Haiti: the first Digital Disaster

Its been over four months now since the killer quake destroyed much of Haiti's capital city, killing an (under)estimated 250'000 people in the process, decapitating government institutions and wrecking an economy that was already near rock bottom. Haiti's humanitarian impact has resonated around the world resulting in an outpouring of support and a near-unprecedented mobilization of aid agencies to a single country. One facet of the Haiti disaster response has been the pervasive and effective use of SMS technologies combined with new social media tools. Indeed, even Obama was tweeting - surely a first for an American president. Here are some reflections for you to ponder on a topic that is evolving so fast, with so much untapped potential that its manifestation and role in future disaster scenarios will surely surprise us all.

Texts and Tweets

“Hotel Montana at Rue Franck Cardozo in Petionville collapsed. 200 feared trapped.”

“We are in the street Saint Martin below Bel Air near the hotel. We are dying of hunger. Please bring us aid.”

These desperate pleas were sent by text message in the first few days after the earthquake struck Port-au-Prince. They were sent through the Emergency Information Service, a disaster communications project established by the Thompson Reuters Foundation, as a way to get information quickly to and from survivors of natural disasters. (Photo: a man rents mobile phone chargers by the hour in downtown Port-au-Prince . (REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz/courtesy www.alertnet.org.)

It’s not your traditional cry for help. But in Haiti, with traditional media and phone systems destroyed, text messages and Twitter were often the only way desperate, hungry or hurting people could signal their distress.

The Emergency Information Service was then able to locate the callers by GPS, plot their location on maps, and referred the call to volunteers on the ground. Concrete examples include directing injured Haitians via text message to one of the few city hospitals with room to treat more patients.

The system also helped search-and-rescue teams find people trapped in the rubble. Red Cross teams on the ground received dozens of messages from people trapped in the rubble. This information was relayed promptly to evacuation teams supported by Haitian Red Cross first aid volunteers.

In addition, the Haitian Red Cross National Society and the IFRC teamed up with Voila mobile phone company to text more than 1.2 million subscribers a day with messages about vaccinations, shelter, sanitation, public health information and other vital data. The push of a button achieved what would normally take an army of volunteers days.

From ‘victims’ to first responders

The idea of using cell phone technology in disaster management is not new. After the 2004 Tsunami, it became clear that modern wireless communication could play critical role in systems for both early warning as well as crisis management.

Digital communications are only a small part of a broader strategy to give greater voice to those most affected by natural disasters. The approach recognizes that people affected by disasters are not 'victims' but a significant force of first responders who need to be empowered and engaged as part of the overall aid effort. After all, it is their recovery, their future, their lives and livelihoods at stake.

How might new technologies change disaster response?

The prevalence of new approaches that utilize, among others, SMS and Twitter; crisis mapping and crowd sourcing, raises a number of important questions for future disaster response and provides us with an important dilemma.

In an evolving emergency (such as during the first days of Haiti) when data is scarce but it is clear that the needs are both urgent and massive how can aid agencies organize themselves to respond to individual requests for help? Should aid agencies even contemplate to organizing themselves to respond to individual calls for help? In Haiti, because of the widespread devastation, the Red Cross was faced with a situation where we did not even have water and sanitation or shelter for ourselves, no telecommunications and no electricity in the first days. Because of its self-sustaining Emergency Response Units however it could still manage to set up surgical field hospitals, mass water distributions and basic health care clinics.

That is, we promptly tackled the ‘known knowns’ based on our experiences from decades of disaster response. This experience informs the type of relief provided for known urgent needs that surface in the wake of large-scale disasters. Relief distributions of essential household items such as shelter materials, hygiene kits and kitchen sets quickly followed the emergency medical and water aid, as did reuniting separated families. That is how humanitarian organizations are currently organized.

