Over the last four weeks I gave three lectures during Fordham University’s “International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance. One was on the Cluster approach, one on the use of social media in emergencies and one was a case study looking at the international response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. This is the case study on Haiti.
Archive for the ‘From the field’ Category
Earlier this week, the UN’s refugee agency counted 1,000,000 Syrian refugees. The problem with big numbers is that they get lost in the noise and in the news; the key is to personalize these numbers. Here is what UNHCR has done.
I just finished reading “The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster” by Jonathan Katz and wanted to share my impressions of the book.
One of the questions I have looked into over the last few months, is how humanitarian organizations can use digital tools to get a better idea of what is going on in disaster-affected areas.
A photographer is suing AFP and Getty Images for 120 million US Dollars over photos that he had taken in Haiti after the earthquake and which he had shared on Twitter.
I just noticed a post on Mobileactive.org on how technology was used by different organizations to follow the 2011 presidential elections in Liberia. The article focuses on the differences between election monitoring and crowd sourcing and also give some insights in the specific challenges that the organizers were faced with in Liberia. It’s worth reading: Technology in the 2011 Liberian elections: mobiles, monitoring and mapping
The last three weeks were a mix of very intense ups and downs that left me frequently frustrated, sleepless and banging my head against a table, but ultimately gave me a sense of satisfaction that cannot be found in many other jobs: the knowledge that I had a very real, positive impact on the lives of people – and not just of an anonymous group of beneficiaries, but individuals whose names and histories I know.
Those of you who follow the elections in Liberia have probably heard about the violent incident that took place in Monrovia last Monday. A local paper has an interesting article on how the simultaneous outage of one of Liberia’s two mobile phone networks affected people who were close to the riot.
