Not far from where I live, an organization that shall remain nameless installed two massive water tanks, which are supposed to serve a community. And to make things easier, this organization installed an electric pump that uses solar power. Unfortunately, what might have sounded like a great idea is completely useless in reality, because the solar panels never made it through their first rainy season and there is nobody who could repair or maintain them – today the tanks are completely dry and empty.

So yes, technology is great and can be sexy, but it has to be appropriate to the context and you have to make sure that you train people in their use so that they can continue to use and maintain it.

Related posts:

1. Use of technology in the 2011 elections in Liberia
2. Web based election monitoring in Liberia: a failure
3. Rural Liberia: Where mobile phones are still a rarity

Having been there for three months hardly makes me an expert – even less so since all I did was shuttle between the our base camp and the UN LogsBase in a land cruiser twice a day, always protected by a suffocating security bubble that made sure that I had no chance to actually talk to any Haitians, except for the drivers and our two local staff.

Nevertheless, I have an opinion. And that opinion is that Haiti was a terrible place to grow up and live before the earthquake. And the quake has made it worse.

What frustrates me is that many people seem to think that we should have been able to change that by now, simply by throwing a lot of money at the issues. The problem is: it doesn’t work that way.

Poverty is the real disaster

Poverty is the underlying problem to all vulnerability. And you can’t change poverty in seven months. To change poverty to you need to create opportunities. And that requires infrastructure, rule of law, education and jobs. You can’t end poverty with a cheque. If you dived all the money that has been pledged (oh, and btw, most of the money that was pledged by states at the beginning of this year still hasn’t arrived) you wouldn’t have ended poverty, you would just have increased prizes.

You also can’t build a functioning disaster preparedness system in seven months – and you definitely can’t do it in a country that never had such a mechanism while you are in the middle of a massive response operation. That is why everybody is so worried about hurricane season.

And don’t even get me started on deforestation – how do you improve the situation of farmers in seven months when 96 per cent of all trees have been cut in the country and the fertile top soil is washing into the sea before your very eyes?

Just across the road from the destroyed Presidential Palace in Port-au-Prince is a large IDP camp.

A task for years, not months

What you can do in seven months is you can try to do the best you can. You can provide potable water, latrines, shelter and give people the basic necessities to survive. In a year, even in two years, you can only treat symptoms.

Treating these symptoms is important. However, there seems to be the bizarre expectation that it should be possible to change the future of nine million Haitians within a couple of months, when realistically I think that you will start to see improvements after five and real changes after 10 or 15 years – and that is in a best case scenario without civil unrest or new natural disasters. (“Tales from the Hood” has an excellent post about how aid is complicated and expensive.)

To make real changes, you need to change structures, which requires the political will and ability to make those changes. Think about it: how long it takes in your country before a new law has been passed or new regulations have been adopted? Why should it be any faster in a country where a quarter of the civil servants are dead, most ministries destroyed and where most people who have an education have left the country?

So when somebody asks me  ”How is Haiti these days?” – sometimes I just respond: “Very warm.” Because that is the only thing I know for sure.

No related posts.

If you want to know how the website was set-up, please click here for the configuration. In addition, I had some customization done on the theme and had an additional language, Haiti Creole, added to the front end. That version is not live yet, but it’s getting there.

The brand new Haiti Red Cross website

Screencast and on-site training

In order to make the most of my time in Haiti I prepared a few short instructional videos. And while my French is terrible, I found a good, free screen capture service: Jing.

Jing is a free software that let’s you capture up to five minutes of video and sound and share it online. It works really smoothly. And while the 5 minute limit might sound very short, I found that it is enough for most steps, as long as you do one video for each action. What I find strange is that the “Pro” version doesn’t let you capture longer videos.

I hope that those videos will also help the webmaster to train staff and volunteers outside Port-au-Prince.

Email with Google Apps

The Haitian Red Cross webmaster Charlot and I.

I hadn’t been aware that I would also be expected to set up the Haitian Red Cross’ email service, but I suppose I should have expected it. And while activating email through Plesk on the server was no big deal, in the end we decided to go with Google Apps.

Email security, backups and all these things are simply such a massive headache that I counselled against putting that burden on the webmaster. In my opinion a webmaster should worry about the site and not about whether email is backed up. I had never used Google Apps before, but it’s great! Once, you have managed to configure a server to work with Google Apps (and unfortunately the instructions are terrible) it works like a dream and of course you also have immediate access to Google docs, calendar etc.. I wish we could get rid of our exchange server at the IFRC and migrate!

