GBi’s Senior ICT Advisor, Darrell Owen, spoke at the 2011 Aid and Development Forum yesterday, laying out USAID’s ICT4D strategy and how it supports the work of humanitarian and disaster relief workers.
The strategy, as Owen explained, is to address both the access to, and the application of, ICTs in development. The effort to provide access includes creating an enabling and facilitating environment, finding and utilizing new low cost, low power technologies, and supporting carrier build out in rural areas.  The second part of the strategy is to leverage the use of ICTs in USAID’s development work. In particular USAID, through the GBi, is looking into the development of cloud related services,  the identification and sharing of scalable and replicable applications, and the possible development of a “catalogue” of sorts of these applications. USAID realizes, Owen pointed out, that almost all of the ICT solution based projects are one-off solutions. “We need to stop reinventing the wheel, and start scaling these up,” he argued.

This strategy has tremendous application to the humanitarian and disaster relief industry, he pointed out. Small, portable low cost solutions suitable for rural areas also work in disaster response. Many of these solutions are capable for operating off the power grid, as well, making them useful in relief operations. GBi’s application focus serves the relief industry by identifying useful,

suitable solutions, including those designed for disaster response and preparedness. Research is underway exploring complimentary, development related cloud services and their application in the field. Identifying and making available disaster response specific tools ahead of time, would make response that much quicker.

Owen, who was accompanied by Joe Simmons of NetHope and Evelyn Cherow of Global Partners United, spoke on a panel entitled ICT for Disaster Preparedness & Development: the State of the Art. The panel was moderated by David Hartshorn, Secretary General of the Global VSAT Forum, a GBi partner.