Ayman’s cousin, Mahmoud, was nearby, under a thick blanket that hid his own devastating injuries. Doctors said he has lost his genitalia, and has severe damage to his abdomen.
A desolate father, Ali Emuhammad, was next to them and displayed on a mobile phone the cause of the tragedy: a picture of yellow and green cluster bombs, similar to the ones that Ayman and Mohammad were playing with two weeks ago. He said neither Ayman nor Mahmoud understood the danger of picking up unexploded ordnance.
“I know that they are dangerous, but I didn’t know what they looked like,” he explained, speaking of the cluster bombs. “If the children knew what it looked like, like through a TV program, or a poster, it would have prevented this accident.”
Despite its relative simplicity, effective information and
While the view that information is as vital as food, water, shelter and medicine rica/tunisia/the-international-federation-launched-the-world-disasters-repor > t-2005-at-the-world-summit-on-the-information-society/” target=”_blank”>is definitely not new, I hope it will get a new boost this Saturday at the World Conference on Humanitarian Studies, hosted by Tufts University in collaboration with Harvard University, Columbia University and the Social Science Research Council (June 4, 2011). There, one of the panels will discuss media, new technologies and how information can best be used in humanitarian responses.
After working in humanitarian crises from Asia to Haiti to Africa, I’ve seen a progressive expansion in interest among humanitarian agencies to develop and commit to improved, two-way communication methods with affected populations. But efforts, and important results in some instances, are too often still driven by individuals, largely lacking enough support and adequate resources at the institutional level, and at times, also lacking technical know-how.
In disaster zones, the delivery of information is too often undermined precisely because those delivering aid do not know enough about the local context, nor possess reliable channels for communicating nor have the capacity and the resources to do so. Unfortunately, such communication with disaster-affected communities is still too often seen
There are basic approaches that will improve and save lives. For example, at Liberia’s eastern border, my organization, Internews, recently completed an assessment among refugees from Cote d’Ivoire. More than 180,000 Ivoirians have arrived since post-electoral violence erupted in December 2010. The findings are relevant far beyond Liberia, with lessons for almost any humanitarian crisis, such as handing out wind-up radios and mobile phones as part of the aid distribution; working with community radio stations to develop programming and transmit important news, advisories and messages in local languages; setting up listening stations and loud-speaker systems in refugee camps and aid distribution points; bicycling through villages using megaphones to make announcements; and liaising directly with mobile telecommunications providers to solve problems of coverage, roaming and access.
While some important work has been done on delivery of messages to affected populations, establishing systematic ways of actually listening to survivors has proven to remain a particular challenge. If this is to change, significantly more resources, training and expertise are needed to move dialogue with affected populations into mainstream humanitarian practice. And this needs to be changed where decisions that affect the humanitarian architecture are made: in both Geneva and New York.
In Haiti after the earthquake, we saw how text messaging and social media was largely used by Haitians to reach out. In Aceh after the tsunami, we saw how portable radio stations could broadcast across
Earlier this year, Internews launched the Internews Center for Innovation, Research & Learning, aimed at harnessing the potential of digital technologies and new approaches to better meet the information needs of communities around the world. Internews’ numerous ongoing field projects already represent a laboratory of innovative activity that we hope will positively affect also the way humanitarians respond to humanitarian crises.
The more the humanitarian community makes information a priority and the more we all learn from each other the more we will help those who are out there in the camps, under tents, or standing amid the rubble-injured, hungry, or feeling utterly terrified and alone among strangers.
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Jacobo Quintanilla is Director of Humanitarian Media at Internews, an international media development organization.