Technology in the time of crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic, civil unrest and recent flooding in KwaZulu-Natal has illustrated the need for data-driven insights to help various stakeholders find the necessary information to assist or be assisted in times of need.
Across KwaZulu-Natal, important information is inaccessible to the public, or is difficult to locate, retrieve and analyse during a disaster. In some cases, the data simply does not exist yet. The Crisis Map served to provide access to near real-time disaster-related information.
On 11–13 April, severe flooding and landslides caused by heavy rainfall affected southern and south-eastern South Africa, particularly the Provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape.
According to national authorities, 443 people lost their lives in KwaZulu-Natal and over 40,000 went missing. More than 40,000 people have been displaced, while nearly 4,000 houses were destroyed and more than 8,000 others were damaged, mostly across eThekwini Municipality and its surrounding areas.
A National State of Disaster was declared in response to the floods and landslides, and rescue teams were deployed to the affected areas to provide humanitarian assistance to those most affected. The International Disaster Charter 755 was activated for South Africa.
The following piece aims to share the build process of the crisis map and how Black Box and PISTA built a tool to help with data-driven insights to help stakeholder operate and lend aid in the most efficient and effective way.
Civil Unrest 2021
The 2021 South African unrest was a wave of civil unrest that occurred in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng provinces from 9 to 18 July 2021, sparked by the imprisonment of former President Jacob Zuma for contempt of court.
To assist actors such as Invest Durban, Durban Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Domino Foundation and eThekwini Municipality PISTA built a very simple map using Google Maps to track activities. We set up notifications from Google Alerts confirming the incidents on the ground and manually updated the layers on the map to assist citizens. There were ultimately thirty-five thousand views of the map over the two week period. This helped stakeholders get a visual sense of what was happening on the ground.
Following the unrest PISTA was introduced to Heal our Land to explore how a fully fleshed out data-driven and technology powered solution to disaster management and prevention would look like, this is when we approached our friends Black Box.
Black Box
Black Box is a product design and development company whose vision centres around the stewardship of African resources for African people.
Heal our Land
The Heal Our Land initiative was born from a number of organisations and individuals that have focused on developing sustainable solutions for social and spiritual challenges for more than 30 years.
In reality, many well intended aid initiatives are uncoordinated, leading to inflated overheads, unnecessary logistical expenses and duplicate relief efforts to specific areas. Heal Our Land seeks to address this challenge by coordinating suppliers (wholesalers, farmers, manufacturers, charities etc.) and logistics (supply chain) to the most needed areas sustainably and effectively.
The Partnership
The disaster in KwaZulu-Natal activated Heal Our Land’s response into existence, and was mainly started due to food riots and social unrest.
Following the civil unrest in July 202 Heal our Land, Black Box and PISTA endeavoured to build a tool to realise the mission of a citizen-facing tool that could assist in disaster management and prevention with the view of creating more resilient communities in South Africa.
UX Research
User experience research is a crucial component of the human-centred design process and an essential part of creating solutions that meet user expectations and deliver value to customers. The Heal our Land team flew down to Durban as part of their stakeholder outreach process to assess the situation post unrest. They were able to spend a full day with us to interrogate the proposed solution.
We held a user experience workshop where we identified the key stakeholders that are related to disaster management in South Africa.Post the workshop we charged into a two week sprint to immerse the product team into the challenge. The team was made of multidisciplinary and complementary skill sets which included a UI/UX Designer, Project Manager, Software Developers, an Architect and UX Researchers.
Some of the techniques used in the UX Research:
- Desktop research into disaster management in South Africa
- Quantitative surveys measuring the needs of CSOs during
- Qualitative interviews with CSOs most impacted by the civil unrest (this aligned to the some of the communities identified by the Human Rights Commission)
- Social Media Monitoring (scanning in community groups)
- Focus Group (involving local civil society organisations)
All of the above culminated into a body of knowledge and insights and analysis documents of the disaster management in South Africa.
We were able to clearly articulate the challenge as follows:
“There is no live mapping or data tracking system available to create a unified movement towards disaster prevention in South Africa.”
Further to articulating the challenge, we were able to distil the product strategy that reads thus:
We seek to create a sustainable collaborative effort between organisations and citizens to facilitate capacity development and impact assessment through data collection, analysis and reporting for proper resource allocation.
Data-driven design: the prototype
Quite simply all the qualitative and quantitative data from the UX Research lent to the product build. It is worthwhile noting that both processes happened in parallel with the research feeding directly into the product matrix and informed the design using data.
The solution
A solution that uses Whatsapp to connect active community members to those with interest in community work on a dashboard to make use of resources in the most efficient and effective way.
The value proposition:
A data-driven tool that combines low-technology with database management i.e WhatsApp feeding data into a system that’s shown on a dashboard.
The value proposition is pegged on a user-centred, scalable and sustainable offering.
Image: prototype of dashboard on desktop and data entry aspect on mobile view
KwaZulu-Natal Flood
On 11–13 April, severe flooding and landslides caused by heavy rainfall affected southern and south-eastern South Africa, particularly the Provinces of KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape.
The Crisis Map Intervention
A day after the first rains, the wake of news reports and the social media buzzing with the #KZNFloods trending Black Box and PISTA sought to use all the insights to lend a hand using technology.
