In the first two weeks it was about visibility while the cameras were rolling. Getting your agency’s sign or T-shirted horde of volunteers in the background or foreground was the media game. But now it’s about reeling in big chunks of the real funding from the real donors. The real feeding frenzy has begun.Read more on the Tales from the Hood blog.
...Several NGOs will get their foothold in Haiti and possibly the world by playing their cards right in this emergency response. Many will remember this earthquake response as a time of winning grants and thinking through Civ/Mil issues and handling large quantities of stuff.
'Your job is to try to get Haiti back to something approaching the way it was seconds before the quake struck. If the President wants you to do nation-building, he’ll let you know.'
UPDATED 22.01.10: CNET writes about Twitter, all growed up, as a communications and information-sharing tool following the Haiti earthquake, and a great piece from the NYT illuminates why even sane people might like to give the thing a try.
Ok fine I'm sold. How do I do this? I've created a list of Twittering humanitarians which will give you a good starting point (you can also just use this as a webpage). Follow the people who seem interesting, then follow people they 'retweet', and you're off.A painful truth that you will not hear spelled out very often: emergency aid in these circumstances is totally dependent on local preparation, and any aid that that will come from outside the area will be largely ineffective until the logistics has been cleared up – which is usually only after several days in the most favourable circumstances. This is why disaster preparedness is so important, and it is also a main reason why countries like Haiti, which don’t have much capacity for disaster preparedness in the first place, are always so badly hit when the (inevitable) disaster strikes.Read more on A Humourless Lot, or follow Michael on Twitter.
The Humanitarian Horizons project is a futures capacity-building initiative intended to assist the humanitarian sector to prepare for the complexities of the future by enabling organizations to enhance their anticipatory and adaptive capacities. The first step in this process is the exploration of four futures-related drivers widely expected to have an impact on humanitarian crises and responses to them. These four drivers are:
- climate change;
- globalization;
- major demographic shifts;
- drivers internal to the humanitarian community, e.g. technological advances, the "shrinking" of humanitarian space, new actors, changing financing structures and the like.
First, a lot of people aren’t in the habit of reading, either because they don’t like it or (more likely) they want to, but (like many of us) they find it hard to turn aspiration into action, especially in the frantic business of aid. Second, it’s one thing to read more research, and another to read it critically. Alone. Without falling asleep. And third, it’s another great leap entirely to turn reading into application.He suggested getting into reading blog posts by humanitarians, absorbing the CARE academy's resources, running global reading clubs and getting cheap mp3 players packed with podcasts like Owen Barder's Development Drums series into every Landcruiser, and suggested that a humanitarian blogger supergroup could write posts, provide podcasts and even innovate some miraculous techy widget to help.
So then Michael Bear at Change.org jumps in. He appreciates the initial thought and the critique that followed it, but doesn't think much of the solutions proposed.There needs to be some imagination around these two approaches, a willingness for organisations to give up control of the learning process, and a long-term investment that will definitely see mixed results.
- Holding workshops in the field that bring people together across a) different organisations, b) different countries and/or c) different disciplines, focus on core transferable skills, emphasising practical skills that reflect policy. Old school!
- Creating structures that enable the professional links developed in those workshops to be maintained more effectively over time. Call it social networking if you must, but stop looking at Facebook. This is where the technology comes in – new school!
- Then (and this is the really, really difficult bit) let these groups define the direction of future learning. Regularly poll staff to see what they want to learn, how they want to learn and when they want to learn, and shape your approach accordingly.
Blattman assumes that all aid workers are somehow alike, or at least assumes that most aid workers actually want to delve into the literature and research, and that it's only external barriers - be they technological or stylistic (cue cliche about academic writing) - that keep them from doing so.In my experience, aid workers are just like everyone else. Some want to learn more, and some don't.Podcasts and book clubs might entice the first group, but certainly not the second.Currion, on the other hand, does a good job of critiquing Blattman's argument, but then comes up somewhat short in terms of offering concrete suggestions - the recommendation to "create structures" without any further detail isn't all that useful.Instead, I think the answer is institutional - aid workers, like everyone else, respond to incentives.Especially when those incentives are tied to performance evaluations. If aid agencies are serious about fostering learning, they'll make it a requirement, tying it to bonus or other incentive structures. Agencies could require that aid workers take X number of online courses a year, or organize mandatory trainings and workshops to disseminate the latest research and learning...This costs money, but everything costs money. It's all a matter of prioritization. If learning is in fact critical to the delivery of effective aid programs, then it should be prioritized by aid agencies. If learning isn't critical to the delivery of effective aid programs, then we shouldn't worry about it overmuch.