Real life – outside base camp

On a more somber note: I have to admit I felt a bit inadequate in the middle of all these people who are providing water, shelter or basic health care. I mean, how does the need for a website rank in comparison to these needs?

On the last day I had the chance to leave base camp for a couple of hours so that I could get an idea of what life is like outside base camp and indeed for many of the staff and volunteers I was working with every day. It’s easy to forget when you are inside a compound and well cared for, but many of the people I was working with might not have a home to return to after work.

To cut a long story short: the needs are basically – everything. I mean, you name it, they don’t have it. We were walking through one of the camps where the Red Cross is working and even though you could see that a lot had already been done to improve the situation, what had been achieved seems like very little compared to what still needs to be done. Don’t get me wrong: I have seen everyone in base camp work every day from 6 am to well after dark. It’s not because people don’t work hard, that things take a long time. It’s because it’s such an enormous job.

The “land issue”

For me, the biggest revelation was to see the “land issue” first hand. I have to admit that I always found it hard to understand why we don’t just erect a couple of thousand tents and instead decided to distribute tarps and tool kits. I always found it difficult to accept that no land is available to set up those tents. But once you are there, you realize that it’s really true: there is no literally no space to put tents up! Every little bit of space is already taken up! I saw people living on the bit of green between the lane’s on Port-au-Prince’s main street.

And you can’t simply replace the rickety shelters that people have built themselves with “proper” tents either. Because those tents are bigger than the existing emergency shelters, less people would be able to stay in any one location. Which means that you first need a place where the rest of the people could go. And for that you need land.

There is a much better and far more coherent summary of the issue on the “tales from the hood” blog titled “Sorry, I’m just an aid worker“.  I highly recommend that you read this post if you are interested in the Haiti response.

Anyhow: Haiti Red Cross has email and a website now. It’s not much, but it’ll help Haiti Red Cross talk to the world about their work and what the reality is on the ground. And maybe that will help a little bit.

No related posts.

Anyhow, this project gives me the rather enviable opportunity to create something from scratch without having to worry about integrating any other systems or databases. And of course, in my mind I have played the “what if”-game many times. Now is my chance to put it into practice.

The conditions

• Website must be easy to maintain
• Must have a backend
• Must have a backend in a language that can be used by the people maintaining it
• Multilingual support
• Cheap
• Site should be up as quickly as possible
• Big developer community

With all that in mind I suggested to use WordPress as a CMS to drive the website. The National Society accepted this proposal and I have been fine tuning it since then. It’s running on a dedicated virtual server. For the design we decided to modify a premium theme.

Below is the set-up that I have in place so far. Please chip in, if you have any additional suggestions. I hope others will find it useful as well. All plug-ins can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/

• After the deadline
  Checks spelling, style and grammar of your English language posts.
  
• Category header content
  Let’s you add HTML at the top of your category or tag-pages. In my opinion, you shouldn’t need a plugin to do that, but it’s the only way I found to add custom text to the top of category or tag-pages.
  
• Contact Form 7
  A customizable contact form. Supports many languages.
  
• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
  Generates a human readable sitemap.
  
• Easily navigate pages on dashboard
  The site will have a lot of pages (as opposed to posts). This plugin makes it easier to jump to individual pages.
  
• Google XML Sitemaps
  Adds a Google XML site map.
  
• Lightview Plus
  Improves the standard WordPress gallery and has slide show features. I have not figured out how to make this multi lingual yet. The plugin requires that you buy  the lightview script for 3 euros.
  
• Media Tags
  Allows you to assign tags to your media files which will make it easier to find them in the future.
  
• Registered Users only
  Hides the site from anonymous users while still under development.
  
• Sociable
  Adds Twitter/Facebook etc. “share” buttons to all posts and pages. I love how customizable this plugin is!
  
• WP DB backup
  Emails me a complete database backup every day. The frequency is customizable, as are the tables that are being backed up.
  
• WPML multilingual CMS
  This plugin is seriously impressive! WPML does not only create a multilingual structure for your site but also helps your editors with the translation workflow and even supports translations of widgets and text-strings (though that doesn’t always work 100%). Since my day job is to maintain a multilingual site I can tell you that I’d be much happier if we had this!   The plugin was developed by a translation company that integrates their translation services into the plugin. Very smart.
  
• WPtouch iPhone theme
  Delivers site news for mobile devices (not just iPhones). Since the site is for a disaster-prone country where mobile phone are widely used, this could be a useful feature.

I have not installed any YouTube and Flickr plugins yet because the one’s I’ve seen haven’t really convinced me.

I am still looking for a good comments-plugin that is available in multiple languages. Please leave a comment if you know one.

