Humanitarian Technology
Technology is starting to play an important role in humanitarian crisis rescue efforts, as seen in Haiti and after Hurricane Katrina. Called crowd-sourcing, it’s exciting humanitarians. Whether trapped earthquake victims are texting for rescue help, or communities are reporting their needs and creating accurate street maps, technology is saving lives.
Crowd-sourcing is the combined power of mobile phones, mapping technology and social networking when it is used to enable people to access help, deliver aid, bear witness to abuses, and even hold governments and aid agencies more accountable, reports Integrated Regional Information Networks through Yahoo News.
Now crowd-sourcing is raising a few questions around validation and accuracy – with anyone being able to report in, particularly when anonymous, credibility becomes an issue. Also, codes of conduct need to be developed so that when people ask for help they actually receive it.
At the same time, ownership of crowd-sourcing needs to stay with the crowd. It worked in Haiti only because of the vast, unprecedented network of volunteers providing information on site and the number of people volunteering to make sense of the information.
If you’re interested, there will be an open-to-public conference on crisis mapping in Boston October 1-3 this year. Called ICCM 2010: Haiti and Beyond, The Crisis Mappers Net is hosting this conference about leveraging mobile platforms, geospatial technologies, and other technologies to effectively provide early warning for rapid response to complex humanitarian emergencies. The Conference on October 1 is public while the Annual Meeting is by invitation only.
P.S. All videos from ICCM 2009 are kindly available on their website.
Tags: annual meeting, crisis, crowd-sourcing, earthquake, emergencies, Haiti, Humanitarian, ICCM 2009, ICCM 2010, mapping, mobile, social networking, technology, Yahoo News
Hearing Loss Solutions
Recently, the potentially ear damaging noises of the new riot police siren (in North America) and the heavily blown vuvuzelas (at the World Cup Soccer) have been making the news. Meanwhile, the World Health Organization estimates that nearly 300 million people, including 78 million children, worldwide suffer from moderate to profound hearing loss.
Far away from the sirens and vuvuzelas, the majority of people with hearing loss live in poverty stricken nations where there is a shortage in basic healthcare. This means that hearing aids and other remedies taken for granted in the west are almost unheard of in these areas, where untreated diseases such as meningitis, measles, and chronic ear infections are among the leading causes of hearing impairment, reports HealthyHearing.com.
The World Health Organization (WHO) explains that hearing impairment places a great economic and social burden on communities and countries, as it can hinder a child’s progress in school and prevent adults from obtaining work.
Apparently the current production of hearing aids fills less than 10% of global need. Even in developing countries, it’s estimated that fewer than 1 out of 40 people who need a hearing aid have one, according to WHO.
The good news is that half of all cases of hearing impairment are avoidable through prevention, early diagnoses and management. Immunization, the avoidance of ototoxic drugs, and protective devices that reduce exposure to noise are among the preventative solutions suggested by the WHO.
In an effort to plan solutions, the Coalition for Global Hearing Health (CGHH) recently held a conference from June 14-15th in Washington D.C. to raise awareness about hearing-related health policies across the globe. The conference aimed to advocate, equip and advise hearing care professionals on the practices necessary to fight hearing loss, an ailment that is often ignored in underdeveloped countries. As well, the attendees worked towards setting up methods for early detection as well as medical and surgical interventions.
The CGHH counts among its members humanitarian audiologists, otorhinolaryngologists, and other hearing health professionals who discussed a range of topics from the role of technology to ethics and social awareness in developing countries.
The CGHH conference is a great step towards an equitable global hearing policy, which is excellent news for millions of people in need.
Tags: aid, Global Hearing Health, hearing, Humanitarian, loss, police siren, prevention, vuvuzela, WHO, World Health Organization
Wild Weather Solutions
Weather and humanitarian efforts are becoming more and more linked. The UN and its aid partners have appealed for $1.9 billion for this year for Sudan, Africa, which makes it the world’s largest humanitarian operation. Along with tribal and political violence, people are threatened by food insecurity and rising malnutrition caused by poor rains and crop failures, along with higher food prices (due to lack of supply, likely).
In Asia, an estimated EUR 2,000,000 (US $2.7 million) is needed to relieve a humanitarian disaster in Mongolia, where the winter of 2009-2010 was exceptionally cold. In fact, a natural disaster called a “Dzud” occurred, in which continuous heavy snowfall with extreme cold follows dry summers, causing a lack of grazing pastures and massive loss of livestock.
