The second staging of the ICT Africa Summit will be held at the CSIR Conference Centre in Pretoria, South Africa on October 24-26.

Project Manager Rocky Kabeya says the focus will be on regional integration in ICT. He says “There has to be one platform on the continent that is strongly committed to connecting the Public and Private sectors to synchronize policy and regulatory frameworks with business opportunities sort after by the private sector and the ICT Africa Summit is the best place for that.”

The summit, which will be sponsored by MTN, Kaspersky, IBM, Meraka, CSIR and the Africa e-programme, is expected to host more ICT delegates than it did last year.

The 2010 staging of the submit in Cape Town attracted 200 delegates from 12 countries. The expected growth in delegates from across the continent will establish the submit as the Africa’s leading ICT expo.

Given the growing significance of ICTs to African economies, this submit is highly likely to become a mainstay. The ICT sector accounts for nearly five percent of Kenya’s GDP, and a growing portion of Ghana’s and Tanzania’s. Over the last decade, some African governments have shown firm political will to tackle the digital divide.

To learn more about the ICT Africa Summit 2011, please go here.

Collecting baseline data in developing countries can be expensive and require many costs.  Also, many have called into question the reliability of the data.  To streamline the data collection process, the World Bank and South Sudan are experimenting with a new alternative—data collection by mobile phones, which World Bank director of Economic Policy Marcelo Giugale recently claimed is the “fast track” to actually listening to the poor, and subsequently meeting their needs.

To conduct South Sudan’s national survey for 2011, the year of their independence, World Bank researcher Gabriel Demombynes worked with the Southern Sudan Centre for Census, Statistics and Evaluation and utilized mobile phones as a means to collect the data (a photo essay explaining the survey design can be seen here).  In the Southern Sudan Experimental Phone Survey (SSEPS), 100 households in each of the capital cities in South Sudan’s ten states were identified, making for a total sample size of 1000 households.  Each household received a free mobile phone.  Researchers gave half of the households traditional Nokia phones and the other half solar-powered phones.  For four months, the researchers contacted the households by phone and conducted the same survey, while adding a few additional questions each month.  Those who answered the phone and participated in the survey were compensated with additional phone time each month; half received five Sudanese pounds of phone credit while the other half received ten pounds.

This innovative survey design allowed researchers to accomplish two purposes: document the current state of South Sudan and experiment with many methods of mobile phone survey data collection.  The results of the survey, and of the data collection experiment, will be available as a World Bank “Poverty Assessment” document in the coming months.  For now, however, a quick summary of the survey data that has been processed thus far can be downloaded as a “Poverty Profile” of South Sudan.  The results demonstrate stark differences between North and South Sudan.

In addition to collecting important data regarding the state of poverty in South Sudan, the study also provides interesting insights about the efficiency and potential of mobile data collection.  Dr. Demombynes describes a few insights from preliminary analysis of the data (though these results may be different once all of the data is analyzed in the coming months):

• There was approximately a 50% response rate for the entire four months among all participants.
• Households who had a mobile phone before the survey were much more likely to respond each month to the survey.
  • This indicates that other respondents had trouble knowing how to work the phone, lacked service coverage, or were less likely to remember to answer and use the phone without prior exposure.
  • More efforts to train respondents on using the mobile phone are necessary and could potentially improve response rates significantly.
• There was no difference in response rates between those who were compensated with five pounds and those who were given ten.
  • There was no control group who received no compensation, so it is difficult to say what impact compensation of any form has on response rates.
• There was no significant difference in response rates between those who received a Nokia phone and those who received a solar-powered phone.
  • The solar-powered phones perhaps had to be in the sun for too long and could potentially be stolen.  Also, although electricity is inconsistent, generators are common and local people know where to go to recharge their phones at affordable prices.

The potential for mobile phones as a means of data collection appears to be valid, as demonstrated by this experiment.  However, additional research should be conducted such as a cost-benefit analysis of mobile collection versus traditional survey methods.  If successful, then more data can be collected about the developing world, informing policy and leading to projects that better meet the actual needs of the poor as opposed to their perceived needs.

Integra is pleased welcome Magda Van Dusen as our Director of Operations!

Magdalena Van Dusen has over eight years of experience working in a range of financial, project management, and administration fields, including federal grant and contract administration, project accounting and subgrants management.   Previously, a Senior Accountant at RAFFA, P.C., Magdalena provided a wide range of accounting services for not-for-profit clients, including financial reporting and month-end closing process. While an Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, Magdalena oversaw the firm’s support to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) monitoring efforts through comprehensive business compliance reviews of large facility projects. Previously, as a Financial Analyst at a development organization, Magdalena provided full service accounting and financial oversight for a portfolio of complex multi-million dollar international development projects sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Magdalena’s additional experience includes internal audit engagements, budget development and analysis, financial report preparation, training, and administrative systems design.

Magdalena will oversees HR, compliance and accounting functions for the firm.

It was fourteen years ago that a group of humanitarian NGOs and the Red Cross/Red Crescent movement came together and created the Sphere Project which defined minimum standards for disaster response. The cornerstone of the Sphere Handbook was the Humanitarian Charter which describes the core principles that govern humanitarian action. On top of this there are minimum standards and indicators defined that currently are utilized as a reference all disaster response.

