Filed under: Uncategorized
When I was a journalist, many years ago now, it never really occurred to me that we spent much more time on “bad news” than on “good news”. In fact, sometimes people caricatured the “good news” attempts as being Pollyanna-ish; they thought “good” news was not really news.
But these days, as I spend so much time on the web, I really appreciate the “good news” sites. It provides a healthy balance to the daily diet of so much “bad news” in the media – what my friend Jim Lord calls “deficit thinking”, and what he replaces with “appreciative thinking”.
One example is South Africa: The Good News. It’s a website that focuses on positive developments in South Africa. Here’s how they describe themselves and their work:
We are well aware of the challenges that we face and the extent of these challenges. We address these challenges full on, but we choose to concentrate on the solution, rather than the problem
Bad news sells. That is a global reality and it is no different in South Africa. Arguably, the news mass media tend to focus on the bad news and largely ignore the positive developments in this county, creating an “information imbalance”. This imbalance fuels the perception that bad news is predominant in South Africa, whereas the reality is that we have many reasons to be exceptionally proud of our country’s recent past and optimistic about our future.
And here’s one example of that good news in action, from Nov. 11, 2008:
The City of Johannesburg was among the world’s cities who were recognised for their efforts in tackling pressing environmental concerns in the 2008 World’s Most Liveable Communities Awards. The awards are endorsed by the United Nations Environment Programme and are hosted annually by LivCom. The UK-based organisation aims to promote the environmental management and community liveability of the world’s cities. The 2008 awards took place in Dongguan, China on Monday.
Johannesburg was the only South African and African city to feature among this year’s winners taking home a total of five awards. Among these awards was the Criteria Award for Planning for the Future. This is given to the city that best demonstrates the use of sensitive and creative planning techniques for the creation of a sustainable, liveable community.
Johannesburg came third overall in the Whole City Awards for the World’s Most Liveable Community with an average daytime population greater than 1 million. South Africa scored just below the Municipality of York, Canada and Jiang Yin, China in this category.
Read the rest of the story here. There are lots of “good news” stories in Africa. You can also find many such stories on Hopebuilding Wiki.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: aid, disasters, humanitarian agencies, information
When disaster strikes, people need information as much as they do food, shelter, and medical attention, says a new report from the BBC World Service Trust, the BBC’s international charity. And in the area of providing information, the humanitarian community’s track record could be improved, says the October 2008 report, entitled The Unmet Need for Information in Humanitarian Responses.
Effective information and communication exchange with affected populations are among the least understood and most complex challenges facing the humanitarian sector in the 21st century. Recent evaluations of disasters – including those of the 2004 Asian tsunami and the 2005 Pakistan earthquake – have identified the failure to consider the value of information and communications with affected populations as a critical and unmet need.
Effective communication can also help agencies be more effective, the report argues:
There is also growing evidence to show that effective communications strategies for beneficiaries … hold huge potential for aid organisations themselves. This is not just because they can save lives but because they enable better accountability, more effective management of expectations and ultimately improved humanitarian response.
One example of this beneficial effect is illustrated in the following story told in the report:
In Galle, Sri Lanka, staff from the Office for the Coordination of Humantarian Affairs (OCHA) noted that there was much confusion among the local populations about their rights and entitlements concerning housing, and little capacity within the government to provide the information required.
The OCHA team worked with several different agencies and local officials to design a campaign including radio spots, posters, a leaflet explaining housing rights and crucially a week long open house day at the offices of the local government department in charge of housing, during which beneficiaries could ask questions, register for assistance and talk to government officials and aid agencies on how to access assistance.
The campaign was a huge success, with both local government officials and populations responding enthusiastically and benefiting from better understanding of each other’s roles and needs.
The Humanitarian Practice Network of the Overseas Development Institute, which is holding a discussion on the report December 4, 2008, also included a positive example in its announcement.
When Cyclone Nargis hit Burma in May of this year, it was weeks before a valiant local effort was reinforced by a massive international response. But one lifesaving commodity was able to get through from the outset: information. Dedicated radio broadcasts helped many to survive in those first critical weeks, telling them how to purify water, treat minor ailments, identify serious medical problems, and build basic shelters.