To effectively respond to tens of thousands of individual cries for help however is currently ‘impossible’ today. There are two immediate challenges to overcome. Firstly, and most importantly perhaps, is to verify the needs. To confirm that received information from individuals relates to actual needs takes resources and takes time; and time is the single most important and scarce resource in the early days of emergency response. (Photo: In the chaos of the camp at Leogane’s footbaal stadium, two hours drive south of Port-au-Prince, this man has set up a mobile phone recharging business.)

Second challenge is the diverse range of needs – in Haiti the Red Cross received urgent requests for help such as: food, blankets, blood, evacuations, tracing missing children, contacting relatives abroad, dialysis treatment, psychological support, money, tents, water, baby food, diapers, protection from looters, mobile phone chargers, clothes, prescription and off the shelf medicines, fuel for vehicles and generators, spare parts, flash lights etc. etc. etc. It takes enormous time to sift through this information, verify it and respond to it – even if it were possible it is arguably much less efficient and effective than the current emergency response mechanisms to the known urgent and life-saving medical, water and shelter needs.

Mapping a crisis has powerful potential

However, this virtual hosepipe of customized information about individual needs cannot be ignored and does have value. It is currently possible to ‘crisis map’ this crowd sourced data and categorize it into useful trending data that can then be shared with and responded to by organizations who specialize in the specific needs requested such as shelter, child protection or blood supply. But we are not there yet and it would require nothing less than a full reorganization of how emergency response is conceived and conducted today.

One challenge for instance, relates to the ‘risks’ potentially associated with crowd sourcing which must first be mitigated and dealt with. Without getting too detailed here there is real potential for vested interests to manipulate data (particularly in a politically-charged context) by mass blasting misinformation via text or twitter to attract aid into their neighbourhoods or worse, to wrongly signal widespread sexual violence with the intention of sparking off reactionary but unwarranted violence by the offended ethnic group. Unproven allegations of this have been made in DRC for instance where the ground-breaking crowd sourcing mapping tool Ushahidi is widely used.

But hasn’t information always been the first casualty of conflict? An indication of desperation. Such known risks of information abuse, with potentially lethal outcomes, should not detract from the massive good and value that a tool such as Ushahidi can bring. Indeed, people learn quickly – in Chile during the earthquake that struck almost 3 months ago, citizens quickly developed their own version of a crowd-sourced crisis map using freely available Google mapping softward. Google themselves quickly launched an online person finder application which has been widely used (almost 80’000 people registered to date) to excellent effect (note: this is of course a ‘traditional’ area of the Red Cross – tracing – being increasingly ‘challenged’ by media companies such as CNN and Google).

Nothing New, not really

And then of course there’s Twitter – perhaps the most powerful crowd sourcing tool out there; at least the one whose huge potential is simultaneously being tapped and explored. Information is so easily transmitted via SMS or online that it can transmit and filter millions of data messages per second. In Chile in particular the speed and efficiency of, for example, search and rescue information channelled through Twitter was hugely impressive.

Chile Twitter lists #terremotochile and #fuerzachile (labeled after President Bachelet's message of strength to the Chilean population) served as central repositories, not only of information but of connections. There have also been two main search and rescue lists distributed via Twitter and later on Facebook, blogs, media and beyond:  Ayudemos a Chile (Helping Chile) and Terremoto Chile (Chile Earthquake)

Why is Twitter so popular – in my opinion because it is nothing new: Spread the word, let others know - unite in difficult times. And that’s the bottom line. New media, new online tools must be used and adapted to increase humanitarian impact and relevance during times of disaster (and also during times of quiet, by improving early warning systems or enhancing accountability to people affected by disasters for instance).

Twitter, Facebook, Skype and Youtube, to name a few, have also greatly improved and changed the way aid organizations are communicating to the media, donors and the general public. These social media tools enable a two-way conversation. The days have passed when organizations can rely on controlling their message and mass broadcasting it in a uni-directional fashion via traditional print and broadcast channels.