Meanwhile, South America is home to Guatemala. In the last few days the World Bank announced that it will offer an emergency loan of $85 million, and the United States will donate $112,000, as humanitarian aid to aid Guatemala following tropical storm Agatha. It rained so much that a giant sinkhole occurred in Guatemala City – surreal photos online. Around 11,000 buildings were damaged and 109 people died.
These stories from around our world all center around wild weather, a sign of climate change. We need to do more than just talk about climate change. Agreements such as the recent Canadian Forestry Agreement that Caitlin wrote about this week (see below), that helps stop climate change while saving endangered species are a good step. We need agreements like that all around the world. Greenpeace recently publicized that Nestle has agreed to get palm oil, which is in so many of our products, from only sustainable sources rather than sources that destroy huge amounts of rainforest. Yea!
Individually, we can help out through ways such as telecommuting and doing our work from home one or two days a week so we keep our vehicles off the road, reducing emissions. And conserving water by using gray water for our gardens and doing our laundry only when we have a full load, and not multiple times a day as some recent research suggested is all too common. See the California water bond article that Susie wrote below.
Working together, with everyone including businesses helping in some way, we can solve the problems of our planet Earth. Stories such as last Sunday’s article (see below) about the San Diego Zoo’s 10 Reasons for Hope show us that we can achieve amazing feats. We need to do this – as Vancouver’s Canadian Memorial Church’s sign read last year, There is No Planet B.
Tags: 10 Reasons for Hope, Agatha, Canadian Forestry Agreement, Canadian Memorial Church, Climate Change, crop failures, Dzud, Greenpeace, Guatemala, Humanitarian, Mongolia, Nestle, palm oil, San Diego Zoo, Sudan, telecommuting, UN, wild weather, World Bank
Happy International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day is celebrated on March 8th around the world, and is a recognized holiday in many countries including Vietnam and Russia, reports CARE Canada’s website dedicated to the Day.
The importance of the “role of women in international development is the reason CARE Canada has joined in with activities around International Women’s Day,” Kieran Green, their Communications Director, told me. Over the years, CARE has “found that women play the most powerful role in fighting poverty”, Kieran explained. “A woman who is empowered is more likely to send her kids to school and make sure her family gets proper health care”. When women in developing countries become empowered economically, the rates of domestic violence go down. The effects are enormous and that’s why CARE focuses on women, and it’s also what they’re trying to help people realize on International Women’s Day this year.
Kieran also mentioned that when CARE Canada realized there was no symbol for International Women’s Day, they decided to resurrect “the old folk tradition of when you want to remember something that’s important you tie a piece of string around your finger”. It’s similar to the idea presented by the red ribbon for AIDS and the pink ribbon for breast cancer. “So for this year we’re calling on Canada and hopefully we’ll see it in the years to come spread around the world, that for International Women’s Day as a reminder of everything that women have achieved and for what they have yet to achieve, tie a string around your finger.”
CARE Canada’s International Women’s Day website has a video showing Fergie, Duchess of York, wearing a string, as well as some women in Afghanistan, Haiti and elsewhere. “String is available everywhere, and it’s cheap. It’s easy to tie a string around your finger,” Kieran added. He’s right – tying a string around my finger by myself took less than a minute. I may have a friend make it a fancy bow.
CARE Canada has a great website dedicated to International Women’s Day. Enjoy the Day, and tell your friends about it. It’s a good opportunity to celebrate the social, economic and political successes of women past and present. Yet it is also a day to think of the millions of women and girls worldwide who continue to fight for justice, equality and peace, the website reminds us.
Happy International Women’s Day!
Ending Hunger
The response to the crisis in Haiti has been an outpouring of warmth and support from people all around our world as our hearts go out to the people there. Aid organizations have responded to the call to provide emergency aid to the devastated country, including medical, food and water. There is still a lot to do, and I wanted to highlight an organization helping to make a difference.
Margie Fleming Glennon, Communications Director of Share Our Strength, kindly gave me some insights into the aid effort as well as about her organization. Share Our Strength has given $145,000 to five organizations with the capacity and expertise to respond to such a huge crisis. The funding ranges from $67,500 for Partners in Health, to $25,000 for each of CHF International and the United Nations Foundation, $22,500 for CARE, and $5,000 for the International Organization for Migration.
Haiti’s immediate needs must be addressed first, as aid is struggling to get in and issues around starvation and security loom. VoicesForOurPlanet.com joins our readers in wishing the aid organizations and the people in Haiti all the very best and pray for them daily.