After reviewing evidence about how affected populations see the need for information and what information they need, and then exploring why such demands are rarely met “and what structures, systems and skills are missing”, the report concludes with detailed recommendations, short-term and long-term. Key recommendations are for agencies to “mainstream communications with affected populations” and to “make someone responsible for understanding and responding to the information and communication needs of affected populations”.
It is so heartening to see how Africans approach technology innovation. They are focused, not just on finding solutions to basic problems such as providing lighting, but on making it possible for Africans themselves to implement those ideas.
Lebone Solutions, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is working to bring light to poor and remote African communities through a microbial fuel cell that uses waste and dirt to make small amounts of energy, Cate Doty reports in the International Herald Tribune Nov. 11, 2008.
“You can just literally make energy from dirt,” said Aviva Presser, a graduate student at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “And there’s a lot of dirt in Africa.”
Presser is one of the founders of Lebone Solutions, which is being financed by a $200,000 World Bank grant and private investments. Lebone’s idea is a microbial fuel cell, a battery that makes a small amount of energy out of materials like manure, graphite cloth and soil, which are common to African households.
As waste decomposes, it produces electrons that stick to an electrode, like a piece of graphite, that then creates enough of a charge to power a small lamp or cellphone.
“It can be made by people with minimal training,” Presser said. “It doesn’t take a massive investment.”
Presser founded Lebone, which means “light stick” in Sotho language, with fellow Harvard classmate Hugo Van Vuuren. Both grew up in Africa, and their class project involved looking at sustainable lighting technologies for the continent. Last summer, they piloted the technology in a small Tanzanian village, Leguruki, where six families used the batteries for three hours a night. Over the next two years, in Namibia, they will see if more easily available materials, like chicken wire, will create electricity.
Lebone hopes that as the technology becomes more refined, each household will be able to build a battery at a one-time cost of no more than $15.
Eventually, Lebone wants to create a new business model for energy distribution in Africa, helping to funnel fuel cells and other technologies tested in Africa to distributors there, rather than reducing developed technologies to meet African needs.
Filed under: governance, innovation | Tags: aid, humanitarian agencies, information technology
I was fascinated to learn today about a non-profit IT consortium called NetHope that is facilitating collaboration among humanitarian agencies when tsunamis and earthquakes wipe out existing communication systems. Private business has grown dramatically over the past two decades because it invested in technology infrastructure, says NetHope CEO Bill Brindley. Now NetHope is bringing those same advanced information technology approaches to emergency relief, human development and conservation programs in more than 180 countries.
“Our member agencies will always be resource-constrained by comparison, so we need to find new ways to close the gap and ensure that humanitarian workers and the people they serve have access to appropriate technologies for the often extreme and challenging conditions in the developing world,” Brindley says. Given that NetHope’s 25 member groups now represent “more than $33 billion in program spending on humanitarian and conservation initiatives and employ more than 300,000 people across the developing world”, new technologies can dramatically improve the overall impact of the humanitarian sector’s work.
A story entitled NetHope bringing technology to humanitarian efforts, by Julie Bick, in the International Herald Tribune Nov. 11, 2008, shows NetHope’s impact after the 2004 tsunami:
Rui Lopes’s first impression of Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after the 2004 tsunami was chaos. Bone-jarringly rough roads led to a hastily assembled field office, where Lopes, the senior technical director of Save the Children, learned that the communications infrastructure, along with just about everything else, had been destroyed. Aside from a few satellite phones and even fewer working mobile phones, the area was isolated as relief workers scrambled to assess the security situation and address the vast humanitarian needs.
On the ground, Lopes unpacked a contraption made of circuits, chips and wires, pointed it at the sky and rolled out a solar mat, which turns sunlight into energy, to power it up. Aid workers plugged their laptops into the device, which offered the first stable Internet connection since the disaster had hit a week earlier.Assessment reports and supply requests streamed out. Photographs went to news outlets to help spread awareness of the situation. Plans to coordinate agencies came in from abroad.
A third generation model of this Network Relief Kit was used by relief workers in Bangladesh after cyclone Sidr killed and displaced thousands of people last November. The workers called it “hope in a box or an angel on the broadband airwaves”, says Paula Musich in an article entitled NetHope Brings Fast Links to Disaster Relief that appeared Dec. 21, 2007 in the specialized IT publication eweek.com.