Today it’s about engaging with your audience; about trying to communicate your message to guide, encourage, engage and influence your stakeholders and, importantly, enlist them as active supporters. Social media in an instant breaks down the staid, clinical, impermeable boundaries that institutions have a tendency to create. Instead, it strips away the divisions and demonstrates clearly that your organization, your national Red Cross society, is about real people; real people who can be easily connected with and maybe even supported in terms of promoting your humanitarian message, fundraising or advocating in the interests of the most vulnerable. This evolving ‘humanization’ of organizational culture and increasing engagement of ordinary citizens into political and business thinking, which is being unwittingly and undeniably achieved by online media, may be one of the reasons why it’s not so ridiculous after all that the Internet has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize!

/PC

Happy birthday dear tragedy

We in the aid business are getting very good at marking the anniversaries of massive tragedies. Heck, we even win awards for it. Tsunamis, cyclones, earthquakes - you can rely on the aid agencies to bring out any number of glossy publications and e-products to mark the first month, second month, third month, six months, nine months, one year, two years… five.. ten.. even 25 (yes, the Chernobyl disaster happened 24 years ago, look out for the reports next year).

Our commemorations generally have an “x months (or years) after the storm/quake/eruption/outbreak/flood life is slowly getting back to normal for villagers in etc and so on”. When it isn’t. Or when “normal” means abject poverty. (photo credit to 12 year old Zhao Lei who entered the photo as part of a Red Cross competition to document life 2 years after the Sichuan quake in China, You can read her story about the photo here and view more entries from this youth photo project here).

Why do we do it? What impact does it have? Of course we have to show the sunny side, otherwise it means we have failed, that years after a disaster people are still living without shelter, clean water, food security, education, infrastructure - much like they were before the disaster, in fact.

We also do it in solidarity but even there I’ve something of a bad taste in my mouth. With the technology we have we ought to be able to let the affected communities plan the commemoration themselves, and tell it like it is, for them. If they want to, of course.

But how critical are we of what we did, of how we spent the money? The media is, finally, nipping at our heels like Jack Russels (maybe we need Rottweilers?), sometimes completely missing the point of course, but at the same time waking us up, copping us on.

And how critical are we of each other? Of the communities themselves and the governments who have the first duty to react and care?

Look at the disasters we responded to in the 80s, or the 90s. How much has changed for the pastoralists of Ethiopia, the children of Somalia? How have we failed to improve living conditions in sub-Saharan Africa? In rural Asia? In the remoter parts of the ex-USSR (where life expectancy is falling - actually it’s falling all over, even in the cities due to poor health, alcohol and drug abuse, violence).

What could be done better?

A release on the wonderful Alernet Expresso tells me: “Aid workers have expressed concern that recovery work in cyclone-affected Myanmar may be hampered by the disbandment of a coordinating group set up to oversee aid efforts.”

There’s the problem for you. All we can really do is express concern, because outrage, shock, disgust, despair, vitriol, sorrow, scorn, spleen and so on and so forth would have us out of the country as quick as you can say “the road to Mandalay”.

I’ve had issues (and pints) with John O’Shea from GOAL at times but I watched him with relish on an Al Jazeera report when he was venting about access to Haiti. 

He was advocating one single leader (actually Obama, a non-starter and he knows it) to go in and take charge. While he was in full flight the anchor wailed “bu..but..what about political sensitivities?” O’Shea barely suppressed a mischievous grin and gave a bitchslap of an answer. “I’m sorry, I’m only a rank  and file  journalist and aid worker. I don’t understand words like political sensitivities when two million people need help.”

Granted, being unaware of sensitivities is a recipe for disaster, but you can be sure O’Shea is well aware of them, despite his protests.

So what to do? Fight the good fight, keep up the work, but ask questions all the time. Use the aid to get the access to ask the questions. Use the access to get the aid in, ask the questions. Keep asking the questions, like Bob Geldof did. “Why hasn’t that man got any food” he repeatedly asked an official in Ethiopia, back in the day. And while it’s a cute trick, it’s still a good strategy.

Don’t put up with bad standards, don’t accept “we can’t do any more”, don’t accept it when our team is working a turnkey operation. Get out there and change things. That’s why we’re doing this job.

