The World Bank suggests that most developing countries lack basic local data about where schools, hospitals, or water points are located, or often the data they do have is out of date or incorrect. This limits their ability to respond when a disaster or humanitarian crisis happens.

Under this agreement, Google will provide the World Bank, governments and UN agencies with access to Google Map Maker which includes detailed maps of more than 150 countries. Through this tool, citizens are able to directly participate in the creation of maps by contributing their local knowledge, and those additions will then be reflected on Google Maps and Google Earth.

“A global community of Google users have been volunteering their time to improve maps, making them more comprehensive and ensuring that they remain accurate as the world around them changes. This is particularly important in vulnerable locations and for disaster preparedness and recovery as it helps citizens and governments to better prepare emergency response plans and act effectively when a crisis hits,” said Shona Brown, Senior Vice President, Google.org.

Their report, called “Microfinance in Africa: Closing The Gap“, explains how community-based savings groups, known as village savings and loan associations (VSLAs), offer an effective, sustainable way to begin meeting the enormous unmet demand for financial services in Africa’s poorest communities.

At the same time, VSLAs offer millions of participants the financial know-how they need to begin seeking vital financial services from formal financial institutions.

CARE VSLAs are open to everyone, but focus on women because experience shows their success creates lasting, beneficial change for entire families and communities. CARE’s VSLAs are typically built by women living on less that $2 per day who collectively save pennies each week, then make small loans to each other to help finance small businesses.

CARE offers VSLA members one year of intensive training in managing money, but no direct capital investment. Because VSLAs are self-contained and operated by their own members, they are sustainable and replicable in communities where traditional financial institutions cannot operate.

Senators Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and John Boozman (R-Ark.) are exploring legislation to improve U.S. microfinance programs. The CARE report urges the adoption of policies promoting financial inclusion for women, and to target such efforts at countries and communities where poverty and discrimination have created the greatest need.

“When poor women have a place to save money, or take a loan to start a small business, they can lift themselves, their families and entire communities out of poverty,” says Lauren Hendricks, executive director of CARE’s Access Africa. “For financial inclusion to become reality, women must be at the center of policies and outreach.”

Plan Canada, which was involved in the early days of the Coalition, just recently joined it. “Why now?” I asked Rosemary McCarney, President and CEO of Plan Canada.

“We didn’t feel that we were ready as an organization to be a good member because our international organization was in policy formation etc. about humanitarian response and where we would respond,” Rosemary answered. So while Plan Canada has always supported the Coalition, joining it now signals that they are now “in the best shape to respond and to be a meaningful candidate”.

“Plan works in about 56 countries around the world. We’ve always been humanitarian responders in the communities where we work. And over the last 3 or 4 years the nature of the emergencies have changed, and the capacities of our organization have grown” in terms of the communities Plan is not currently working in. “From the time of the Asian tsunami, Plan has been increasing its technical capacity to have swat teams that are able to move quickly around to support our country teams depending on where the crisis is. Then we had to create the policy environment so that people knew how to respond, when to respond, what the triggers were for the nature of the response we would do. All the things that a good humanitarian organization would have in place when operating on a large scale.”

Plan Canada is unique amongst the Humanitarian Coalition members. Rosemary explained. “We’re a bit of a different organization than the current members because we have a very large donor base. We have 180,000 donors across Canada.” The other organizations tend to be “very grant oriented organizations”.

“From the point of view of the structure as a whole, I think our joining sends the right signal that this is the right direction, this is the next part of the evolution of the sector itself. So ever increasing collaboration, coordination and effort. We’ve always worked that way on the ground as colleagues,” Rosemary explained. “But this is actually backing it up into Canada in terms of showing Canadians how we’re trying to continuously improve efficiency and effectiveness in terms of both the work and how Canadians can look to us as a group of NGO’s that are intent on working very purposefully together both in the nature of how we communicate about disasters, how we raise funds from Canadians for addressing the needs of people in a disaster, and how we work on the ground together. The last part has often been invisible to Canadians.”

Congratulations to Plan Canada for joining the Humanitarian Coalition. As Rosemary said, “it’s just one of those things that’s time has come”.

Traditionally the UN and other humanitarian agencies have only been able to provide aid in countries where their presence is accepted by both the local government and the members of the community where they are working. This is the closest they come to a guarantee of security. Without local acceptance and support, the workers are vulnerable and can’t continue their work. It is easy to see how, under these conditions, a change in public mood could put foreign aid workers at risk.

Some might argue that the shifting role of the UN from strictly neutral humanitarian aid, to more recent less neutral “stabilisation” tasks has put workers at greater risk. But then what of these transition countries that are unable to provide security for their own people; should the international community intervene?

Using armed forces to deliver aid seems counter-productive and has been proven to be disastrously ineffective in the past. So the question then is how do we protect the people who work so hard to help those who need it most? This is a question that needs to be more thoroughly considered before more innocent civilians are killed.

Women play a key role in our world, and in humanitarian work. When women are empowered, they work to improve their community’s standard of living and freedoms.

Humanitarian non profit organizations offer ways to help the women of our world. In particular, Plan Canada has a “Because I am a Girl” project in Colombia that helps to protect the rights of nearly 100,000 conflict-affected children in that country. Plan Canada’s goal is to raise $16 million over 5 years, and you can help by visiting their website and making a donation. Donations are matched $3 for $1, so a $20 donation actually brings $80 to the project.

