Humanitarian Information Centers

Photo Credit: UN WFP

Following actual natural disasters, humanitarian crises often escalate in gravity due to a lack of communication and connectivity between stakeholders that are on the ground. In an effort to eliminate these problems, the government of Luxembourg, in collaboration with the ICT Humanitarian Emergency Platform at the UN World Food Program (WFP), recently designed and created EPIC: Emergency Preparation Integration Centre.

The purpose of EPIC is to provide voice and data communications, via rugged mobile phones and digital radios with Internet-based phone service and GPS capabilities, to disaster zones within 14-20 hours of occurrence. The communication platform allows international agencies to communicate with each other, consolidating efforts and increasing response efficiency. Additionally, EPIC allows on-the-ground response teams to maintain communications with their agencies’ home bases, allowing for the transfer of swift and accurate news feeds in order to stimulate donor response as well.

Photo Credit: emergency.lu

The EPIC system is all contained in a single toolkit, stored at the UN’s five response posts, located around the globe in strategic locations. When a disaster hits, the toolkits are quickly flown to the scene, reestablishing communications as quickly as possible to help coordinate an organized response effort. The entire toolkit has yet to be used, but will be pilot tested in a mock trial in Cape Verde this July, according to WFP ICT regional director of Latin America Alf Ellefsen. If the trial run goes smoothly, the toolkits will be fully operational by September or October of this year.

I had the opportunity to interview Mr. Ellefsen at the WFP about the program following his presentation at the Aid & International Development Forum 2011 last week. He explained that this effort “fulfills our mandate from the UN as the lead of the Emergency Telecommunications Sector to provide telecommunications services during humanitarian crises.” As seen in Haiti and Pakistan, recently, the lack of collaboration between responders created new problems and slowed some efforts. The EPIC system would allow responders, such as the WFP, to collectively work with other public, private, and non-governmental organizations to efficiently distribute food to victims, locate resources, and communicate crucial messages.

Though initially a project by the government of Luxembourg, EPIC now includes deployment and funding partners at the UN WFP and Ericsson. The potential of EPIC is large; if functional, it could drastically reduce the systemic problems that result in the months following natural disasters, and save thousands of dollars in relief efforts that end up being duplicated.

This post originally appeared in @gislio ‘s blog on Thursday, February 24, 2011

Ten years ago, the humanitarian community came up with the concept of Humanitarian Information Centers (HIC) as a common information management service provider during conflict or natural disasters. The concept became widely used, although not always called HICs in the period 2002-2006. Following the Humanitarian Reform (HR) in 2005 the concept lost traction and was replaced by the Operational Guidance Note on Responsibilities of Sector Leads and OCHA in Information Management (OGN). In the OGN instead of a common service model, the opposite decentralized model was emphasized with information management (IM) responsibilities lying within each cluster and having OCHA handle inter-cluster IM.

Both these models had their drawbacks. The HICs often became bottlenecks and tended to focus on inter-cluster information management products, while in the OGN model inter-cluster information was lacking support and the capacity of individual clusters to provide high quality IM services varied greatly from one cluster to the other.

Improvements in connectivity and the rise of volunteer groups such as CrisisMappers (CM), Open Street Maps (OSM) and others provide an opportunity for the humanitarian community to re-think the current approach to crisis information management. It is important in this aspect to look at new models for doing this critical work with an open mind and not to keep things as they are just for formalities sake. We need to look at what has worked and what has not worked and take the best of both approaches and identify ways to avoid the things that haven’t worked in the past. At the same time we must be willing to think outside of the box for solutions we have not used before.

Key Principles

When looking for a new approach to crisis information management it is essential that we ensure that the following key principles are met:

Information is a shared commodity that all humanitarian organizations should have access to
Duplication of IM efforts should be minimized at all costs (i.e. don’t collect contact information multiple times)
Innovative ways collecting, processing, analyzing and visualizing information should be emphasized to improve the effectiveness of the crisis information management.

A Common Service

It is very easy to see that information is something that is of great value to the entire humanitarian community and spans the entire cluster system. Just like emergency telecommunication and logistics are handled as a common service to the entire humanitarian system, so should information management be handled. At the same time we must ensure that the common service is actually providing a clear level of support to the entire humanitarian community and not just focusing on the inter-cluster information management.

Service Contracts

An Information Management Common Service should up-front define the service it will provide to the rest of the community and the service levels it will adhere to. This means that the common service should negotiate with each individual cluster what information it will manage on its behalf. This way the common service can be held accountable for the service it is providing. At the same time clusters and lead organizations should also have to be held accountable towards providing information into the common service. Clearly defined processes and interfaces between the common service and the humanitarian community should therefore be put in place.

Scalability

Depending on the scale of the disaster the common service can take on different tasks. For smaller emergencies where it becomes difficult for individual clusters to provide information management capacity then the common service could provide these on behalf of the individual clusters. In large scale disasters and in prolonged disasters some clusters may elect to continue having dedicated information management capacity within the cluster. These information managers would then act as the interface between the common service and the cluster and provide additional cluster specific analysis on top of information provided by the common service.

Governance

The Common Service should not be a UN specific or UN OCHA specific entity. It should be an entity in which the entire humanitarian community has a stake in, a consortium/partnership of equals. This would ensure buy-in from more stakeholders and also the ability to ensure capacity is in place, because the common service could thereby make use of information management experts from a wide variety of organizations.

Funding

By classifying information management as a common service it also becomes easier to identify it as a separate funding line in the consolidated emergency appeals. Right now information management is scattered under various headings in different clusters and within the “coordination” bucket that OCHA requests. Donors are quite aware of the importance of information management but have not had a clear way of providing funding to it directly.

Distributed Model

One of the main drawbacks in the old HIC model was that it was entirely field based. An attempt was made to perform all the data processing and analysis in the field. With improved communication it becomes easier to off-load those tasks to people with better connectivity and better processing power than those in the field. These people could be trained information managers from the different humanitarian organizations or they could be volunteer communities that have been trained in performing particular predefined tasks.

Outsourcing

It is important for the humanitarian community to start leveraging the rise of volunteer groups, built up around social networks and communities. These people want to lend a helping hand during disasters and are willing to often perform very mundane tasks such as data cleaning and processing because through the sheer scale of number of people involved they can make these mundane tasks become easily overcome.

By applying the common services model it becomes easier for those volunteer groups to interface with the humanitarian community because they then only need to deal with one entity instead of multiple organizations.

Needs Assessments

The common service would work closely with the different clusters and individual organizations performing needs assessments on the ground to ensure limited duplication. By collecting data from these assessments jointly into a common service repository, the information becomes more widely available within the humanitarian community and thereby allowing for better decisions to be made.

A Common Information Management Roster

As a common service of the entire humanitarian community it becomes possible to put in place a common roster of information management professionals from UN Agencies, NGOs and other organizations that could be called upon to provide information management services as part of the common service. The funding provided through the CAP for the common information management service can then be funneled back to the organizations providing information management personnel for the particular disaster through the roster.

This also allows for common information management training to be created which would ensure that the different information management experts are all trained in the same methodology.

Partnerships

Through a common service approach it also becomes easier to put in place partnerships with other NGOs and volunteer groups since they don’t have to deal with a large number of humanitarian actors, but can focus on providing their service to the entire humanitarian community through the common service.

Innovation

By having a common service it also becomes possible to jointly work on innovative ways of improving information management activities instead of individual organizations trying to do things by themselves and thereby not achieving the economies of scale required to make innovation profitable. Attracting funding for innovation becomes much easier when the donors see that it will benefit not only one organization but multiple organizations.