Isn’t it? 


/JL

Worst Places in the World to be a Mother

Save the Children is an organization HDEO has encountered in many contexts and forums over the years and it remains an NGO for which we have respect in every aspect. Their advocacy work in recent years has really taken on an important momentum and we would like to highlight their most recent report, focusing on maternal health which basically looks at the worst places in the world to be a mother and proposes solutions to remedy this situation. 

I find it horrifying for instance, that one in seven women in Niger is likely to die while pregnant or in childbirth (compare this to one woman out of 47'600 in my own country). One of the main pillars in the much-lauded Millennium Development Goals (or MDG's) is precisely on the area of maternal health - the deadline to 'bridge the divide' and ensure equality for all women and children is fast approaching in 2015. With organizations like 'Save' I hope we can move at least in the right direction. A mother and child (who barely recovered from near-fatal malnutrition) in Mauratania. Most women in sub-Saharan Africa give birth with no skilled health worker present. (IRIN photo)

Eight of the bottom 10 countries as ranked in Save the Children’s annual Mother's Index, which ranks the best and worst places to be a mother, are in sub-Saharan Africa, says the NGO. 

Afghanistan, Niger, Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Yemen, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Sudan, Eritrea and Equatorial Guinea form the bottom 10; while Norway, Australia, Iceland and Sweden come top. 

One in seven women dies in pregnancy or childbirth in Niger and one in eight in Afghanistan and Sierra Leone; while the risk is one in 25,000 in Greece and one in 47,600 in Ireland. 

“The problems around maternal and newborn health have been raised for many years, but there still remains so much to be done,” says Houleyemata Diarra, Save the Children’s regional adviser for Africa. “There are not enough skilled attendants at births, and governments are not taking into account where health workers are needed - in communities.” 

Over half of deliveries take place at home in most sub-Saharan African countries, with no skilled birth attendant present, according to the UN Children’s Fund. 

Save the Children is calling on governments and donors to prioritize building up a workforce of female health workers to serve in their communities and local clinics. 

These workers should be incentivized with better training, pay, and support for career growth, says the NGO. 

It costs a lot to train a doctor or run a hospital, but the cost of giving community health workers basic training - to diagnose and treat common early childhood illnesses, organize vaccinations and promote good nutrition and newborn care - does not have to be exorbitant. 

In Bangladesh the NGO found that providing female community health-workers with six weeks of hands-on training and some formal education caused infant mortality rates in affected areas to drop by a third. 

“There are a lot of models of this working well around the world,” said Save the Children’s Diarra. “African countries need to follow these examples.” 

/PC with thanks to IRINNEWS.ORG 

Malaria can be prevented and cured so let's do it!

Today is World Malaria Day 2010 - and this year, in an effort to sustain positive forward momentum and hold on to important gains achieved in the fight against Malaria, we have been busier than usual contributing to building awareness and ensuring governments - both those managing malaria prevention or treatment programs and those supporting through donations and development - remain committed on all fronts. 

One of the newer elements we produced this year was our very own TV debate (pictured below) where we transformed our main meeting room at Geneva head office into a TV set. We invited key people from the world of malaria prevention, treatment and financing to provide another platform for discussion and engaging new audiences. The final edited result is made available to all our partners and national red cross / red crescent societies for use in their own constituencies. 

In addition to this we release a new updated report containing more evidence-based data on the effectiveness of community-based action in malaria prevention; we produced a photo slideshow for web-based communications and an opinion piece for national media markets. In Brussels we distributed our report to more than 4000 parliamentarians and staged a photo exhibition. We also partnered with different media organizations including World Radio Switzerland and the Financial Times.

Many of our national red cross / red crescent national societies are also extremely active. The Canadian Red Cross for example, as part of their successful Malaria Bites campaign, launched a cool Facebook application which allows you to cover your avatar with a mosquito net -- every action helps build awareness!