Once the current crisis settles down, there will be a need for long-term assistance, and that’s where Share Our Strength will continue to help. The organization specializes in feeding the hungry. Hunger has been a long-standing issue in Haiti, one which is expected to be even more urgent going forward.
Share Our Strength is in the planning stages with chefs across the United States, many of whom they have long-established relationships with. And history. Following Hurricane Katrina, the organization managed the Restaurants for Relief program, which helped raise money to rebuild New Orleans. Now they will step forward to do the same for Haiti.
So what does Share Our Strength do between major crises, and where does their money come from? The organization’s mission is to end hunger in the United States. Having been founded 25 years ago to help provide aid to the Ethiopian famine, Share Our Strength today continues to provide some international support, although it’s a small part of their budget. They have been addressing the ongoing problem of hunger in Haiti for around 20 years, which takes the largest portion of their international aid budget. Now, obviously, they are giving Haiti a much greater focus.
The organization is likely familiar to many of you, through some of their well-known events. The flagship event is Taste of the Nation(R), which started in 1988 and today is America’s largest culinary event. Presented by American Express, popular restaurants in 55 US cities offer food and beverage tastings, involving over 10,000 chefs. The events are entirely managed by volunteers, and raise millions of dollars each year that Share Our Strength uses to support over 1,000 hunger organizations as well as its own food programs.
Margie also mentioned several other major programs that her organization manages, including the Great American Bake Sale and the Great American Dine Out events. Their Operation Frontline program helps teach low-income families to shop and cook on a budget. They are also starting a new program focused on people with diabetes in 20 communities across the US.
As well, in the summer of 2009, Share Our Strength surveyed American teachers about child hunger in the classroom. Responses came from 700 teachers in 47 states and a wide range of schools. Sixty-two percent of teachers reported seeing children who come to school hungry each week because they are not getting enough to eat at home. Sixty-three percent of teachers mentioned that they use their own money to help feed children in their school. They likely understand the negative cycle to which hunger can lead. If you’ve ever been hungry, you may remember how distracting it can be. Distracted children, unfortunately, are often labeled as misbehaving, a label which can stick and lead to medical and societal problems when the children are a little older.
From feeding hungry children in the United States to the massive rebuilding that needs to be done in Haiti, Share Our Strength is committed to working with other organizations to make a positive impact. For more information about Share Our Strength and to find out how you can help, visit their website.
Tags: CARE, CHF International, earthquake, Haiti, Humanitarian, hunger, Katrina, Migration, Partners in Health, Share Our Strength, United National Foundation
Adapting to Climate Change
In the shadow of the climate changes that are occurring, and the lack of a binding agreement emerging from Copenhagen, some leading humanitarian groups are seeking ways that people may be able to adapt to the early stages of climate change.
Angie Dazé, Senior Climate Change Adaptation Advisor for CARE International, gave me a personal interview today. She specializes in community-based adaptations, trying to understand the effects of climate change and what the most vulnerable of our world’s people might do to survive the early stages of climate change.
Empower the Most Vulnerable People
A whole community is not affected equally by climate shock. In pastoral communities, men often manage the livestock while women are responsible for fetching water, tending the garden, and ensuring the family has food. “What we often find is that women tend to have a higher level of vulnerability because of their role in the home,” Angie told me. “In agricultural-based communities, in particular, food and water become very difficult within a changing climate. So women’s traditional roles and responsibilities become even harder,” Angie explained. Issues related to climate change vulnerability can be social or political. Although women traditionally have limited decision-making power, when humanitarian managers “empower women to have more power in decisions, they tend to make good decisions that will help the family to manage the resources in a way that will reduce their risk.” But it’s not just women. “It’s making sure that the different members of the household have the skills and the information that they need to play the role that they need to play most effectively.”
Get the Right Information
One of climate change’s biggest problems is the uncertainty of what, how and when changes are going to occur. CARE managers “help people to have a broader range of options open to them, so they’re in a position to make decisions to manage the risks. And also to ensure they have the information they need to make those decisions,” Angie told me. This information includes seasonal forecasts, what crops might be better suited to a particular climate condition, and early warnings for droughts or storms.
Find Practical Solutions
While empowering women is an important part of an overall strategy of making a community more resilient, CARE also works closely with all members of the community, and local organizations, NGO’s, and government institutions. Together, they come up with practical solutions such as different agricultural practices – when rainfall decreases, it’s essential to keep as much moisture in the soil as possible. CARE is launching a program in Africa in which they do small scale adaptations in different communities and countries to find out what works. That learning will then be applied widely, both at the community and broader levels, such as trying to influence national policy frameworks. The focus is always on giving the most vulnerable people a voice and ensuring that the potentially large sums of money that will be donated to stricken areas actually reach the people who need it. It’s also “building skills and new practices and always providing information,” Angie added.