My suggestion: don't think of the aim of this project as getting people in the field to read, or to listen. Think of it as getting them to write, and to talk. Measure success in terms of posts blogged, tweets tweeted, pods casted, and articles published by the workers you're trying to reach, on the subjects you want to publicize.Focus on the conversation, and getting it to become self-perpetuating, and the information dissemination/absorption will take care of itself. No one wants to sound like an idiot, so they'll need to process the information before they can comment on it. (And if they do go ahead and put out uninformed blather, then that's a useful signal for anyone thinking of hiring them...)
Equally importantly, making this project about discussion will also ensure that the flow of information runs both ways: not just academia to field, but field back to academia.
Aid agencies are faced with the dilemma of engaging with and supporting government efforts to promote stability or maintaining a principled approach. Their added value in promoting stability is not clear and their influence over these processes is likely to be mixed. A principled approach will be limiting in terms of influencing domestic policy and gaining access. Resolving or managing these dilemmas will require strategic decision-making based on context analysis and strong leadership.
Irrespective of the approach adopted, advocacy has a significant role to play in ensuring adherence to International Humanitarian Law in the conduct of hostilities, that there is sufficient humanitarian funding and that efforts to promote stability ensure that the needs of the most vulnerable are met, and that political and security considerations do not override the humanitarian imperative.
The stable bastion of east Africa. Except, well, for those rather brutal post-election riots in early 2008, the scars of which are still not completely healed. The Kenyan economy is forecasted to shrink next year, the first time the economy has contracted in almost a decade. Corruption is, if anything, growing worse, while the price of basic commodities is increasing - for instance, the cost of maize has doubled over the past year.
And, finally, we're looking at a full-blown food crisis in the coming months, as drought and spiraling prices have left 3.8 million Kenyans dependent on food assistance. (For a map of the drought early warning stages in Kenya, see here.)
An ineffective coalition government. A shrinking economy. Rising food prices. A recent history of violence. Not good, not good at all.
Read more here.
All In Diary, an online resource for humanitarian field workers, aims at improving the quality and appropriateness of relief work. They cover sections on humanitarian principles, disaster preparedness and response, how to start projects, working with communities, managing people.Read more on the All in Diary website.
They just published a PDF version of their "manual", which looks like an excellent introduction to humanitarian work as a whole, and not just a reference guide for aid workers.
Twitter has gone mainstream, with Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher each racking up over a million followers. Critics have panned the microblogging site as narcissistic at best, but media-savvy people around the world have adopted Twitter for far more serious purposes. Moldovans used Twitter to organize protests against fraudulent elections, witnesses to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai kept the world updated via Twitter, and citizens in Myanmar used Twitter to circumvent media censorship and report on the true severity of last year’s deadly cyclone.
Humanitarian relief workers in particular have taken to Twitter’s short messaging technology. Its 140 character limit and ability to reach multiple people simultaneously have proved extremely useful for communicating in rapidly-evolving situations.
Read more on the PBS website.
YOUR TURN TO ASK: Reducing risk in a world of disasters
11 May 2009 15:36:00 GMT
Written by: AlertNet
This Sunday, the United Nations will be launching an important new report looking at how, where and why disaster risk is increasing globally.
Drawing on more than 30 years of data, the study will analyse how climate change and other factors are changing the map of vulnerability. It will also come up with key recommendations for making the planet safer.
The contents of the report are under lock and key until the May 17 launch in Bahrain. But AlertNet has asked the United Nations' top official on disaster risk reduction to field questions from readers ahead of the event.
Margareta Wahlstrom, chief of the U.N.'s International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, will answer your burning questions about climate change, vulnerability and the risks faced by developing countries. You can participate by using the comments section below or by using the #askmw tag on Twitter.
We'll get as many of your questions to Wahlstrom as possible, and we'll be publishing her replies on AlertNet on Friday, so keep checking back!
New to Twitter? If you aren't using Twitter already but want to post a question or see what other people are asking Wahlstrom through Twitter, just get yourself a Twitter account, search for the #askmw tag and view all questions. You can post a 140-character question yourself, making sure to use the #askmw tag somewhere in your post so it sits with all the other posts from people across the Twittersphere.
I seem stuck in a spiral of interviews, half-meetings on stairways and in the backs of cars, rare trips to the storm-hit locations on the edge of battered Yangon, late-night beers in a weirdly well-functioning hotel.Read more on Head Down Eyes Open.
So much is happening, but the story is the paucity of aid. Our relief planes arrive one by one, then four in one day. The Myanmar Red Cross HQ by the port in Yangon is frenetic from dawn to dusk with hundreds of volunteers loading relief supplies onto trucks.