Add the UX Research, the domain expertise, the repository and experience of building civic technologies we were best positioned to rapidly build a solution to one of the biggest challenges — the flow and movement of information in a time of disaster and provide a data-driven approach to help stakeholders
Building a product in 36 Hours
Let us cut to the chase. This product was built overnight by a team of incredibly talented young professionals driven by the need to realise impact in their community.
Image: progressive web application on mobile and desktop view
Building with the user in mind
Having worked with the civic society organisation network in Durban and known to be in the process of building a technology tool to assist with disaster management and prevention we were added to a WhatsApp group with many of the actors.
This would be our primary user base based on their knowledge of endeavours worked on post civil unrest. This WhatsApp group featured many of the proactive NGOs and NPOs operating in the space and our role was to help them make evidence-based decisions.
Before going live a testing environment was set up to see how the initial subset of CSOs would respond and use the tool. This gave critical insight on how people would respond to the tool.
Getting the word out
Our primary call to action was using personal social media accounts of the team in our immediate community.
The tweet hinged on the trending hashtags #KZNFloods #DurbanFloods. Some of the numbers from the highest performing tweet from @nkmthembu account posted after product launch.
Image: https://twitter.com/nkmthembu/status/1514494934123958274
Within an hour after posting the above tweet a journalist from Newzroom Afrika reached out. Four hours from the tweet an interview was scheduled and was flighted on air the very same day during the drive time hour. Link to interview can be found here.
Image: https://twitter.com/Newzroom405/status/1514640111392202752
A horde of the time post first version product build was spent trying to get as many people in eThekwini and broader KwaZulu-Natal using the tool.
We were fortunate to land a radio interview with East Coast Radio during their breakfast show where Callum Oberholzer spoke about the Crisis Map. Link to the interview can be found here.
Image: Iono FM website with live recording
The eThekwini Municipality Communications Department featured the map on their Facebook and Twitter accounts, they also published the map on the digital version of the Metro Ezasegagasini Newspaper, a government publication documenting all government affairs and issues that go on in and around KwaZulu-Natal.
Image: Snippets from Metro Ezasegagasini
Collaboration — going viral
The thing about building a civic technology solution overnight during a disaster is needing it to go viral and one of the better ways is to share, shamelessly — removing all ego and the ‘what will people say or do’ thinking.
We WhatsApped the link to the map to everyone we knew who had a community or could influence, a few wealthy folks as well, people who one would consider part of a ‘black book’. This spilled over to LinkedIn and Twitter people.
We randomly hit up the co-founder of EskomsePush on Twitter via direct message as can be seen below. He immediately saw value for his community and he posted a link to the Crisis Map on the EskomsePush app.
To give a view of how important this is, below is a view of the request from the app when load shedding is announced. Eskomsepush app peaks at about 1.2 million requests per minute.
Image: https://twitter.com/hermux/status/1515014044629012487
Some numbers — on the performance side
A combination of the media above gave us just below thirty thousand users.
- 19K Android Users vs. 7 100 iOS
- 17.7% User retention
- 26K Mobile user vs. 1 000 desktop
- 1600 users per day post initial flood period
- 26.47% Pretoria engagement rate (we learned that there was an interest on relief efforts based in Gauteng)
Some numbers — on the relief side
One of the most powerful features of the tool was to allow people to log their need or resource in two clicks. The rapid fire technique lent to the seamless use of at a time where people were wrestling with other challenges.
- There were 580 needs logged (the red pins)
- There were 169 resources shared (green pins)
- There were 42 connections made, in other words, people actively logging that they assisted someone in need
Nerve Centre
Access to near real-time information catapulted the crisis map we built to people seeking quality information on how best to deploy resources, the catapult landed us being part of a nerve centre made of multiple technical stakeholders.
The aim of the nerve centre was to consolidate all sources of information to help the South African government at local, district, provincial and national make decisions on how best to respond to the disaster.
Some members of the nerve centre included but not limited to:
- eThekwini Municipality
- COGTA — KwaZulu-Natal
- Office of the Premier — KwaZulu-Natal
- National Disaster Management Centre
- Department of Social Development
- Entsika Consulting
- KwaZulu-Natal representatives from all District Municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal
- Department of Education
- Department of Human Settlements
- Department of Health
- SITA
- Department of Planning Monitoring and Evaluation
Learnings
Build in public. We did not have the most perfect tool but we put something out into the World and got people to give feedback, in real-time.
Build with the user in mind. The simplicity of the tool allowed it to be the most relevant digital aid solution, this was possible because we focused on the critical path.
Have unwavering resolve. Sometimes building citizen-facing technologies might be impactful but be prepared for it to be a thankless exercise especially when the dialogue or mood shifts to the next thing (especially on social media)
Break things and iterate. The initial call to action button wasn’t the best but the second iteration made up for it.
Purpose. The team cared for what they were building. There was no promise of pay. We simply wanted to do good.
Clear line of sight and draw the hard line. Clarity precedes success and in this instance defining limitations early on maintained levels of focused intent and effectiveness. The team and tool could have bent and become anything.
Next Steps
Heal our Land, Black Box and PISTA understand that the crisis map was a tool for rapid learning. We are endeavouring to create a body of knowledge through intense research, capturing stories, putting feet on the ground by way of field work and learn as much as we can post the natural disaster.
Another major push for us is morphing the crisis map into a community map with an overarching mission to promote citizen care. To achieve this we are engaging multiple stakeholders in government, civil society organisations and business to co-create a meaningful and impactful offering.
Footnote:
This work is being done pro-bono, so we if you would like to contribute to it, please contact us.