The Future
Ultimately, the best solution is for countries to sign a binding agreement to reduce emissions and stop climate change. Adaptation is most hopeful for our current level of climate change, but if it continues to grow (as is likely after Copenhagen), livelihoods are going to become impossible and mass migrations will likely occur. If that happens, we will be facing a whole new set of social and political hot spots.
The silver lining to the recent Copenhagen conference may be the number of average people who became involved and who care about the effect that climate change is having, and will have, on our planet, its people and its animals. So please keep caring and helping – You’re needed!
Tags: adaptation, Africa, CARE, Climate Change, Copenhagen, empowering women, global warming, Humanitarian
A Child’s Wish List
’Tis the season of children’s wish lists, and one in particular has caught my attention this year. Save the Children Canada has a section on their website called “Wishlist 2009”. It’s a list of ten gifts that make a difference. Seven of the ten gifts cost between $20 and $100, with the other three stretching upwards in the budget to reach $1,000.
Starting on the lowest rung of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, for just $20 you can help feed two children lunch at school for a whole month in Burkina Faso (once known as Upper Volta) in western Africa. You can help buy lunch every day for a year for $200. If you’ve ever been hungry after missing a meal, you’ll know how distracting hunger can be. As well, children need food so they develop properly and stay healthy.
We’re so lucky to be able to turn on our taps and get clean water. Access to clean water is vitally important, and for $50 you can contribute towards providing a water filter for a school to help children avoid illness. You can also buy six ceramic water filters for rural schools for $300, and help keep Nicaraguan children healthy.
For $500, you can support the purchase of ten doses of Pentaxine, a vaccine that fights hepatitis, which can be fatal for children.
Consider sponsoring basic school supplies including notebooks, pens, pencils, and a geometry set for children in Latin America for $35. Or for $80, help Save the Children purchase a locally-made desk for two students, in Burkina Faso or Kenya.
You can also assist a teacher with transportation so they can get to school, visit parents, and even transport a sick child to a medical clinic, all for $100.
Accessing health services, education, and other state services in Nicaragua requires having a birth registration. For $25, you can help ensure that two Nicaraguan children have their births registered and can access the services that they need.
Remote communities in places such as Nicaragua often lack health facilities. For $120, you can assist in equipping a health services birthing team, including a midwife, and even emergency obstetric care if needed.
Feeling truly philanthropic? $1,000 provides 90 tables and benches for 180 students in Burkina Faso.
So as you rush around completing your shopping and trying to fulfill wish lists, please remember that the children of our world also have wish lists. Let’s help them smile and feel the joy of this season and of having basic life needs met for the coming months.
Tags: Africa, Burkina Faso, Humanitarian, Kenya, Nicaragua, philanthropic, remote communities, rural schools, Save the Children, school lunch, school supplies, wish list
Wildlife and Humanitarian Screensavers
Enjoy having a beautiful wildlife or humanitarian screensaver showing up behind your computer’s desktop files. Here’s a short list of excellent organizations that offer screensavers – in the Friday File. You can reach the Friday File by either clicking on “Fridays” in the navigation bar up top on this page, or by clicking on The Friday File under Categories.
Tags: Conservation, Humanitarian, screensaver, wallpaper, wild animals, Wildlife
MEDA Makes Positive Impact in Pakistan
I was excited to have a personal interview this week with Helen Loftin, Mennonite Economic Development Association’s (MEDA)’s regional project manager in Pakistan. She says the work they’re doing has linkages with the book Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn, which is currently enjoying some much deserved media coverage.
Results of MEDA’s programs in Afghanistan and Pakistan prove that when women have a means of income and control over their personal income, the return on investment is phenomenal for their family, community and country.
Currently, Helen is involved with three of MEDA’s ongoing programs in the embellished materials (hand embroidered fabric) sector. These initiatives give particularly marginalized women, who are traditionally homebound, important economic opportunities, linking them to markets to create an income. With homebound women, the solution was to create a woman to woman sales network. Once the women have an income, they are able to invest it – they educate their children (including their daughters), buy better shoes, buy assets for the house such as a radio, or acquire more income-generating assets such as livestock. Some women have purchased a motorcycle for their family to use for transport to and from school, and for business opportunities, even though few women use it themselves.
