I asked the question, You have been involved with many disaster response missions throughout the world, in your opinion which one tested NetHope’s capability and effectiveness the most, and why?
His response was not a surprise to me, he said Haiti was the most difficult disaster to deal with, very difficult. One road block to starting the recovery process was that two of the top UN officials who were already in Haiti at the time of the earthquake, are now dead. They died in the earthquake and some other UN representatives who were there were searching for loved ones. This caused the UN to be down and slow to get going after the initial shock of the earthquake.
However, organizations like NetHope, who when they arrived created a wireless network using long range wifi that connected all NGO offices. This allowed for better communications between all the NGOs that responded to the natural disaster in Haiti. He did continue to speak about how NetHope set up these academies where they take computer science students and train them to their standards, giving them internships and chances to start working as local staff.
He talked about a few things my favorite was the part on innovation. He made a good point, but I also find it to be common sense. If you want to use technology in disaster response you have to be willing to get rid of the piece of technology that worked for you the last disaster for a new and improved system or piece of technology. The bad thing that FEMA did is that they put a water distribution center in the middle of a Wal-mart parking lot that just reopened its doors.
A good way to be innovative would be in the famine area of Africa most of the refugees have cell phones. The NGOs print these vouchers for the people to eat, but the cost to print these vouchers is $1.60/voucher. If you have 100,000 refugees that is $160,000 worth of vouchers, however if you use mobile technology for people to receive vouchers it only costs $0.03/voucher equaling out to cost only $3,000. This would save NGOs $157,000 per 100,000 refugees. This to me is one of the things I might want to do my final project on, creating ways to save money in how they hand out food vouchers in areas where many refugees or survivors have cell phones.
In the video below it talks about how NetHope lost 15 students in the Haiti Earthquake. They are providing technical training and internships to humanitarian staff and unemployed youth in developing countries. This is great on multiple levels within the international community. They teach the students practical experience so they can fix real life problems.
Haiti must have been incredibly difficult to deal with. I feel they were really flying by the seat of their pants on this one and were making it up as they went. There was an unprecedented amount of infrastructure damage and they had to make it work as they went. They did the best they could and they did some incredible things by being innovative.
ReplyDeleteThe SMS system was brilliant. I don't know if it was a strike of lightning in the perfect storm but it worked amazingly. They really benefited from the amount of cell phone use in Haiti. Also the collaboration was key it really helped the situation.
While there were some set backs but no one or organization is perfect. Everyone will make mistakes. They handled the situation amicably. There are still vast improvements that need to be made but the collaboration gave me a little bit of hope. We will see if it continues... fingers crossed. There need to be changes made. The system needs a shake up and it needs to be done sooner rather than later.
With the UN out of commission NetHope stepped up and set things up their way and it was a great success. Here's hoping for more open-mindedness in the future.
I found your blog post very interesting and though provoking. You mentioned the question that you asked in class, which stood out for me becuase that was going to be the question that i was going to ask. Like yourself, his answer did not surprise me. His response as "haiti" was almost common sense for me. Because unlike Hurricane Katrina, Haiti is not a well established country. Also, because the earthquake was of such a large magnitude, many of the top political advisors were either dead or attending to family issues. This became a issue because without the top political advisors, there is no one to really make the decisions that had to be made in order to get the clean up done as effective and efficiently as possible. Another issue with Haiti was the language barrier that we had to over come. It would take us a lot of time to get the SMS messages and have the translators translate them, which they have been working around the clock doing, and then we had to analyze the SMS to determine if it was real or not. So just by these two points you can see how Haiti was such a mess.
ReplyDeleteAlso you mentioned something about the cell phone usage in Haiti. This was something that took my by complete surprise. I did not expect so many people in Haiti to have cell phones. But it wasn't that many because the cell phone towers did not fail and people were still able to send messages. This goes to show that we can not always incorporate things from the previous disaster into the present one. Because in the last disaster the cell phones towers did not work so we had to come up with other means of communication. So basically each disaster is different and we need to treat it that way.
Your question answered one of my questions, I asked what type of disaster is most difficult to respond to, whether it was a hurricane, tornado, or flooding. After he answered your question I realized it probably didn’t matter what type of disaster had struck, but the type of infrastructure of the area that was affected. He said that Haiti’s earthquake was terrible, not necessarily because of the earthquake, but because of the lack of government after the quake hit.
ReplyDeleteLike Mr. Ollafsson said, people need to be educated after they have been affected by a crises or disaster. Continuously providing help is great, if people are educated about the situation, then maybe they can help themselves. And I agree with you about the point Mr. Ollafssonn mentioned, the use of technologies that aren’t being used when humanitarian organizations respond to disasters. He gave a couple of examples, one of them being the good vouchers used in Kenya. He said these vouchers cost somewhere around $1.60 to print. Sixty-three percent of Kenya’s population owned or used mobile phones. Mr. Ollafsson they could use mobile transaction that would only cost around six cents, rather than the paper vouchers. Another example he gave about technologies that could be used was related to assessing disasters. A team of people would go out and interview people after a disaster. These people would ask a series of questions and note the answers on paper. Mr. Ollafsson said the assessment questions could be noted on mobile devices rather than using paper.
I think one of the most important terms he mentions was collaborations. The major humanitarian organizations are too busy battling each other for publicity, when they could be out helping people. Basically it sounded like the only time these humanitarian organizations wanted to help were when camera were watching. If they knew nobody was watching then they didn’t want to help out, only because they want publicity. It’s a shame and something should be done.