What would you add to this list?

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I’m referring specifically to Chrome OS, Google’s new operating system, and the announcement that Google would dump Google Gears, a service that makes it possible to use services like GoogleDocs offline. In both cases, Google emphasized the importance of cloud computing as opposed to working offline. The idea is that all data, i.e. your spread sheets, your documents, your photos, get stored on remote servers (a.k.a. “the cloud”) and none of it on your machine.

Has Google lost touch with reality?

For most people in the world "cloud computing" is simply not realistic. Photo: Rita Banerji

Cloud computing is a good idea if you live in an urban area in a first world country where wifi connections are ubiquitous and where many people are using computers as little more than terminals. But that’s simply not the case in most parts of the world. Earlier this year, I visited a youth camp in rural Italy. Short of getting on a Sat phone, there was no way to get online. And this was northern Italy, not northern Ethiopia!

Access to technology is key

I think that access to information technology is crucial and can make a real difference in many developing countries. But in most developing countries, internet access is really expensive. I am concerned that by requiring people to be online in order to do things that could be done offline, we are making it harder for the world’s poor to get access to this technology.

Some advantages

Of course cloud computing would have some potential advantages for people living in developing countries as well. If you write all your documents in internet cafes, you’ll use many different computers and being able to store everything at a central location is certainly helpful. Additionally, if you ever worked in a country where  electricity is fickle, you’ll certainly appreciate anything that saves your work automatically. But there is a difference between being able to access and save information online and being required to do so.

The risk: a widening technology gap

Obviously, cloud computing is still a long way off from replacing offline computing. I’m sure that OpenOffice will continue to be available, as will pirated copies of MS Office. But the fact that Google completely dismisses offline use twice within a year, worries me. I’m worried that Google will focus its energy exclusively on users who can afford to be online 24/7 and that this is where innovation will take place. If that happens, then it will become even harder for young people in developing countries to catch up.

Related posts:

1. From collaborative “crisis mapping” to “crisis feeding”

In this list I am focusing on courses that offer specific skills for humanitarian aid workers and not on more general courses that can also be useful for people working for an international organization or NGO, such as general administration, photography etc..

1. Humanitarian relief, peace and security operations at the Peace Operations Training Institute

The Peace Operations Training Institute focuses on everything you might need in a so-called “complex emergency.” Here you find courses in Mine Action, Civilian Military Coordination, Global Terrorism or Ethics in Peacekeeping, to name  just a few. If you are working for a non-profit than you can take most of these courses for as little as 50 USD.

2. Diplomacy at UNITAR

The United Nations Institute for Research and Training (UNITAR) offers three strands of e-learning coursesat irregular intervals: Public Finance and trade, Multilateral Conferences and Diplomacy and Governance in Urban Sanitation. The courses take up to eight weeks to complete and many of them are free. The most expensive course I found was 400 USD. You will  have to apply and explain why you should be admitted to this course.

3. Peace and Conflict Studies at the University for Peace

No, this is not a bunch of hippies getting together. The University for Peace is a UN mandated graduate school for peace and conflict studies. UPEACE will accept applications for their distance learning programme from January 2010. There is no information about the costs yet, but I expect that the UN will offer the course at a very attractive fee.

4. Development Studies at the University of Birmingham

The University of Birmingham offers two distance learning courses: “Poverty Reduction and Development Management” and “Public Administration and Development”. You can either enrol into a masters programme or do a postgraduate diploma. The MSc takes two years to complete. As you can imagine, this doesn’t come cheap. The courses start at 6,000 pounds (~ 10,000 USD).

5. Logistics at the Fritz Institute

The Fritz Institute offers three courses, all of which have something to do with logistics: “Humanitarian Logistics”, “Humanitarian Supply Chain Management” and “Humanitarian Medical Logistics Practices”. I’ve only heard good things about these courses. Prices vary and the Fritz Institute offers some scholarships for individuals.

6. Human Rights with the Human Rights Education Associates

HREA organises a large number of specialised human rights trainings via distance education for human rights practitioners and development workers. The courses cost 725 USD. In addition to English many are available in French and Russian. I even found one course in German.

7. How to care for a Swine Flu victim at the International Red Cross Red Crescent

Last but not least, my employer has recently launched an e-learning platform that is open to the public. Among the free courses are one that teaches you how to care for a sick family member (it’s built for H1N1 but is just as useful for the normal flu) and one course  (40 hours) that introduces you to the International Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. The courses are free, more courses will be added over the next year.

What other distance learning or e-learning programmes and courses do you know that should be part of this list?

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