We thought that nobody would object to us giving direct assistance to a vulnerable teenage mother who had just given birth. We were wrong. This is my contribution to the Second Aid Blog Forum on “Admitting Aid Failure?”
Web based election monitoring in Liberia: a failure
On October - 13 - 2011
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For the past three days I have been following the coverage of the Liberia elections on liberia2011.ushahidi.com. Unfortunately, I’m far from impressed. To be clear: this is not the fault of Ushahidi: After all, Ushahidi is just the technical platform and it is the responsibility of others to feed the system information, but it shows the limitations of crowdsourcing information.
Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections
On October - 9 - 2011
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Liberians will go to the polls on 11 October 2011 to vote for a new house of representative, a new senate and – most importantly – they’ll decide who will be the president for the next six years. Ushahidi has set up a website to monitor the elections.
Talking about condoms, talking about rape
On September - 24 - 2011
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Over the last few days I came across a few things having to do with communicating with beneficiaries. The first is a short video about selling condoms in Congo. The second is a sign advising women in Liberia where they can go for help if they have been raped.
A call for investing into information management in aidwork
On September - 5 - 2011
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I think of information management a little bit like of logistics: You don’t notice it if it works smoothly, but it has a massive impact if it doesn’t work. But, unlike with logistics, many people are so used to IM being crap that they think that it cannot be improved. Let me tell you: good information management is possible, it’s not even difficult, and it can do lots to improve humanitarian aid.
Why this isn’t “just a job”: An amazing story from Ivory Coast
On September - 3 - 2011
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There are moments in this line of work that you just can’t find anywhere else and that fill you with such a joy and sense of accomplishment that you never want to do anything else. This is such a story:
Completely wrong assumptions about technology in developing countries
On July - 30 - 2011
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I just came across a really excellent post by Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier: “A List of Completely Wrong Assumptions About Technology Use in Emerging Economies”. If you have anything to do with using digital tools in a development context, I highly recommend you read this post. Though, of course, the problem is not limited to using web tools.
Rural Liberia: Where mobile phones are still a rarity
On July - 20 - 2011
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This is my first time in Africa. However, the one thing that all my colleagues with Africa experience had told me was: “Everybody has a mobile phone.” This made sense to me based on my experience in Haiti where, even though the country is extremely poor, many people even had two mobile phones, one for each network. In Liberia – not so much.
