Humanitarian Data: Can It Make A Real Difference?
The world today is living in an era of unprecedented humanitarian need, making it as opportune a time as ever for world leaders to re-examine the global humanitarian system and find better ways of working together.
It was for this reason that the World Humanitarian Summit (WHS) was held in Istanbul, Turkey in May 2016. The two-day conference brought together over 9000 delegates from 173 Member States representing the UN, the private sector and civil society to discuss the pressing humanitarian challenges arising from the effects of climate change, inequality, conflict and poverty.
A 24 hour hackathon in Istanbul dubbed ‘Hack4Humanity’ focused on the creation and use of unique solutions that leverage innovation, technology and multidisciplinary problem solving to respond to the refugee crisis. The emerging solutions from the hackathon are to be later extended to a worldwide hacking community to be further developed.
In Nairobi, Hacks/Hackers — Africa partnered with United Nations OCHA’s Humanitarian Data Exchange to explore how #OpenData and #CivicTech are being used to tackle some of Africa’s largest challenges, from #ebola to #refugees. The local meetup brought together digital pioneers who are using data and simple tech tools to transform lives across the continent, and come learn about ways for you to get involved in world-changing projects.
To kick off, Queen Makalele, radio journalist from Radio Tamazuj, Sudan spoke about the challenges faced by displaced communities from South Sudan living in Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp. She highlighted the adverse effects of the post-2013 conflict particularly on the lives of women and children (e.g. trauma, lack of sleep, out of school children) and the role played by the radio station in highlighting community needs.
Ida Jeng from Refunite shared on the use of real-time data to reconnect separated refugee families. In technology constrained environments like refugee camps in the East African region, their use of accessible tech like Interactive Voice Response (IVR) to collect and share information stood out.
Mulki Nuh, from Kenya Red Cross (KRC) shared about her organisation’s use of social media in emergency response (floods, fires, road safety). She discussed the use of Twitter and Facebook to provide life saving information, gather information for response activities and community engagement. KRC’s use and training of digital volunteers has revolutionised their response capabilities and activities.
mFieldwork’s Moses Munene used a live demo to show how their customised Open Data Kit mobile service facilitates the transition from paper based systems to digital data collection. The system aims at being highly usable especially for organisations without skilled personnel to set up and maintain such system/tools.
To close the evening, the Humanitarian Data Exchange presented a short film on humanitarian data ‘Making the Invisible Visible’. Focusing on promoting data use and ‘DIYData’, Moses Sitati demoed the new ‘Map Explorer’ feature on the HDX website that allows users to visualize several datasets at once using the Lake Chad Basin in West Africa as as example.
This will not be the last event of this kind as we continue working towards building and empowering a community of citizen data users in East Africa. The new connections made with like-minded professionals will build on collaboration within the Hacks Hackers Africa community for impact in the regional development and humanitarian sector.
The worlds of hackers and journalists are coming together, as reporting goes digital and Internet companies become media empires.
Journalists call themselves “hacks,” someone who can churn out words in any situation. Hackers use the digital equivalent of duct tape to whip out code.
Hacker-journalists try and bridge the two worlds. Hacks/Hackers Africa aims to bring all these people together — those who are working to help people make sense of our world. It’s for hackers exploring technologies to filter and visualize information, and for journalists who use technology to find and tell stories. In the age of information overload and collapse of traditional business models for legacy media, their work has become even more crucial.
Code for Africa, the continent’s largest #OpenData and civic technology initiative, recognises this and is spearheading the establishment of a network of HacksHackers chapters across Africa to help bring together pioneers for collaborative projects and new ventures.
