A new wave of information and communication technologies is changing the face of humanitarian aid, and calls for a restructuring of future disaster relief and coordination efforts.
This emerged from a report released yesterday by The UN Foundation, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the Vodafone Foundation. It reveals that “disaster relief 2.0”, or the rise of crowdsourcing and cloud-based collaborative networks, is creating a new culture of community-driven disaster response.
For example, a group of survivors of the 2010 Haiti earthquake used online mapping skills they developed during the disaster to help re-map Japan, following the 9.0 magnitude earthquake there.
But, as Valerie Amos, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, points out, without a direct interface to the humanitarian system, these communities can end up mapping needs they aren't able to meet.
“The challenge is to improve coordination between the structured humanitarian system and the relatively loosely organised volunteer and technical communities,” she said in a release. “This report illustrates a potential way forward.”
The study examines how volunteer and technical groups worked together in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, to recommend ways to improve coordination during future emergencies.
It states that the disaster in Haiti marked a profound change in the way emergency information is usually collected, shared, and analysed to extract critical data needed to target humanitarian aid.
“For the first time, members of the community affected by the disaster issued pleas for help using social media and widely available mobile technologies. Around the world, thousands of ordinary citizens mobilised to aggregate, translate, and plot these pleas on maps and to organise technical efforts to support the disaster response,” states the report.
“However, the international humanitarian system was not tooled to handle these two new information fire hoses - one from the disaster-affected community and one from a mobilised swarm of global volunteers,” notes the report. It aims to make recommendations to adapt to this new reality, and so enable “collective action to lead to collective intelligence”.
Humanitarian group T'el'ecoms Sans Fronti`eres (Telecoms Without Borders), with the support of the UN and Vodafone foundations, has dispatched a team to Japan following the devastating earthquake and ensuing tsunami.
Team members are using portable satellite equipment to provide voice and data communications to aid workers, to help deliver emergency supplies.
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