To Sum Up!

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TO SUM UP: Tech works; humanitarians need to go 2-way, really; journalists need more support; and donors must be more innovative.

All good things having an end, my last blog post will report on the final evaluation and lessons learned from Internews’ 6-month project to Integrate Local Media and ICTs into Humanitarian Response in the Central African Republic (CAR). You can download the report here and access all the blogs (14) and reports (4) written during the life of this project (March-August 2012). The project was implemented by Internews in partnership with Ushahidi, supported by UNOCHA in CAR and funded by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF).

The project was an ambitious one, really: to create a bounded network of trusted local media organizations to gather real-time first-hand information from affected populations to create a two-way communication flow with humanitarians. Internews’ contention was (and is) that communication is aid and that effective communication between local populations and aid providers improves emergency response, community participation &; community resilience.

To achieve this goal, Internews trained a network of local journalists to gather, aggregate and analyze information submitted by local journalists and community members using short text messages (SMS). This information (i.e. reports) were then relayed by local radio stations and community correspondents around the country to a central coordination hub run by the Association of Journalists for Human Rights (RJDH in its French acronym).

The reports were made accessible to humanitarians and other journalists with internet access through an interactive humanitarian map (www.cartehumanitaire-rca.org) that was set up to facilitate the exchange of information between local journalists and humanitarian organizations. The goal was also for humanitarians to engage with the community, working with local journalists, and posting reports on the same platform.

The project faced numerous challenges, starting with the deep mistrust existing between humanitarians and media in the CAR as documented in one of my reports and blogs. “Guilty by association” –Internews shared offices with the RJDH–, the project needed first to rebuild trust between actors through outreach and regular meetings. And it worked through the work of a dedicated Humanitarian Liaison Officer –check the blog posts by Raimondo Chiari, very insightful.

The humanitarians interviewed at the end of the project all reported improvement in their relations with media, leading to increased contacts and collaboration. Nevertheless, humanitarians still judge the overall media landscape as being of poor quality and lacking analytical skills.

The challenge is migrating to 2-way

This may perhaps explain why humanitarians have yet to contribute to the exchange of information, and not merely act as recipients: Out of 346 messages featured on the humanitarian map between February and August 2012, just 2 were issued by humanitarian organizations.

On the other hand, over half the humanitarians interviewed consulted the map on a regular basis. Humanitarians also continued to express concerns over the security and quality of the information collected by the SMS-based system, fair enough.

Journalists reported improvement in information collection and sharing. Humanitarians, however, played a mainly passive role. They consulted the reports and maps, but contributed little. The information from the map and reports did not directly influence decisions or actions. This is in part the result of the reliance on their own information network and mistrust of media and crowd sourced data on the ground of validity and risks.

More training for journalists The contribution of the journalists to the humanitarian map also varied greatly. Half of the radios involved in the project did not send any message. The lack of training in handling the system, and more generally in journalism, was a major issue.

On the positive side, journalists all agreed that the project contributed to improve journalists’ interaction and active collection of information among affected communities. This reflects the contribution that even minimal training makes for journalists who generally have had no or little training on what journalism is.

The SMS system was also effective – 4 out of the 11 radios involved in the program received over 100 SMS per month between May and July 2012. The numbers may appear low, but they suggest that some people really chose to interact with their local community radio station.

Overall, however, the population rarely uses SMS, and lacks access to cellphone or even basic literacy to send messages. In person meeting are often preferred. As a result, alternative ways to formalize contacts and submit reports to journalists should be explored.

In the end, what this pilot project showed is that innovative uses of technologies do work: the system that was set up to establish the two-way dialogue functioned and was useful to those who used it. Technology does what is meant to do and you have, from a technical perspective, an enabling environment.

First and foremost: “Going back to basics” The problems to achieve the projects’ goals were vastly outside of the technology and require focusing on the relations between actors and on capacity development. Changing behaviors, habits of thoughts and ways of doing things is perhaps the most difficult thing to do.

What the humanitarian map did (and continues to do) is provide a test case to demonstrate the usability and overall simplicity of the system and its compatibility with- and improvement over- existing ways humanitarians engage with affected communities.

These characteristics alone should encourage piloting second generation projects. They should also entice donors to more seriously support and demand innovative approaches and equally important, create the policy and funding space for humanitarian agencies to experiment beyond what they can currently do under more “traditional” donor approaches. In that regard, the existence of the Humanitarian Innovation Fund is definitely good news.

Patrick Vinck Ph.D.[email protected] (link sends e-mail)External evaluator of the Internews HIF project in CAR Research Scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health and Associate Faculty with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI)