Mobile advances sound hope for aid agencies

New technologies are a life-saver on the ground in the wake of disasters such as that in Haiti, writes JOHN COLLINS

IN COMPANIES where staff are located in different offices around the country or even the globe, providing support to remote workers can be a major hassle.

Despite all the advances in networking which make it possible to manage PCs, laptops and other kit remotely, support staff invariably end up talking people through fixes over the phone.

But when the person on the other end of the phone could be in a feeding station in rural Chad, with its dry and dusty environment presenting its own challenges for operating technology, things can get complex pretty fast.

“It’s fair to say we are an atypical IT department,” says Vincent Richardson, head of ICT facilities with the Irish charity Concern. “When you are trying to troubleshoot something in a compound in Darfur, it becomes atypical very quickly.”

The demands may be unusual, but technology is transforming how aid agencies, governments and others respond to disasters from Haiti to the Gulf of Mexico.

Last January’s catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, which killed an estimated 230,000 people and made at least one million homeless, tested technology to the limits. Concern, which had 100 staff on the ground before the earthquake, was among the first wave of NGOs to respond.

One of the first personnel it sent to Haiti after the earthquake was a senior voice and data engineer who brought a laptop-sized device called a B-GAN (Broadband Global Area Network). Connecting to orbiting satellites, it provides instant voice and data communications and also has GPS capabilities.

“It costs $20 (€16.50) a minute to run it, but in terms of emergency response they are awesome,” explains Richardson.

In the early days of Concern’s response, mobile phones were out of action. Most of the masts around Port au Prince belonging to Denis O’Brien’s Digicel were damaged, although its core data centre was housed in an earthquake-proof building. The other mobile network in the country, Haitel, had larger masts on hill tops around the city which withstood the earthquake better, but the massive demand placed on the network meant it was practically unusable.

Tragically, a significant amount of the network traffic was coming from people trapped under the rubble trying to call for help.

While Digicel and Haitel restored service within 24 hours, international connectivity was still an issue. Concern is a member of NetHope, a group of over 30 international NGOs which pool technology. Within a week, NetHope had identified what bandwidth was available in the country and shared it between its members on the ground.

“After four or five days, each NGO had about 2MBits/sec of broadband,” says Richardson. Networking company Cisco donated voice over IP (VoIP) hardware such as headsets to help with the effort.

“NetHope is a sizeable bloc. We have an annual combined budget of $30 billion [€24 billion],” says Richardson. “Companies like Cisco, Microsoft and Intel are keen to get around our table.”

In a devastated city like Port au Prince, one of the main challenges is where to prioritise assistance. Dynamic mapping, which overlays static maps with live data about damage to infrastructure, potential hazards, where people are sleeping out etc, was one of the tools that NGOs drew on. US firm ESRI, a specialist in geographic information systems, provided the tools, which according to Russ Johnson, ESRI’s director for public safety and homeland security, are now being used to prioritise rebuilding efforts.

“A lot of the country was pretty poor to start with so there was not a lot of infrastructure,” explains Johnson. “But if you are rebuilding, it makes sense to map the hazards and risks and then either avoid them or if you do build over them try and mitigate the risk.”

Although Haiti was one of the most impoverished countries in the world before the earthquake, its citizens are keen users of mobile technologies.

“Initially some of the best data we could get came from texting and tweeting,” says Johnson. “There was a lot more people using hand-held devices than we expected.”