Last year, when I heard about World Humanitarian Day for the first time, my first impulse was that this sounded pretty self-righteous. I mean, where is the World Firemen Day or the World Truckdriver Day? Two professions that are very dangerous and that probably contribute more to people’s lives than most professional aid workers do. Since then I have changed my minds slightly. For one thing, there is never anything objectionable about remembering colleagues who have died. But more importantly[...]
Since I have arrived in Haiti I don’t need an alarm clock any longer. At 06:30 the heat in my tent is so stifling that I cannot bear staying inside any longer. But even if it wasn’t so hot – the noise of the five other people I’m sharing the tent with would be more than enough to wake me. Anybody who thinks that aid workers in Haiti have an easy life, should spend a few nights at the IFRC base camp.
I have been given the opportunity to return to Haiti for the next three months. I will be working as the communicator for the inter-agency “Shelter Cluster”. That will mean that for the immediate future this blog will be less about social media and primarily about my time in Haiti.
I find it surprising that there are not more good distance learning and e-learning programmes for aid workers and that the ones that exist are so hard to find. Here is a number of courses and programmes that I know of. Please leave a comment if you know of any others. 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[...]
The United Nations Joint Inspection Body recently spoke to web professional in 40 UN agencies to identify what the most common problems are and how to fixed them. The result is an impressive document that can be used by many non-profit organizations, NGOs, International Organizations and even government ministries and agencies to address similar problems in their own organization. The ”Review of Management of Internet Websites in the United Nations System Organizations“ (31 pages) focuses on website governance and strategy – and I still[...]
