Trying to explain FrontlineSMS to people is difficult, as it’s the kind of technology you really need to use in order to understand its full potential. I just came across a poster that was really designed well, showing some of FLSMS applications for field medicine.
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I get a lot of emails asking me which organizations they should give money to for the Haiti disaster relief. While I have my personal preferences, this should really be a personal decision.
But you’re the expert! You know better than I who is doing good work and who isn’t!
Well, yes and no, but that’s besides the point. While I am on the ground here, certainly, and do have both positive and negative experiences with various aid agencies, giving money is a personal act, and if you’re serious about helping Haiti, you must be prepared to do a little work.
But I just want to give money. It’s not realistic to expect everyone to do research about which organizations are bad and which ones are good! People don’t have time for that.
I would argue that’s precisely one of the problems with international development today: donors have not yet demanded the kind of transparency and rigor from the organizations they donate money to, thus eliminating any incentive for an organization to be transparent and rigorous in its efforts.
I know I just posted “The Best and Worst Ways to Help Haiti“, but this is also worth reading. It’s by Alanna Shaikh, who writes for the blog Blood and Milk.
Nobody Wants Your Old Shoes: How Not to Help Haiti (PS: the comments at the bottom are as interesting as the article itself)
Some people like to donate goods instead of cash because they worry that cash won’t be used in a way that helps the needy. If that’s you, I have two points. 1) Why are you donating to an organization you don’t trust? 2) What’s to stop them from selling your donated item and using the money for whatever they want?
Whether you agree or not, more opinions, not less, are needed on the subjects.
I’ve been inundated with requests by people wanting to be volunteers in Haiti. While they’re intentions are great, unfortunetely there are too many conversations like this:
Me: Hope for Haiti Caller: Hi! I want to get on the next flight to Haiti and help! Me: Oh, hi, thank you! Do you have a background in medicine or disaster relief? Caller: Not at all! I just want to help!
Me: Hope for Haiti
Caller: Hi! I want to get on the next flight to Haiti and help!
Me: Oh, hi, thank you! Do you have a background in medicine or disaster relief?
Caller: Not at all! I just want to help!
I get it, and I don’t begrudge them one bit. But the truth is, right now the only volunteers needed are experts. Haiti will need plenty of non-expert volunteers in the coming weeks and months, but for now resources there are so tight, and security is so haphazard, that it’s not practical, safe, or helpful to go down there.
So what can I do? Give money to these big orgs that already have raised a ton?
Well, yeah, that would be a good start. Give $5. Give $10. I’m working with Hope for Haiti, and we’re having our first plane full of doctors and nurses land in Port au Prince in about 10 minutes. Another plane is landing in the DR with supplies. So the money being donated to Hope for Haiti IS REACHING HAITIAN PEOPLE.
But let’s say you already donated, or want to help in a more tangible way. If you’ve got tech skills, we need your help with Crises Mapping.
From the co-founder of Ushahidi (quotes are from Beth’s Blog)
We have received tremendous support from the crisis mapping community through the Crisis Mapping Network, the developer community, collaborating organizations like UN OCHA Columbia, INSTEDD, Haitianquake, Digital Democracy, FrontlineSMS, Google and others, and dozens of volunteers who’ve helped with everything from data entry, to translations, to data filtering. Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.
We have received tremendous support from the crisis mapping community through the Crisis Mapping Network, the developer community, collaborating organizations like UN OCHA Columbia, INSTEDD, Haitianquake, Digital Democracy, FrontlineSMS, Google and others, and dozens of volunteers who’ve helped with everything from data entry, to translations, to data filtering.
Since the site went live, the team has been working round the clock to make improvements to the instance, fix problems (our server has crashed several times already and our alert system went beserk!), coordinate efforts with volunteers, share information with partners, and collaborate with other tech-based efforts e.g. the people finder at Haitianquake (since merged with Google’s). The fact that we have a global team means that we have been able to offer round the clock support, with the Africa-based team taking over when the US-based team goes to sleep and vice versa.
Ory describes their current challenges, including:
Close the feedback loop: that is, ensure that agencies trying to figure out where help is needed are tracking our reports and following up on requests for help that are coming in. We are currently doing this via the Crisis Mappers network, Sahana, and Internews and INSTEDD teams who have just landed in Haiti, but a lot more needs to be done.
Thanks to Chris Blattman’s blog for pointing me towards these two great pieces, both by Binyavanga Wainaina, an author from Kenya who founded and now edits Kenya’s first literary journal called Kwani?
The first? A “classic” piece on “How to Write About Africa”, originally published in Granta and available for free reading here. It’s worth 10 minutes of your time.
The second is a podcast Wainaina recently did on the Ethics of Aid.
Direct link to the podcast is here.
A teaser:
A lot of people arrive in Africa to assume that it’s a blank empty space and their goodwill and desire and guilt will fix it. And that to me is not any different from the first people who arrived and colonized us. This power, this power to help, is just about as dangerous as hard power, because very often it arrives with a kind of zeal that is assuming ‘I will do it. I will solve it for you. I will fix it for you,’ and it rides roughshod over your own best efforts.
(Download PDF here)
Stumbled on to this the other night. Could be useful. If it’s good enough for Oxfam…
There is a film of discomfort here that one doesn’t find in the south, partially explainable by the myriad of myopic Minustah, frantically looking at their watches while music pulsates in the background, reminding everyone that they have a 1am curfew, a badge of honor somehow. But they are an easy target—in truth, most of the people I meet working in development here are dissatisfied with their jobs, to varying degrees, ranging from apathy to antipathy to downright derision. Are their jobs really that uninspiring, truly that worthy of contempt? I don’t think so. The city itself is partly to blame, whether they recognize this or not. And not the city. Their perception of it. Port au Prince is like so many other big cities walled in from the outside country, protected from its’ countrymen, built on their bones, modern day St. Petersburg’s scattered throughout the “south”.
Bill Easterly and Peter Singer…agreeing? Or, more likely, Bill Easterly saying stuff, and Singer nodding his head knowingly? Yes, that’s better. Any way you slice it, a good watch.
Here’s the New York Times 6-minute version.
Here’s the full 46 minute bit.
I watched the full one, because I have time on my hands. The one takeaway message I got was that something like Charity Navigator really does the development community a disservice.
