As many of you know, I’m quite critical when it comes to how to the impressive information gathering possibilities of crisis mapping tools turn into actionable information for responders. On LinkedIn someone shared a video with me today where Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier addresses some of these concerns.

The video is from 2010, but it’s still worth seeing:

He suggests that instead of expecting first responders to use the information collected on a crisis map, the data could be fed back to the crowd so that neighbours can help neighbours. He uses the example of snowstorms in Washington D.C. where people used an Ushahidi map to help others out with snow shovels etc.

I think he has point. If enough people were plugged into the system, it could turn into a marketplace for help needed and resources offered which could make a difference.

However, I have three caveats:

• The risk remains that multiple responders would rush to a single incident that catches the imagination (think: babies) while other, more serious cases,  might be neglected. I suppose the likelihood of this happening could be reduced by enabling logged in users to say “I’m taking on this task.”
• The usefulness depends very much on the size of the disaster and that there is a significant portion of the population who are not affected at all or who are affected but still have resources they can spare. So while it would probably work during the floods in Bangkok, it would not help during a mega-disaster like the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
• This model works only in societies which have a very advanced technology infrastructure that is accessible to a large part of the population. So, while I’m not surprised that it can work in Washington DC, it will not work in the poorer parts of the world which are also more likely to experience disasters.

With these concerns in mind, I nevertheless think that “crowdfeeding” (though that is a horrible term imho) can be a useful tool to organize people who are willing to help each other at least in the highly developed world – and that is nothing to scoff at, either.

What is your opinion?

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1. Liberia: Ushahidi to monitor elections

Doing their homework

One team of journalists who have really made an effort is the team behind “Inside Disaster Haiti”, which will air as of Tuesday in Canada. They had already been in touch with the Canadian Red Cross for a whole year prior to the earthquake, wanting to film a response operation. When the earthquake happened they were able to deploy with some of the first emergency response units and they came back a few times afterwards to film the progress.

Inside Disaster Trailer from PTV Productions on Vimeo.

Serious game gives a glimpse behind the scenes

An offshoot of the film is the “serious game” Inside the Haiti earthquake where anybody can play the role of a survivor, a journalist or an aidworker. It’s done fairly simply: you get shown a scene and then have to pick one of multiple choices, which will influence how the rest of the story progresses. But since it is based on professional-grade documentary material, I think that it actually leaves quite an impression and can help people to get at least a glimpse of the decisions that need to be made at in an operation like this.

I have worked as a journalist for almost ten years and found that part quite realistic. As for the aidworker-scenario: in the beginning I was really upset because their protagonist is someone who spontaneously decides to go to Haiti with some random, donated goods and without any training or useful skills, i.e. exactly the kind of person that most big organizations don’t want to see on the ground. But they actually manage to take this lack of experience and include it as part of the scenario. Which is brilliant because, after all, the people playing the game will have no experience.

And while it isn’t trying to give you an in-depth perspective by any means, I still think that it might open some people’s eyes to the complexities of the work. So, all in all, a big “thumps up” from me:

Check it out and play “Inside disaster the Haiti earthquake”.

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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.

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I have spoken an emailed to a lot of journalists over the past couple of weeks and now that the “6 months after”-stories are being published, it is starting to pay off. In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes that international organizations make is not taking enough time to explain to journalists why thing are complicated and take a long time.

I find it absolutely astonishing that I’m the only dedicated communications officer within the whole cluster system that coordinates the response to the earthquake for the UN, NGOs and the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement. And of course, I only speak for the Shelter Cluster, meaning that the 11 other clusters have no dedicated resources for communications at all!  No wonder many of them feel misunderstood.

Recommended reading

The best piece I read over the last few days is the the front-page  story of the today’s New York Times. This also proves that it pays off to have media that invest time and money. Deborah Sontag was in Haiti multiple times and spent a lot of time researching her article and talking to people. So, if you want to know what it’s like in Haiti, six months after the earthquake, read:

In Haiti, the Displaced Are Left Clinging to the Edge

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Do me favour and look down your street. Now imagine that up to 60 per cent of all the houses  just collapsed (the percentage of destroyed houses depends a lot on which part of town you are in in Port-au-Prince). Can you imagine how much rubble this would be? From a shelter perspective the problem is that before you build transitional shelters on these plots, you first have to remove the debris.

Now, imagine that your road is not nice and paved, but just small enough for two people to squeeze past each other and that you would have to do that in order to reach some of the plots. There is no way you can get an excavator or a truck through here. So you, your family and maybe some friendly neighbours have to carry whole houses with your hands and maybe a wheelbarrow to the nearest big road.

This is the problem with debris. And there is a lot of it - approximately 19 million cubic metres.

London to Beirut

I calculated the other day that if you put this into standard shipping containers, you could form a line from London all the way to Beirut. That is a lot of wheelbarrows.

To get an idea of how this looks like in reality I shot a short video from the car the other day.

What you see in this video is actually a good example, not a bad one. Because at least people have already moved rubble from their plots. Sadly this is the exception rather than the rule because a lot of people were only renters and the landlords are either not interested in removing the rubble or – in some cases – even sue people who are removing debris it without permission.

Cash for work?

There is an interesting ongoing discussion whether cash-for-work programmes can help to get rid of the debris (once landowners have given their permission). Some people say this is the only way to get it done because you can quickly put a lot of shovels and pickaxes into a lot of hands. Others see it as contra-productive because these programmes are rolled out on a neighbourhood by neighbourhood schedule and people who might just get up and remove the rubble themselves it might wait until they are being paid to do it.

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Check it out: http://goodintents.org/blog

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