Tech breakthroughs must reach the world’s most vulnerable
Tae Yoo, Senior Vice-President, Corporate Affairs, Cisco
Alan Donald, Director, Technology for Development, Mercy Corps
This article is part of the Sustainable Development Impact Summit
Today, more than 65 million people worldwide have been forced to flee their homes and a record 141 million are in need of humanitarian assistance.
The causes vary from violent conflict and political upheaval to extreme weather patterns, but the human toll is often the same: families uprooted, children unable to attend school and people struggling to survive without shelter, food or clean water.
These immense challenges threaten decades of development progress — and it is ironic that we are facing them during the Fourth Industrial Revolution — a time when breakthrough technologies are developing rapidly and transforming the way we live, work and interact.
Technology plays a critical role in helping humanitarian and development organizations tackle the urgent global problems we face. But this sector has largely been excluded from the technology transformation underway in other fields. Many of the technology solutions that NGOs need already exist, but they are often inaccessible because of business models and costs.
Consider this: technologists have developed solutions that can verify and authenticate your identity simply by reading your thumbprint, but many humanitarian workers still have to collect personal information in writing and enter it into spreadsheets. This manual process takes considerable time, is prone to human error and does not take full advantage of the latest data-security technologies and protection standards.
Other challenges facing humanitarian agencies and the communities with whom they work include:
- A lack of tools to mine data for insights that inform decision-making and ultimately help more people.
- How to protect sensitive data and personal information.
- The efficient and accurate identification of beneficiaries, assignment of goods and services, tracking of distributions and monitoring of the impact of aid programmes.
- The delivery of accurate and timely information about services and other resources to displaced people on the move or settling into new communities.
- Limitations to experimenting with emerging technologies in the locations where they operate, often because of a lack of funding.
As Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, has written, the response to the Fourth Industrial Revolution “must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders, from the public and private sectors to academia and society.”
If we applied the technological innovations of the private sector to the humanitarian and development community, the results could be transformative for millions of the world’s most vulnerable people.
This work is already underway. In late 2015, for example, Cisco brought its advanced Meraki wi-fi networks and engineering manpower to refugee sites in Europe. These networks have connected more than 600,000 unique devices, enabling refugees to reach more than 2 million friends and family members. The cloud security software associated with these networks blocks an average of 2,000 cyber threats per day, guaranteeing secure connections for users.
But we must do more. Digitization and other technological breakthroughs powering the Fourth Industrial Revolution are creating a landscape where:
- Everything is becoming connected.
- Everything is becoming software-based.
- Everything generates data.
- Everything can be automated.
- Everything must be secured.
How can we ensure that the humanitarian and development sector not only adapts to this environment, but also capitalizes on it?
Partnering for lasting impact
Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins has said that in today’s economy, every business must become a technology company. It is also true that every non-profit and NGO must become a technology-based organization if they are to achieve the scale needed to meet today’s vast humanitarian needs and development challenges. The private sector can help them get there.
To advance that effort, Cisco and the global organization Mercy Corps are embarking on an ambitious five-year, multi-million dollar partnership that will enable Mercy Corps to exploit a set of digital solutions to deliver assistance faster, better and to more people. Mercy Corps already instills a technological mindset into all of its global programmes and is building an in-house team devoted to maximizing the impact of technology in the humanitarian relief and development sector. Working together, we hope to capitalize on digital technologies for Mercy Corps’ development and humanitarian response programmes, further transforming the way the organization works.
Through a mix of cash, products and technological expertise, we aim to fill critical gaps in delivering humanitarian aid. These include integrating data gathering systems, facilitating better data analytics for decision-making and experimenting with promising new technologies in the environments where they would be used.
For example, robust data analytics could help Mercy Corps predict how many families will arrive at an aid distribution point and what supplies they will need, so they are better prepared to accommodate them.
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A network that is more open and programmable could support a hyperlocal app that allows people at the neighborhood level to share emergency warnings, take collective action, find services and vital information, and access employment and education opportunities.
Field workers at a refugee intake site could test a biometric registration solution, ensuring vital identification information is captured accurately and stored in real time, so that humanitarian responders can better deliver services, adapt quickly as needs evolve and monitor the impact of programmes.
Meeting the world’s toughest challenges
Beyond enriching Mercy Corps’ own capacity, our partnership has the potential to benefit the broader humanitarian community by sharing tools, learnings and best practices across the sector and serving as a model for what a long-term, technology-forward NGO-private partnership can achieve.
Many companies already make cash contributions and match employee gifts to support humanitarian initiatives. According to the Global Humanitarian Assistance Report, companies and corporations gave an estimated $388 million to humanitarian organizations in 2015 — about 5.5% of the $6 billion given by private donors overall.
This kind of support provides valuable operating revenue. We can go a step further, sharing our core competencies to help humanitarian organizations harness the most advanced breakthroughs of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. We can better meet the world’s most urgent needs and toughest challenges today and build a brighter future for everyone.
Originally published at www.weforum.org.