If you’d prefer to be active, CARE Canada is challenging Canadians to Walk in Her Shoes. That is, to symbolically walk in the shoes of a woman in a poor community in our world, who walks an average of 8,000 steps (about 6 km) a day to simply collect water, firewood or other basic necessities of life. Enjoy getting (or staying) fit while you count your steps and help women around our world.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Celebrities are in a special position to help make a positive difference. Their fame and fortune can be put to good use when they have the heart and dedication to do humanitarian work. A shining example is Sean Penn, who was widely acclaimed as the Celebrity Humanitarian of the Year in 2010.

Just days after the earthquake Penn booked two planes with doctors and medical supplies and went to Haiti, reports PopEater.  Since then he has worked tirelessly, helping the people of Haiti. He runs the Petionville camp where an estimated 55,000 Haitians are living. As well, his team has treated 50,000 medical patients, delivered 100,000 pounds of medical supplies, and delivered 12,000 tents to homeless families across Haiti.

When Sean Penn is not in Haiti helping refugees, he can often be found in the United States lobbying on behalf of the Haitian people. He spoke in front of the Senate Foreign Relations committee and was recently raising awareness and funds for his organization. Penn plans to spend 2011 reminding people that the relief effort has only begun and still needs their help.

The referendum, as you may already know, comes on the heel of a two decade long civil war which finally ended in 2005. The referendum is about whether the southern region should remain a part of Sudan or become a new, independent country. Considering the recent civil war, and some of the humanitarian abuses that occurred during that time, it’s expected that the South will vote for separation.

If the people vote for separation, it’s uncertain what Sudan’s capital Khartoum’s reaction will be. So the satellite will watch for any unusual movements of troops and be ready to alert the UN and other forces if a humanitarian crisis is looming. As well, a map is being developed based on the pattern of burned villages, which may be an indicator of where Khartoum would start an attack.

The technology has been used before, in 2007 when Amnesty International’s “Eyes on Darfur” watched for and helped prevent further humanitarian abuses in the Darfur region of the Sudan.

If you want to get an idea of what a satellite view looks like, go to Google maps and click on satellite view. The visual map shows amazing details, which is similar to the view that will let the UN know what’s happening in the Sudan. The current Satellite Sentinel Project is a collaboration between Google, the United Nations Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT), the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, and celebrity-backed NGOs, reports Radio Free Europe.

Part of an effort by the humanitarian group Engineers Without Borders, the students experienced an eye opening time that likely taught them as much as they were teaching. The article starts with a student wondering “What did I get myself into?” as they bounced along a dirt road under the hot African sun.

One of the students’ achievements was building a water pump so the local farmers could access clean water for their crops. Before the pump was built, the farmers had to spend up to half a day getting water. Now they have the chance to spend more time farming and even making a little more money.

Making bricks and designing an optimal stove proved to be more difficult than the students originally thought. The village’s current abilities and technology affected the results, and some things will take multiple visits to accomplish.

I keep hearing from travelers to poor countries that the people there seem to be happy. This article again confirms it. During the student’s stay, the villagers partied, showing themselves to be very community-driven. It’s something that too many people in North America have lost during their struggle to improve their economic well being. It’s a feature that makes humanitarian work magnetic.

What a great experience for the students, and program for the Mali villagers.

According to a Fact Sheet by the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies the Humanitarian Charter and Minimum Standards in Disaster Response were created through the Sphere Project, an inter-agency initiative that aims to make humanitarian agencies more accountable.

The charter, based on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is made up of eighteen articles which outline the minimum standards necessary in order to protect human beings in times of adversity. According to International Law the charter articles address issues from population displacement to medical attention for the wounded and sick. Article fifteen states that in situations of public emergency, humanitarian organizations shall be granted all necessary facilities to carry out their activities.

The charter is a sign that a new strategy is in the works that will change the way UN and humanitarian agencies deal with mega-crises that continue to plague the world.

As part of her major funding appeal for the ongoing Pakistan Flood crisis, Amos insisted that lessons must be learned from the large humanitarian disasters of recent years, ranging from the 2004 Asian tsunami to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, reports Google News.

Amos argues that the ‘business as usual’ strategy used to tackle these massive emergencies are no longer sufficient in a world that is facing increasingly larger mega-crises.  In Pakistan, aid agencies are struggling to cope with the scale of events as millions of people’s homes and farmland have been destroyed by the floods in a nation that is already home to the world’s largest refugee population (mainly from Afghanistan).

Yahoo News also reports that Amos will be conducting a review of how UN agencies and aid groups react to mega-crises.  New thinking is needed, and ways found to broaden funding and increase responses to large disasters.

Meanwhile, flood waters in Pakistan are moving from North to South, creating a ‘new’ disaster every few days and putting a strain on the humanitarian community.  The International Monetary Fund announced last Wednesday it would give Pakistan a $451 million emergency loan, while the European Union is also considering new ways to help.  By Friday, the sheer size of the Pakistan crisis had forced Amos to make a new monetary appeal, substantially higher than the original $460 million request.