Published by ALNAP, the 2012 State of the Humanitarian System report is an important evaluation of the humanitarian community’s efforts over the past two years.

“I commend this report to all those responsible for planning and delivering life saving aid around the world,” writes UN Under-Secretary General Valerie Amos in the Preface. “If we are going to improve international humanitarian response we all need to pay attention to the areas of action highlighted in the report.” Below are some of the highlighted areas from the 100+ page evaluation that are ripe for innovative interventions.

Accessing Those In Need

Operational access to populations in need has not improved. Access problems continue and are primarily political or security-related rather than logistical. Indeed, “UN security restrictions often place sever limits on the range of UN-led assessments,” which means that “coverage often can be compromised.” This means that “access constraints in some contexts continue to inhibit an accurate assessment of need. Up to 60% of South Sudan is inaccessible for parts of the year. As a result, critical data, including mortality and morbidity, remain unavailable. Data on nutrition, for example, exist in only 25 of 79 countries where humanitarian partners have conducted surveys.”

Could satellite and/or areal imagery be used to measure indirect proxies? This would certainly be rather imperfect but perhaps better than nothing? Could crowdseeding be used?

Information and Communication Technologies

“The use of mobile devices and networks is becoming increasingly important, both to deliver cash and for communication with aid recipients.” Some humanitarian organizations are also “experimenting with different types of communication tools, for different uses and in different contexts. Examples include: offering emergency information, collecting information for needs assessments or for monitoring and evaluation, surveying individuals, or obtaining information on remote populations from an appointed individual at the community level.”

“Across a variety of interventions, mobile phone technology is seen as having great potential to increase efficiency. For example, […] the governments of Japan and Thailand used SMS and Twitter to spread messages about the disaster response.” Naturally, in some contexts, “traditional means like radios and call centers are most appropriate.”

In any case, “thanks to new technologies and initiatives to advance commu-nications with affected populations, the voices of aid recipients began, in a small way, to be heard.” Obviously, heard and understood are not the same thing–not to mention heard, understood and responded to. Moreover, as disaster affected communities become increasingly “digital” thanks to the spread of mobile phones, the number of voices will increase significantly. The humanitarian system is largely (if not completely) unprepared to handle this increase in volume (Big Data).

Consulting Local Recipients

Humanitarian organizations have “failed to consult with recipients […] or to use their input in programming.” Indeed, disaster-affected communities are “rarely given opportunities to assess the impact of interventions and to comment on performance.” In fact, “they are rarely treated as end-users of the service.” Aid recipients also report that “the aid they received did not address their ‘most important needs at the time.’” While some field-level accountability mechanisms do exist, they were typically duplicative and very project oriented. To this end, “it might be more efficient and effective to have more coordination between agencies regarding accountability approaches.”

While the ALNAP report suggests that these shortcomings could “be addressed in the near future by technical advances in methods of needs assessment,” the challenge here is not simply a technical one. Still, there are important efforts underway to address these issues.

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By Patrick Meier – iRevolution