Thanks to refinements in the third generation of the NRK, relief workers were able to quickly establish voice and data communications, despite power being out to the Ganges Delta area for days after the typhoon hit….The NRK, which can fit in a backpack, includes a solar power kit that allows it to operate without having access to a vehicle battery. It weighs about four pounds and connects satellite phones as well as laptops to a satellite network that covers the globe.
NetHope, which was co-founded in 2001 by Dipak Basu, Cisco’s first fellow, and Ed Granger-Happ, CIO of Save the Children, has just wrapped up its biannual member summit in Geneva with a lot of good news including funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and continuing support from Microsoft.
“We started NetHope eight years ago with the idea that a collaborative approach to developing and delivering technology solutions to common problems throughout the NGO sector would make the most sense for our member agencies and for the corporate and foundation partners whose support of our work has been so critical,” says Granger-Happ. “The new support from Rockefeller Foundation and the increased support from Microsoft represent an important endorsement of the NetHope approach, including the premise that technology can be a core lever for dramatically improving the overall impact of the humanitarian sector’s work.”
NetHope’s unique business model allows member NGO IT professionals to share their technology resources and expertise in order to create the scale needed to reach and positively impact the more than 3 billion underserved people and communities in the most remote areas of the world.
The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an initiative by Germany, Spain and Denmark, will be launched in Bonn in January after 51 countries agreed to its statute in Madrid Oct. 23-24, reports EurActiv.com November 3. IRENA’s mandate encompasses all forms of renewable energy, including bio-energy, solar power and wind energy. It seeks to combat such obstacles to tapping clean energies as lack of public awareness and proper information, market distortions in favour of traditional energy sources, and ineffective political frameworks.
The German government, which has taken the lead in the preparatory phase, says a “large majority” of the numerous countries that have set ambitious targets to give renewable energies a more prominent place in their national energy consumption “would like detailed consultation and advice on this”. Providing information on best practices and promoting technology transfer will be at the core of IRENA’s aim to give all countries access to reliable information on the latest expertise and effective financing options.
IRENA, intended as the first truly international organisation offering support and advice to both industrialised and developing countries, will work closely with other related international organisations and initiatives, only offering its services at the request of member states, says EurActiv.com.
The EU has adopted a binding target to source 20% of its energy needs from renewables by 2020 in response to the double challenge of global warming and energy security. In January 2008, the Commission proposed differential targets to each member state depending on their per capita gross domestic product.
“Investing in sanitation and hygiene is not only about saving human lives and dignity; it is the foundation for investing in human development, especially in poor urban and peri-urban areas,” explains the foreword to a very useful new publication on sanitation. “However, one of the main bottlenecks encountered the world over, is the limited knowledge and awareness about more appropriate and sustainable systems and technologies that keep project costs affordable and acceptable.”
Until now, such information has been scattered throughout hundreds of books and journals. The “Compendium of Sanitation Systems and Technologies” is a new guidebook produced by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag) and the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC). It is being launched officially this week at the World Toilet Summit and Expo in Macao.
Bringing together and organizing this information in one document makes it easier for everyone – engineers, planners, development agencies, NGOs and donors –to plan effectively for sanitation solutions. By pulling all the information together in one volume, the Compendium aims to promote a systems approach so that sanitation devices and technologies are considered as parts of an entire system.
Although the book is primarily addressed to engineers and planners dealing with infrastructure delivery, the technology sheets also allow non-experts to understand the main advantages and limitations of different technologies and the appropriateness of different system configurations.
In 2005, Sandec and the WSSCC published Provisional Guidelines for Household-centred Environmental Sanitation (HCES), a new planning approach for implementing the Bellagio Principles on Sustainable Sanitation in Urban Environmental Sanitation. The HCES approach emphasizes the participation of all stakeholders – beginning at the household/neighbourhood – in planning and implementing sanitation systems. “It is our hope that this Compendium will allow all stakeholders to be involved in selecting improved sanitation technologies and to help promote people-centred solutions to real sanitation problems.”
A hard copy of the Compendium can be ordered by writing to info@sandec.ch.
