Tech Solutions Address Vulnerability of Poor in Natural Disasters

Posted by jfrant

Nothing quite brings inequality into focus quite like a natural disaster. The poor are overwhelmingly impacted by natural disasters and little has been done to improve their resiliency. There is hope, however. Information and communication technology (ICT) enabled and community-led development projects have begun to address issues of relief, recovery, and resiliency for the most vulnerable in New York City.

Hurricane Katrina showed us the racial nature of poverty in New Orleans and how inequality affects our ability to cope with natural disaster. According to a Congressional Research Services report, the hurricane “disproportionately impacted communities where the poor and minorities, mostly African-Americans, resided.” Simply put, poorer communities lack the resources to evacuate and prepare for storms, and are more likely to be located in areas that are vulnerable to disaster.

Hurricane Sandy was no different – again the poor were the hardest hit by the disaster, but the response by government was decidedly better – though not perfect. Community organizations, churches and even next-door neighbors rallied to fill gaps in the government response.

The OccupySMS map was intended to facilitate “mutual aid” connecting volunteers who happen to be in the neighborhood with individuals with specific needs.

One of the most successful ICT enabled projects launched in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy was a project supported by Occupy Sandy Recovery – an offshoot of the inequality advocacy group Occupy Wall Street. The group developed a platform called “OccupySMS” to facilitate “mutual aid,” by connecting people with a need to volunteers offering assistance in a specific area. The application utilized an existing platform called Mobile Commons, allowing users to request donations or assistance and matching those requests to nearby volunteers via SMS. The service was specifically intended to fill individual household needs that were not being met by government-operated aid distribution centers.

Occupy Sandy’s efforts did not end with the recovery efforts. The organization followed through by creating an incubator of sorts to promote projects that address the long-term relief, recovery and resiliency of the communities affected by Hurricane Sandy.

The directory of projects includes both social and technological projects to improve coordination in the event of another natural disaster. FLO Solutions, for example, aims to help organizations implement free and open-source technology that will make it easier for them to share knowledge and data in a disaster situation. By networking non-profit, community and relief organizations together, the project facilitates the sharing of actionable information, such as requests for supplies and volunteers.

Occupy Sandy isn’t the only organization in New York that is fostering creative and technology-based solutions to issues of inequality. Code for America’s betaNYC Meetup calls itself “America’s largest civic technology and open government community.” By supporting civic technology startups and open government initiatives the organization hopes to “solve 21^st Century civic problems … improving the lives of all in New York City.”

Inequality remains a huge problem in New York City, but with the help of civic organizations like Occupy Sandy and betaNYC we can make our city more resilient to natural disasters and ensure that the most vulnerable members of our community are not forgotten.

Canvassing for development

Posted by jfrant

The New Media Taskforce here at SIPA is holding an “Innovating Mobile Tech for Development Competition,” where students are given the chance to pitch their idea for innovative mobile applications that seek to address specific political, economic, or social needs in international development to a panel of industry judges. Here is the idea that I may submit:

Village Well, Jombo village, Malawi by Flickr user Bread for the World

One of the major failures of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is a lack of timeliness and completeness of data measuring progress towards achieving the goals. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Lancet:

One of the biggest drawbacks of the MDGs is that the data are often years out of date. Accurate published information from the past 12 months is still not available for most low-income countries. This timelag was inevitable when data were obtained by hand in household surveys, but in the age of the mobile phone, wireless broadband, and remote sensing, data collection should be vastly quicker.

Dr. Sachs is spot-on in suggesting that mobile technology will make data collection more rapid, but I would also contend that mobile-technology-enabled crowdsourcing will increasingly make traditional statistical surveys irrelevant. This is already happening in the arena of American politics. President Obama’s canvassing app enables citizens to volunteer their time to help register voters, build a massive database of registered voters, and ultimately organize voters out to the polls on election day. The app uses information about your location to suggest nearby households that you should visit and questions you should ask when you get there. I believe same model can be applied to the realm of international development.

Let’s say you have a database of 1,000 water projects spread across Malawi. You know the location of the water projects but do not have the resources to send an employee to monitor them on a regular basis. Water For People has built a platform called FLOW that enables field workers monitor water projects using a mobile app. While replacing pen and paper with a smartphone and Internet connection is a significant step forward, I believe that FLOW still doesn’t take the concept far enough because its capacity limited by its reliance on paid professionals to conduct the surveys.

The next-best thing to a trained monitoring professional would be a citizen armed with a smartphone. Bringing up the app, the citizen would be given a map of water projects in their immediate vicinity. They would then “check-in” at the water project and complete a simple survey about the state of the project. If the idea is expanded even further, this app could potentially supplement or replace the statistical surveys currently used to track progress toward achieving the MDG. And because the data would have no time lag it could be used to identify regions that require intervention in real-time, such as a village with an abnormally high maternal mortality rate.

Effectively, crowdsourced development data could turn the MDGs from an out-of-date snapshot of past development status into a tool for development practitioners and governments to detect issues with development while they are still relevant and actionable.

Gross National Happiness or Have You Seen a Cow?

Posted by jfrant

Today was the first day of the first week of orientation for my master’s program (MPA-DP) at Columbia. The day concluded with an interesting lecture (the first Development Practitioner Seminar) from Dr. Saamdu Chetri, the director of Bhutan’s Happiness Center. His lecture was on Gross National Happiness (GNH). Every two years the country of Bhutan conducts a survey to determine the level of “happiness” in the country. The idea is based on the fact that GDP is an inadequate indicator to judge the wellbeing of a society. In fact, the traditional concept of “growth,” Dr. Chetri explained, may be incompatible with long-term economic sustainability.

[polldaddy poll=6477912 align=right]At the end of the lecture, we were given the opportunity to ask questions. My question: Since the index is based mostly on answers to subjective questions in an interview setting, how do you ensure that social pressure to be happy (or at least say you’re happy) doesn’t artificially inflate the level of “measured” happiness. That’s not how I phrased it (I wish I’d phrased it better), but that was the basic idea.

Dr. Chetri’s response was that the questions are designed in a way to make it very difficult to intentionally sabotage the results. Instead of just asking if you’re happy, the interviewer would ask a variety of questions on numerous subjects from which they could infer the person’s level of happiness. For instance, the interviewer would ask something like: “Do you know what a cow looks like?” The assumption being that if you don’t know what a cow looks like you are less connected to nature and therefore less happy.

The GNH is based on four pillars of happiness, which are good governance, sustainable socio-economic development, cultural preservation and environmental conservation. Economic development is important to achieving happiness and equity in society, but it should not come at the cost of the other three pillars. For example, while cleaning up an oil spill may create jobs and contribute to GDP, it has a negative impact on overall happiness because oil spills are devastating to the environment.

Central to GNH is the idea of sustainability, which will also be a key component of the Sustainable Development Goals (the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, which will sunset in 2015).

P.S. I went on an evening ride in Central Park today. Going fast is scary with so many people around.