Since 2002, the Red Cross/Crescent alone has protected over 18 million people with long-lasting insecticide treated nets, saving over 300,000 lives in the process. Malaria can be prevented and cured. We have evidence of what’s working, so let’s do it.

/PC

Jackie Brown Meets Bugsy Ratzinger

Is Quentin Tarantino a Catholic? The latest sequel of sordid revelations in the Vatican’s pedophile priests collusion and cover-up campaign is reminiscent of a scene from ‘Jackie Brown’ where crime-don Samuel L. Jackson opens the trunk of his car to show Robert de Niro a corpse:

“Who’s that ?

That’s Beaumont.

Who’s Beaumont?

An employee I had to let go.

Wha’d he do?

He put hisself in a position where he was going to have to do ten years in prison, that’s what he did. An’ if you know Beaumont, you know ain’t no goddamn way he can do ten years. An’ if you know that, then you know Beaumont’s gonna do anything he can to keep from doing them ten years - including telling the Federal Government any and every motherfuckin’ thing about my black ass. Now that, my friend, is a clear cut case o’ him - or me. An’ you best believe it ain’t gonna be me.”

When German weekly magazine Der Spiegel opened the trunk of the popemobile last week, in Beaumont’s place it found the allegorical remains of Fr. Gerhard Gruber, the vicar-general of the archdiocese of Munich in 1980 when Pope Benedict – then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger –approved a proposal to allow pedophile priest Peter Hullermann to return to full pastoral duties where he had unrestricted access to – and influence over young boys.

"Take the Pope out of the firing line"

Hullerman had been accused by three sets of parents in Essen of sexually abusing their sons, including forcing an 11-year-old boy to give him oral sex. Initial questions about Ratzinger’s failure to protect children by ensuring that Hullerman was barred from working with minors were fuelled by allegations of complicity, and as pressure on the Pontiff increased, church authorities issued a statement placing exclusive responsibility for the decision to reinstate Hullerman on Father Gruber.

Der Spiegel however had a copy of a letter from a friend of Father Gruber saying that he had been pressured by Church officials last month to sign a prepared statement accepting full responsibility – to “take the pope out of the firing line”. A clear cut case of him – or Ratzinger, and we all know from Ratzinger’s past record of evading responsibility for his role in covering up for pedophile priests how Gruber ended up in the trunk of the popemobile (right).

"Rejoicing" the protection of pedophile priests

In another astonishing episode, Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos, author of a 2001 letter congratulating a French bishop for colluding with a pedophile priest who was later convicted for the repeated rape of a boy, also ended up in the trunk of the popemobile. Hoyos revealed last week that Pope John Paul II had approved the letter and authorized him to send a copy to bishops all over the world as an example of how to resist pressure to report offending clergy to the civil authorities. 

Father René Bissey was given an eighteen year prison sentence for the repeated rape of one boy and the sexual assault of ten others. His bishop, Pierre Pican had known about the abuse but refused to report Bissey to the police. Pican was sentenced to three months in prison for failure to report Bissey’s crimes. 

Cardinal Hoyos (left) was head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Clergy, and a colleague of Cardinal Ratzinger. He wrote – with the approval of the Pope, he says, – to Pican, praising him for covering up for the rapist priest: “I congratulate you for not having reported the priest to the civil authorities. You have done well, and I rejoice at having an associate in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all the other bishops of the world, will have chosen prison rather than speaking out against his priest-son”. Hoyos added that he would be sending a copy of the letter to all the bishops’ conferences “to encourage the brothers in this very delicate area.”

Excommunication the price of Cooperation

In another clear cut case of him or me, the Vatican responded to the horror generated by the revelations about Hoyos’ letter by issuing a press release claiming that this was another example of why it was necessary to bring all these cases under the “competence of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith” to ensure a “rigorous and coherent management” of abuse cases. The truth is that the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith responded to its new responsibility by issuing a letter – signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger – to bishops and cardinals warning them that such cases should be referred in secret to the Vatican and that breaching the pontifical secret – by, for example, reporting pedophile priests to the police – carried penalties up to and including excommunication.

