SXSWorld
Issue link: https://sxsw.uberflip.com/i/690210
3 8 S X S W o r l d | M AY / J U N E 2 0 1 6 | S X S W. C O M s the Ebola virus tore through com- munities in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea in 2014 and 2015, rumors and fear blossomed in local neighborhoods and around the globe. No respecter of borders, the disease sickened more than 28,000 people across West Africa. Some 11,800 died. In order to combat the epidemic, the public health community needed a way to communicate prevention messages and facts to affected residents, and to obtain frontline insight into the disease's spread. Among technologists around the globe, the out- break also generated intense can-do interest. Some 5,000 miles away in Blacksburg, Virginia, Virginia Tech sponsored a hackathon. Seeking to create a web-based app for residents in Ebola-affected com- munities, approximately 80 programmers came together to feverishly sift through synthetic data sets created by the Department of Defense. As the online news site Quartz reported in October 2014, the team was excited about one app that would allow "a user who feels he is suf- fering from Ebola symptoms [to] send a text to a public health agency to report themselves sick. In turn, the agency would send a specially outfitted vehicle – free of charge – to safely transport the individual to a hospital or critical care center, as to not spread infection." Meanwhile, back in West Africa, staffers at BBC Media Action, a charity-based development arm of the well-known news service, decided to work with the tools at hand. Besides the BBC's native medium – radio, which could be use to broadcast health-related content – the most obvious was WhatsApp, the most popular chat application in West Africa. Functional on smartphones as well as older mobile models, WhatsApp had several virtues. Messages could be sent as text, images or audio. The app wasn't a data hog and could reach users with fairly restrictive data plans. It was also a two-way communication system, allowing users to ask questions and express concerns, which the BBC could then address and communicate to the public health community as the crisis evolved. And most signifi- cantly, the application was already in wide use. The response of the Virginia Tech hackers and BBC Media Action are telling examples of both the power and folly of tech-centric solutions to crisis response. On one hand was an earnest group of technologists laboring hard to find a new solution to the crisis, but with implementation challenges that rendered it untenable. On the other hand was an embedded staff of responders, using existing tech- nology with a high adoption rate to immediately get direct, low-tech messages to as many people as possible. The Virginia Tech response was one that plays to what Jeff Wishnie, senior director of program technology at Mercy Corps and a participant in a crisis response session at the SXgood Hub during SXSW 2016, calls "the myth of the two-day app." A true-believer in technology's potential to significantly improve crisis response, Wishnie is skeptical about the real impact of efforts aimed at developing new technologies to help the latest crop of people suffering the immediate after-effects of mass disaster. "Hackathons just aren't serious," he says. "They are in no way up to the challenge of delivering effective, useful, impactful technology." Instead, Wishnie and others laboring on the front lines of humani- tarian crises really see potential in creative use of technologies that are already in widespread use among affected communities – such as WhatsApp in West Africa – or alternately, in using new technology to cut daunting steps out of challenges common to people suffering during various humanitarian crises. Consider the more than 60 million people who, for various rea- sons, have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge elsewhere, whether in their home countries or abroad. Though some are able to plan and leave in an orderly fashion, all too often, they flee amid chaos, and small children can become separated from their families. "Imagine you're a two-year-old, and the only thing you know is that you lost mom and dad, and that you come from the village with the big mango tree and a school," says Wishnie. In the past, families searching for those kids had to go from ref- ugee center to refugee center, scanning posted pictures of missing children. The process was laborious, and often impossible, since many parents lacked permission to leave the centers in which they were registered. Enter RapidFTR, developed by Unicef to help reg- ister and reunite lost and separated refugee children with their families. Aid workers now use this tool to capture images of children and as much basic information as they can, and upload everything to a simple secure database, where parents and guardians can search while children are held in a secure reunification center. The tech- nology, Wishnie points out, does not do away with other complex challenges related to verification of relationships, but it does help to alleviate some of the trauma and confusion of displacement. In the end, noted Wishnie and other speakers at the crisis response panel, technology does play a powerful role in addressing humani- tarian crises, but only if we understand the challenges, habits and needs of the people we're trying to help. T For Crisis Responders, Low Tech Can Deliver Big Impact by ashLey CraddoCk A C H A N C E G I L B E R T A r t wo rk in t h e SXg o o d H u b