Helen has observed a fantastic leap of confidence in the women involved in the projects. “The glory of this job is witnessing the effect that this has on the women in terms of their carriage, the way in which they engage with other members of their groups, and ultimately in their communities,” reports Helen. They become a role model for their children and other women.
As well, as the book suggests, empowering the women lessens terrorism. The women are their children’s largest influence, and the kids are with their mothers for all of the first seven or so years of their life. “If the family itself has a business that is viable and growing and shows economic promise, that gives the family something worth holding onto and building upon,” explained Helen. The communities in which MEDA works line the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan. A family with no other choice for survival might send a child or father off for $5 a day to carry anything anyone asks them to back and forth across the border. If you can build something for them to hang onto, that shows hope and gives them dignity, they will engage in that and defend it – rejecting outside influences of things they know are not right, reports Helen.
Coming from a family business herself, Helen has worked in the private sector in southern Ontario, and has an MBA. The MBA led to an internship with CARE in India that was her opportunity to test if international economic development work was a romantic ideal or a good match. Her internship, linking fledgling enterprises to interested multinationals, proved this was where she wanted to be. So, for the last 3 ½ years, she has worked with MEDA.
Part of MEDA’s success in Pakistan relies on the word spreading through the communities. MEDA links women new to the program to the marketplace in a culturally acceptable manner and most women just run with it. Although MEDA workers with western perspectives sometimes have trouble grappling with the depth of the need and the urgency to do something positive, the work is exciting and rewarding.
And while some women keep their business as a very small family venture, other women become real business people. Some are so enterprising they no longer need MEDA. They understand competition, and don’t want to share their numbers or the full story on how the business is doing. Although the humanitarian vocational workers are thrilled by the women’s success, it can be frustrating when annual program reports are due!
For more information about MEDA, or to donate, please visit their website.
Tags: CARE, empowering women, Half the Sky, Humanitarian, MEDA, Pakistan, women
Bringing Hope to Families in the Developing World
Recently, CARE Canada called. “Would you like to support our program and for $32 buy a pair of chickens for a family in the developing world?” they asked. “Your donation will be matched 3 for 1 by the Canadian Government.”
Promptly, my $32 was on its way to CARE. It inspired me to spread the word about this initiative, and at the same time crystallized what had been on my mind for months. So, welcome to this blog, where I’m excited to give a greater voice to those who are working to find or implement solutions to our planet’s problems.
Here’s the scoop on CARE Canada’s chickens program, which turns
out to be the first step of a much larger and more complex international humanitarian effort.
When people pay for chickens through phone queries or the CAREgift catalogue, the money supports programs such as the Kabul Humanitarian Assistance for Widows program in Afghanistan, Kieran Green of CARE Canada explained. Afghan widows have little means of income to support their family. The chickens provide the widows with eggs to feed their family, and then eggs and young chickens that they can sell to other people in their village. And that’s a huge step, which takes care of the basic needs of life for the women and their families.
Courtesy: CARE Canada
Then, implementing a humanitarian Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs program, CARE continues working with the women. Once feeding themselves and their family is eased in the widows’ minds, CARE provides vocational training in a commercially valuable skill such as cell phone repair, commercial baking or sewing, all of which are in demand in the Afghan jobs marketplace. Once trained, the women get CARE’s help in either starting a business or getting a job. So when you buy a pair of chickens, you “empower the women to start moving from vulnerability to independence”, Green reports.
Waves of economic and social benefits ripple from the widows into their villages. Eventually, villagers can support programs such as CARE’s Village Savings and Loans, a microfinance group.
The Kabul Widows program is currently working with approximately 1,800 Afghan widows. Since the CAREgift catalogue was launched in December 2008, supporters have purchased 420 pairs of chickens through the catalogue.
A slight correction over the original posting is needed here. CIDA matches the chicken funds three to one, and the vocational training funds one to one, so your donation is multiplied and does more good than if it was standalone. If you’d like to help, you can pay for chickens through the CAREgifts Livelihoods page on their website. If you’d like to support a vocational training program for 2,000 Afghan women, check out CARE Canada’s Afghanistan Challenge where CARE displays its interlinking attitude by partnering with Rotary International, MEDA, WUSC and the Canadian Government.
In future posts, I’ll look at some other solutions, as well as ways that we can all make a difference. I look forward to discovering where this blog goes, and welcome you to join me on the journey.
Tags: CARE Canada, CAREgift, charitable gifts, empowering women, Humanitarian, MEDA, Rotary International, WUSC