So, we have an Archbishop, a future pope, who – knowing that a priest had admitted to sexually abusing young boys – allowed him to take up a new posting where he was free to take advantage of other young boys; and a high-ranking Vatican cardinal (a close colleague of the same pope) who writes and distributes a letter congratulating a bishop for refusing to take action against a priest who has repeatedly raped a young boy and assaulted ten others.

Brady must go

Meanwhile Cardinal Seán Brady (right) head of the Catholic Church in Ireland continues to serve as the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Brady - who admitted he was part of a church cover-up squad that forced a 10-year-old and a 14-year-old who had testified against notorious pedophile priest Brendan Smyth at a church enquiry to sign secrecy oaths – has rejected repeated calls for his resignation. Smyth later admitted to molesting and raping about 100 children in Ireland and the United States and was convicted and jailed. 

Many of these offenses were committed after the abuse enquiry that Brady was involved in. Brady maintains that he will only resign if the Pope asks him to do so. Another clear cut case of him or me.

And these are the people who lead the Catholic Church? You couldn’t make it up.

Why are these people above the law? Where are the criminal charges against the church officials like Brady who colluded in and covered up for rapist priests and christian brothers and facilitated their transfer to new parishes where they were free to prey on other children?


Please take time to join the Facebook campaign to break the silence and bring Cardinal Sean Brady and the Irish Catholic Church to justice.

/SD is Sean Deeley, a HDEO newcomer - this is his second installment, read the first one here.

Haiti: How they Live

A favorite at HDEO is the audio slide show. Basically, photographs melded together are narrated by the photographer to form a compelling story-telling format. Here we have a 5 min slide show, narrated by lens man Michael Goldfarb for gold standard aid agency Medicins Sans Frontier. This slideshow portrays how the people of Haiti remain resilient, getting on with the business of life, while the rubble all around providing a daily backdrop to the violence wrought by the earthquake three months ago.

Haiti: Enormous challenges remain, three months on

Recent heavy rains and their mud-soaked aftermath have once again turned the spotlight back onto Haiti.

Along with the immediate shock at the continuing human suffering, the images we’re seeing are also provoking another reaction; why, when so many of us around the world have given so much, are those affected by the earthquake still living in such appalling conditions?

Why, when the world knew that the rainy season was coming, are people still forced to shelter under tarpaulins? Where are the new houses for the homeless? Where, in short, is the relief effort which might seem to have dissolved under the rains?

In truth, aid agencies in Haiti are working harder than ever to provide relief and protect people from the rains.

So far, shelter distributions led by the International Red Cross have reached close to 1.2 million people. Haiti represents one of the fastest distribution operations ever undertaken. This in spite of well-publicised problems including a port too damaged to operate, blocked roads and a clogged airport.

Some obstacles undoubtedly persist, but humanitarian agencies in Haiti continue to perform logistical miracles to get aid to those in need.

In the United States, one of the the richest countries in the world, with teams of the most well equipped experts on earth, it took two years to clear the rubble of the World Trade Centre.

Haiti, it hardly needs to be pointed out, is not the United States. Rubble clearance and reconstruction is an enormous task, and to achieve long-term, sustainable recovery we have to be realistic about the size of that task and how long it will take.

That is why emergency shelter has been the focus. We have to reach the most vulnerable people with the most effective forms of aid possible within the time available. In Haiti that means mass distribution of waterproof tarpaulins to get shelter to as many people as possible. Gradually, as rubble is removed and new land made available, families will receive metal roof sheeting and timber and steel frames to construct more durable shelters.

We need to help people as quickly as we can, but must not let pressure to increase the speed of our response lead to errors of judgement which could undermine recovery, and jeopardise people’s lives, in the long term.

All aid agencies are working round the clock to make sure people are protected in the short-term and ensure a safer future in the years ahead but it is a sad reality that, with the rains coming, the situation for people living in the camps will get worse before it gets better.


/PC