Now imagine if this platform partnered with a bigger organization that could promote it to a much wider audience around the world while providing some measure of verification to assuage skeptical users. In the West, a mother could take a break from watching her child’s soccer game to explore a live global map (interactive and constantly updated) on her iPad, displaying who needed what and where. She would be able to independently decide whom to fund on the basis of individuals’ stories or perceived need levels. Using mobile money-transfer systems already available, that mother could transfer cash or mobile credit to the recipients directly, as quickly and casually as sending a text message.
The challenge with this type of platform is that the onus of marketing falls directly on the aid recipients themselves. Life is hard enough in a refugee camp without having to worry if one’s online profile is sufficiently need-worthy, and the stark competition for resources that such a platform would cause recipients is distasteful in and of itself. There is also the risk of donors who lack good judgment or familiarity with the situation on the ground disproportionately supporting people who have the best marketing campaigns (or who have gamed the system) instead of those who need it most. The consequence of going around established aid organizations is the loss of those groups’ ability to discern levels of need and distribute their resources appropriately. With those controls gone, the free-for-all of direct donations would almost certainly lead to a less equitable division of those resources. An analysis of peer-to-peer lending through Kiva’s website conducted by researchers in Singapore reported that lenders tend to discriminate in favor of attractive, lighter-skinned and less obese borrowers.
Moreover, the emergence of a platform like this assumes that the desire for a closer connection is reciprocated. Aid recipients would have to want to engage in such a connection, and that would strike many who have worked in development as a nonstarter. To be sure, some people in postcrisis countries (as well as developing nations) might embrace the opportunity to directly market themselves if it meant a more reliable source of funding. But the majority will not. Unlike with Kiva, whose recipients are requesting loans, these recipients would be asking for charity—publicly. Pride is a universal human quality, and often when people have little else, they value their pride all the more. It’s hard to imagine that, even if such an open-funding platform were available to them, refugees, IDPs and other recipients would willingly advertise their needs to a global audience. One important function of established aid organizations is the distance they provide between recipients and their funders. So amid all of the changes we have described above—start-up NGOs, micro-targeted programs, decentralized aid—it is worth remembering the reasons certain aspects of the development-and-aid world are as they are, and why they work.
Room for Innovation
If the destruction of institutions and systems caused by upheaval has a silver lining, it’s that it clears the path for new ideas. Innovation exists everywhere, even in the labored and intricate work of reconstruction, and it will be enhanced with a fast network, good leadership and plentiful devices, meaning smart phones and tablets.
We’re already seeing how Internet tools are being refashioned to serve in a postcrisis environment. Ushahidi (the name means “testimony” in Swahili), an open-source crisis-mapping platform that aggregates crowd-sourced data to build a living information map, demonstrated this to great effect after the 2010 Haitian earthquake. Using a basic mapping platform, Ushahidi volunteers in the United States built a live crisis map just one hour after the earthquake struck, with a designated short code (4636) for people on the ground to text information to; it was subsequently publicized on national and local Haitian radio stations. Engineers outside Haiti added the data that was collected to an interactive online map that aggregated reports of destruction, needed emergency supplies, trapped people and violence or crime. Many of the text messages were in Creole, so Ushahidi worked with a network of thousands of Haitian-Americans to translate the information, cutting translation time to just ten minutes. Within a few weeks, they’d mapped some 2,500 reports; Carol Waters, Ushahidi-Haiti’s director of communications and partnerships, said that many of those messages simply read, “I’m buried under ruble [sic], but I’m still alive.”
Ushahidi’s quick thinking and quick coding saved lives. In the future, crisis maps like these will become standard and their creation will probably be government-led. By centralizing the information with an official and trusted source, some of the problems that Ushahidi faced (like other NGOs not knowing about the platform) could be avoided. Of course, there is the risk that a government-led project would fall victim to bureaucracy or legal restrictions that would prevent it from keeping up with non-state actors like Ushahidi. But if the response were immediate, there is tremendous potential for a government-led crisis map because it could grow to encompass much more than emergency information. The map could stay active throughout the reconstruction process, and it could serve as a platform through which the government shared and received information about the various reconstruction projects and environments it managed.
For any postcrisis society, citizens could be told where known safe zones (i.e., free of mines or militia) in their neighborhoods were, where the best mobile coverage was or where the largest investments in reconstruction efforts had been made. Citizen reporting on incidents of crime, violence or corruption would keep the government informed. An integrated system of crisis information like this would not only keep the population safer, healthier and more aware, it would also cut some of the waste, corruption and redundancy that reconstruction efforts always generate. Not all postcrisis governments will be interested in such transparency, to be sure, but if the population and the international community were widely aware of the model, there might be sufficient public pressure to adopt it anyway. The delivery of foreign aid could even be made contingent on it. And no doubt there would be many willing non-state partners and volunteers ready to participate in the process.
But the first priority for a postcrisis state is, usually, managing the fragile security environment. Interactive maps can help with that, but they won’t be enough. Those early moments when a conflict ends are the most delicate, because the interim government must demonstrate that it is in control and responsive to the people, or else it risks being chased out by the same population that installed it. In order for daily life to resume, citizens must feel safe enough to reopen businesses, rebuild homes and replant crops, so mitigating the volatility in the environment is vital for building citizen trust in the reconstruction process. Smart uses of technology can help the state reassert the rule of law in important ways.
By virtue of their functionality, mobile phones will become key conduits and valuable assets as the state works to manage the security environment. For countries with a functional military, the question of whether its members will uphold the rule of law—as opposed to defecting, committing criminal acts or seizing power for themselves—will depend less on personal motives than on their faith in the competency of the government. Put simply, for most people in uniform it will come down to whether they receive a paycheck reliably and relatively free of graft; they need to know who is in charge.