Some of the Sphere core standard do address information sharing, like the following excerpt show:

---

Core Standard 1 – People Centered Humanitarian Response

People have a right to accurate and updated information about actions taken on their behalf. Information can reduce anxiety and is an essential foundation of community responsibility and ownership. At a minimum, agencies should provide a description of the agency’s mandate and project(s), the population’s entitlements and rights, and when and where to access assistance (see HAP’s ‘sharing information’ benchmark). Common ways of sharing information include noticeboards, public meetings, schools, newspapers and radio broadcasts. The information should demonstrate considered understanding of people’s situations and be conveyed in local language(s), using a variety of adapted media so that it is accessible to all those concerned. For example, use spoken communications or pictures for children and adults who cannot read, use uncomplicated language (i.e. understandable to local 12-year-olds) and employ a large typeface when printing information for people with visual impairments. Manage meetings so that older people or those with hearing difficulties can hear.

Core Standard 2 – Coordination and Collaboration

• Be informed of the responsibilities, objectives and coordination role of the  state and other coordination groups where present.
• Provide coordination groups with information about the agency’s mandate,  objectives and programme.
• Share assessment information with the relevant coordination groups in a  timely manner and in a format that can be readily used by other humanitarian agencies
• Use programme information from other humanitarian agencies to inform  analysis, selection of geographical area and response plans.
• Regularly update coordination groups on progress, reporting any major delays, agency shortages or spare capacity.

Efficient data-sharing will be enhanced if the information is easy to use (clear, relevant, brief) and follows global humanitarian protocols which are technically compatible with other agencies’ data. The exact frequency of data-sharing is agency- and context-specific but should be prompt to remain relevant. Sensitive information should remain confidential

Core Standard 3 – Assessment

Pre-disaster information: A collaborative pooling of existing information is invaluable for initial and rapid assessments. A considerable amount of information is almost always available about the context (e.g. political, social, economic, security, conflict and natural environment) and the people (such as their sex, age, health, culture, spirituality and education). Sources of this information include the relevant state ministries (e.g. health and census data), academic or research institutions, community-based organisations and local and international humanitarian agencies present before the disaster. Disaster preparedness and early warning initiatives, new developments in shared web-based mapping, crowd-sourcing and mobile phone platforms (such as Ushahidi) have also generated databases of relevant information.

Initial assessments, typically carried out in the first hours following a disaster, may be based almost entirely on second-hand information and pre-existing data. They are essential to inform immediate relief needs and should be carried out and shared immediately.

Data disaggregation: Detailed disaggregation is rarely possible initially but is of critical importance to identify the different needs and rights of children and adults of all ages. At the earliest opportunity, further disaggregate by sex and age for children 0–5 male/female, 6–12 male/female and 13–17 male/female, and then in 10-year age brackets, e.g. 50–59, male/female; 60–69, male/female; 70–79, male/female; 80+, male/female.

Sharing assessments: Assessment reports provide invaluable information to other humanitarian agencies, create baseline data and increase the transparency of response decisions. Regardless of variations in individual agency design, assessment reports should be clear and concise, enable users to identify priorities for action and describe their methodology to demonstrate the reliability of data and enable a comparative analysis if required.

---

One of the key issues that is hindering effective humanitarian coordination is that information is not being shared effectively between the various response organizations. Many of them don’t see value in sharing information and often feel that sharing information with others will hurt their own ability to gather funds and drive their own programs forward.

What we need is a Humanitarian Information Charter that describes the core principles that govern humanitarian information sharing and management. These should define why organizations should share and as organizations endorse this charter they commit to sharing information with each other.

It is however not enough to tell organizations to share. Information needs to be shared in such a manner that it can also be compared to other information and analyzed for trends. However during almost every recent emergency data being shared has not been compatible with data coming from other organizations. Lot of effort has been needed to convert the data into compatible formats and often the analysis is delayed so long that the data becomes irrelevant by the time it becomes available. This in return leads to organizations not seeing any value in sharing information.

It is amazing that we have had organizations like UNGIWG active for over 10 years and we have had the global clusters for over 5 years now and the IASC Task Force on Information Management active for over two years now  and yet none of these have managed to agree upon standards for representing the information required to effectively coordinate disasters.

Those of us sitting in some of these bodies and having representatives in them must take the blame for not putting focus on the right things in our efforts there. If we want information sharing then we must ensure information interoperability. We ensure information interoperability by defining the data standards for how to share each type of information.

We have 20-30 types of spreadsheets and databases for each dataset that we want to capture. Now that we have finally agreed upon what the common and fundamental datasets are, then we must agree upon the format for sharing them. Once we have defined that standard, then we must actually agree to use it and nothing else.

We must then go through each cluster and ensure we define the core standards for each dataset that needs to be captured and shared to ensure effective coordination in the cluster.

Once we have the standards defined, we can actually start sharing templates and databases for collecting this data. Then we can even move forward and start sharing data capture applications and analysis modules. Then we can actually start comparing data from different organizations.

It is important for all of us to stop arguing about politics for a while and start addressing this core issue. We must understand that no data standard will be perfect and we must move towards minimum data standards and not perfect data standards.

I hereby challenge all the global cluster members as well as all the workgroup and task force members to give themselves 6 months to agree upon these standards. What we have at the end of six months will what we will use as the version 1 of the Humanitarian Information Standards. Aim for simplicity and interoperability instead of perfection and silos of data.

I am ready to work on a Humanitarian Information Charter and put together the minimum standards for humanitarian information sharing – are you?