliable / accurate information is hard to come by in Georgia, as Ivan points out and Ethan overviews (is that a verb?). I find it hard to get too worked up about the lack of “citizen war reporters” even though it is my fervent hope that the web is going to change the way we do business in both complex emergencies and natural disasters. My lack of work-up is simply because even if there were shedloads of citizen journalists covering these events, I would still treat them exactly the same as any other information source – which is to say, I wouldn’t trust them at all.

As an example, the single most critical humanitarian information issue in Georgia was the numbers and locations of people displaced by the conflict. This was problematic for a number of reasons:

1. Nobody had a clue how many people had been displaced by the conflict. There were multiple government agencies involved in looking after the IDPs (frequently a euphemism for “ignoring them”, of course), each with their own figures, none of which tallied with the figures that UNHCR or the Red Cross had; and of course nobody in the humanitarian community had bothered to sit down and agree on a number we could all work to. Lesson from Afghanistan, folks: your numbers are never going to be 100% accurate, and it’s better just to agree to a number and get to planning than continually be running after the latest figures – which are also going to be wrong.
2. Nobody wanted to talk about the IDPs left over from the previous round of conflict in 1992-93; a staggering 220,000 people (not 100% accurate, of course – just run with it!) have been rotting in terrible conditions for the last 16 years, and some of their stories can be found on IDP Voices. Nearly all of us who were new to Georgia found this astonishing, since it raised a rather difficult question: what the *&%$ has the government and the UN been doing for the last 16 years? It also confuses the picture because in purely humanitarian terms many of these “old caseload” IDPs were in a worse situation than the “new caseload” – and many of the “normal” citizens live in conditions as bad as either.
3. For both old and new caseloads, the main priority is ensuring their basic shelter, which comes under the Emergency Shelter cluster. Unfortunately the UN in Georgia had decided that they didn’t want to activate the cluster system (because it’s a bit of a hassle and you have to actually take responsibility for your actions) but they did want to use some of the cluster tools (particularly the ones that give you a fat sack of cash to spend). This meant that it was like stepping into a time machine to 2004 – you remember, when “co-ordination” was a competition to see who could hold as many meetings as possible with as few outcomes as possible.
4. Notwithstanding the co-ordination problem, nobody had a clue what to do with all them displaced. The government unveiled a not unreasonable resettlement plan for the new caseload at the start of September, but that plan rapidly ran aground on the harsh reality that the stock and state of public buildings in Georgia are likely not sufficient to house the IDPs according to basic humanitarian standards, even on a short-term basis. (Some interesting discussion on this at the Social Science in the Caucasus blog.) The question is whether that government plan can be reshaped into a more realistic framework that will engage the entire humanitarian community as well as being attractive to donors…

One of the things about shelter issues is that they tend to get worse the longer you leave them. Conditions deteriorate, particularly when people are housed in buildings that were never designed for residential use. In this case, many of the new caseload had been placed in schools and kindergartens around Tbilisi and other towns – which meant that we also had to deal with the fact that those institutions were needed for the start of the new school year. This was a particular tension for UNICEF, who often run a “Back To School” program – which wouldn’t look too good if there weren’t any schools to go back to. In addition winters in Georgia can get unpleasant, especially the closer you get to mountains, and thus another constraint on resettlement.

You might have noticed that there wasn’t much talk about information in this blog post. That’s because there wasn’t much information, as I explained previously. We got hold of the complete set of school locations from the MInistry of Education (shape files ahoy!) but nobody seemed that interested. We tried to persuade the different actors – Red Cross, UNHCR, Ministries various – to consolidate the figures for collective centres and the IDPs therein, but with little luck. Paolo Palmero from OCHA had gathered a lot of data during his 2005 visit, but none of it seemed to be circulating in the agencies.

Summary version: this response showed yet again the importance of investing in information resources before an emergency hits. That doesn’t just mean getting loads of satellite images (although UNOSAT did some impressive work on damage levels) but investing in relationships with government, relationships that can be leveraged quickly to mutual benefit. It means having a basic picture already in place – locations of schools, for example – that you can then overlay new data on top of – such as the estimated IDP numbers in those schools. This really needs a collective approach – one agency alone isn’t sufficient to achieve success, although you need a focal point for the effort – but it continues to make me wonder if we should be thinking about setting up an organisation that collects and disseminates operational data like this.

At least that would avoid me feeling like a numpty, turning up at meetings with my tiny spreadsheet of schools that might need some watsan rehabilitation…