Mar 25, 2020
Covid-19: thank your lucky stars you have an address
Peter Hulm is an editor of Global Geneva website and magazine.
At first it sounded ludicrous in the Internet and email era. At a United Nations meeting on cities last October in Geneva, one of the first speakers promoted the importance of the postal service.
Lovisa Selander of the Swiss-based Universal Postal Union (UPU) told some 50 national, UN and civil society experts reported that the postal service was transforming itself into a social services provider, checking on citizens’ health, offering recycle services, and combating social isolation.
Even giving people a postal address is a social service, she said. This is often a prerequisite to obtaining many welfare and governmental services. It can also act through postal networks as a financial service for the “unbanked”, the billions of people who could not hope to get a bank account.
Since the national postal service is also a major employer and user of motor vehicles in its deliveries, the postal service can also have a major impact on air pollution and the condition of the places where it is active, the UPU’s Sustainable Development Expert pointed out.
Today, as a result of the covid-19 crisis, the Berne-HQ’d UPU has rung a new alarm bell, particularly for poorer countries, with slums and shanty towns with hardly any homes or passages identified.
UPU’s Addressing and Postcode Expert Patricia Vivas says in a statement issued on 25 March: “In Europe, mapping outbreak cases of COVID-19 and deployment of emergency services have been handled in a matter of hours in countries like Italy or Spain. A very different scenario is to be expected in less economically developed countries where the COVID-19 situation is becoming increasingly intense; however, addressing networks and mapping tools have yet to be fully implemented in many of these countries.”
With addresses in a database, authorities and health experts can locate people, determine how many people are ill, and where the vulnerable old people are, UPU points out. Emergency action is also time-sensitive: “Identification of a location and the best route to access it are crucial for rapid responses.”
UPU told the world about its importance six months ago, and I reported on the speech. Today we can only admit, many governments weren’t listening.
Here’s my original report from 1 October 2019 (some 4000 words): Getting smarter about cities.
