Mens den tekniske udvikling med twitter og Facebook spurter derudad, er mange udsendte nødhjælpsarbejdere langt bagefter med indsigt i de nye hjælpemidler og ved ofte mindre end de lokale på de steder, hvor de skal operere og gerne kunne øve en effektiv og hurtig indsats.
LONDON, 28 October 2013 (IRIN): Recent innovations have offered a whole new box of tools to the humanitarian community.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is using the latest edition of its annual “World Disasters Report” (http://worlddisastersreport.org/en) to showcase some of the technological advancements being put to use in emergencies, and to start a discussion on their potential benefits and pitfalls.
The report, launched this month, reveals how raw data from phone companies is being used to track sudden population movements, and how satellite imaging is being used to show the physical effects of natural disasters in areas otherwise beyond reach.
Doctors from the diaspora (syrere i udlandet) are using Skype to guide medical treatment in parts of Syria they cannot travel to, and Google Person Finder is being used to reunite families – a high-tech solution to what is one of the oldest functions of the Red Cross.
Growing mobile phone saturation (enorme udbredelse) is also changing humanitarians’ relationships with beneficiaries (modtagerne).
By next year, there are expected to be as many phone subscriptions as there are people on the planet.
Aid agencies use mobile phones to reach people in need, transfer cash, warn of approaching problems, and identify those killed or badly injured in disasters – and increasingly, aid recipients are using their phones to talk back to the aid workers.
In every recent emergency, the airwaves have crackled (knitret) with data, as people frantically send messages to their loved ones, to the authorities and to the world via platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
They pass along news, calls for help and pictures of damage. Now an army of digital volunteers has sprung up, offering to collate (samle), translate and, where necessary, geolocate this torrent of data.
DIY disaster relief
It is an exciting development, but also a scary one, especially for aid workers who are less technically minded, and at a meeting last week at London’s Overseas Development Institute (ODI), both enthusiasm and nervousness were on display.
While new technologies have yielded (medført) some changes to disaster response, and a lot of rethinking, many in the humanitarian community are simply not early adopters (langsomme til at tilpasse sig).
Today, it is common to arrive at a disaster scene and find that local people are well ahead of humanitarian agencies in using whatever technology is best suited to their situation.
“The way information is moving now is fundamentally different,” said Imogen Wall, global coordinator for communications with communities at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), adding:
“We are used to what you might call a ‘command and control’ model, but what Facebook and Twitter do is a many-to-many form of information sharing. People can go into a giant pool and get what they need for themselves.”
For example, the IFRC report mentions “Jointly”, an application (tilføjelse /funktion på mobilen) that allows people to offer help or ask for help; it matches requests with offers, bypassing traditional responders and offering a kind of do-it-yourself route to disaster relief.
Meanwhile, aid workers often struggle with how to use such new technologies. Liz Hughes of Map Action said:
“When we think about the take-up of technology and its use in disaster response, we need to think about the skills base in the humanitarian community itself”.
“We do GPS training, and it is surprising that such a basic thing like being able to geo-position is still a challenge. There is still a gulf between the possibilities out there and where we are now.”
Reliability questions
Læs videre på
http://www.irinnews.org/report/99011/humanitarians-play-catch-up-as-technology-pushes-forward
