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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After all they get things wrong all the time and you are generally happy enough if the general thrust of the piece was accurate and in defense of most journalists you have to say that  they normally don’t have the time or resources to research a complex subject, nor the column-space or air time to explain it properly. That might explain why listening to ”Haiti and the truth about NGOs” for 45 minutes annoyed me so much!

Clearly the BBC’s Edward Stourton has had all the time and resources in the world to produce this piece. And he was given 45 minutes! An eternity! And he still manages to deliver a one-sided and biased anti-aid piece that seems to come down to this central message: NGOs have lots of money and know what needs to be done, but they have lost their souls and that is why they squander it all.

Hogwash!

I’m not saying that the problems that he mentions don’t exist. They do and they shouldn’t. And I agree that the Haiti response hasn’t been as good as it should have been. But producing a 45 minute piece that is basically saying that it’s all because the NGOs are sinisterly hoarding the money is just a waste of airtime. I’m not going to go through it minute by minute, but here are a few things that I found particularly annoying (quotes are not verbatim):

In a big disaster everybody expects the UN to take the lead.

Wrong! The government has the lead! The UN and NGOs have no legitimacy to, well,  ”govern”.

The UN is unable to keep incompetent NGOs out of the country.

True. But again: that is not the UN’s role. It’s the government’s. Can you imagine what would happen if the UN would suddenly start kicking NGOs out of the country.  And you know what? People who be justifiably pissed off, because the UN is not a democratically legitimized institution of the host country. The UN is a service provider to the government.

What I find telling is that Stourton actually didn’t talk to anyone from the government for his piece.

The first thing that’s back up and running are the generators so that aidworkers can power their DVD players (Linda Polman).

Cheap jibe. The first things that these generators power are laptops and lights so that aidworkers can work deep into the night, as well as telecommunication infrastructure so that the people on the ground can tell their headquarters what is needed. And I’m sure Linda Polman knows that.

The UN is asking beneficiaries for their opinion.

It’s hard to believe, but he actually makes that sound like a bad thing!

There is no way to know what NGOs are doing with the money

Saying it’s impossible to know how the money is spent simply isn’t true. Every major organization has to report back to donors. Those reports are public. In addition, most project proposals or appeals include detailed financials as well. Nowhere in this piece did I hear him ask for any financial reports. Of course reading those and making sense of them is actually quite hard and tedious work.

I could go on to the police-scene and how he suddenly introduces some drama when driving past a couple of burning tires. Oh, the excitement! But I’ll stop here. Please go ahead and listen to it and let me know what you think. The piece will still be available online on the BBC website until January 18.

What annoys me most is that this is just lazy on the part of Stoughton: If you want to talk about the failings of aid, then also talk about the complexities of aid. If you talk about lack of programming, then also talk about whether pledges have actually turned into real money. If the money hasn’t been spent then ask the project people why. And if you really think that NGOs haven’t done any good in Haiti, then also mention what has been delivered over the last 12 months.

And why is there no mention, discussion or interview with the Haiti Interim Recovery Commission, the major body for assigning money and moving project forward, headed jointly by former US President Clinton and the Haitian Prime Minister Bellerive? I mean, how can you discuss the successes and failings in Haiti without looking at the commission that is supposedly in charge of the majority of the money pledged for reconstruction of the country?

Has enough progress been made in Haiti over the last 12 months? Absolutely not. Could things have been done better: Of course!

But if you are given 45 minutes of airtime and generous travel budget, then please spend you time to address concrete issues and then ask the people on the ground why these things are that way – instead of “aid experts” back in Europe!

Here are a few blog entries and articles I would like to  recommend:

• Foreign Policy: Five lessons from Haiti’s disaster
• Aidwatch: Aid is not just complicated, it’s complex
• Tales from the Hood: Looking back on Haiti – Failure or Success?
• Tales from the Hood: Cost
• Engaging internationally: Haiti one year later: what have we learned?
• Wired: Organizing Armageddon: What we learned from the Haiti earthquake (from April 2010)
• New York Times: In Haiti the displaced are clinging to the edge (from July 2010)

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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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As anyone who has working in the humanitarian sector knows, our love for acronyms is pretty ridiculous.

In Haiti we even printed the most important ones on the back of t-shirts so that we could look them up more easily. The problem was – most of the changed so quickly that the t-shirt production couldn’t keep up.

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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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• diarrhoea has become a completely ordinary and acceptable conversation topic at breakfast
• you have forgotten the door code for your apartment at home and have to ask your tenant
• you get upset if a new member of the team sits at “your” spot for breakfast
• the location of “your” spot on the table has become part of the briefing for new members of the team
• you cannot come up with any non-work topics to talk about, even though you are trying really hard
• 06:15 feels like oversleeping
• you can’t figure out what month it is, but you can instantly calculate the current time at headquarters
• you start counting down to your next R&R less than one week after coming back from your last one
• you introduce people as “he’s the new Edward” or “she’s the new Sandra” –  and nobody understand your reference
• you remember the names of people from three rotations ago, but can’t be bothered to learn the current ones
• you have trouble sleeping in a real bed
• you read an OCHA SitRep and know what all the acronyms and abbreviations mean
• you are genuinely startled when you see yourself in a mirror
• you start feeling tired at 18:00 because that’s when curfew is,  even while on R&R
• you can’t remember the last time you saw a movie that wasn’t on somebody’s hard disk or came on a DVD from Thailand
• your mental image of a romantic evening is anywhere out of sight of latrines
• you can accurately predict who will be in the communal showers before entering
• people think it’s appropriate for them to show you the fungus they have picked up in the shower, even though you are neither a doctor nor a nurse

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this list over the last few months!

Additions are more than welcome

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