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By Timo Luege, TC103: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management facilitator

As technology for disaster response evolves, digital mapping is playing an increasingly important role in helping emergency managers in humanitarian emergency response operations. When considering the best tools and skills to respond to the Ebola crisis in West Africa, earlier this year, Doctors without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) sent a dedicated Geographic Information Systems (GIS) officer to Guinea, to support the local and international medical teams who are fighting the Ebola-outbreak. To find out whether that was a good investment, the MSF GIS Unit asked TC103 facilitator Timo Luege to write a case study showing the impact of this field-based GIS officer.

Some of the key observations are:

Most of the the areas close to the border of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone had not been mapped previously. This meant that it was very easy to see the changes.
Despite being in a very remote area, the GIS officer had decent internet connection which allowed him to reach out for remote support. Among other things this made it possible for the volunteers of the OpenStreetMap community to contribute directly to supporting the response. So this is also a case that shows what crowdsourcing can contribute to humanitarian emergency response.
Since the GIS Officer was in the field, he and his local staff were able to provide context to the basemaps that were produced remotely. Both components were important: without the remote support, the GIS wouldn’t have been able to create all basemaps at the granularity that is available now. But without the GIS in the field, a lot of the traced outlines would not have been meaningful, because you need local knowledge to know whether a building is a school, a hospital, a police station etc. Also: assigning the correct names to villages is at least as important as mapping roads. Again, you need people in the field to do this.
Because MSF chose to use formats and tools that encourage or even require sharing, many maps created for MSF will add value to local communities, local government and help other humanitarian and development organizations working in the area. This means that the outputs will continue to be beneficial and can be built upon.

You can download the complete case study here:

“GIS Support for the MSF Ebola response in Guinea in 2014”

This post originally appeared in Social Media for Good

Interested in learning more on how to use digital crisis mapping tools for humanitarian emergencies and natural disasters? Enroll now in this online course on Mapping for International Development and Tech Tools & Skills for Emergency Management.

About the TC 103 facilitator: Timo Luege

After nearly ten years of working as a journalist (online, print and radio), Timo worked four years as a Senior Communications Officer for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Geneva and Haiti. During this time he also launched the IFRC’s social media activities and wrote the IFRC social media staff guidelines. He then worked as Protection Delegate for International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Liberia before starting to work as a consultant. His clients include UN agencies and NGOs. Among other things, he wrote the UNICEF “Social Media in Emergency Guidelines” and contributed to UNOCHA’s “Humanitarianism in the Network Age”. Over the last year, Timo advised UNHCR- and IFRC-led Shelter Clusters in Myanmar, Mali and most recently the Philippines on Communication and Advocacy. He blogs at Social Media for Good and is the facilitator for the TechChange online course, “Tech Tools & Skills for Emergency Management“.

TechChange recently broadcasted the Training Health Workers for Ebola webinar series, with the sponsorship and webinar content of mPowering Frontline Health Workers and IntraHealth International. Over 550 participants from more than 70 countries have joined this webinar series so far, and more health workers around the world continue to sign up to view these recorded sessions for free.

The 4-part webinar series brought together voices from all over the world, both in terms of expert contributors and online viewers. We are inspired not only by the amount of people who participated online, but also by their contributions to the discussion on the information and tools necessary to support frontline health workers. Many commenters interacted with guest experts by asking important, timely questions, as well as by sharing information and resources on the work that they or their organizations are doing on the ground in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone to respond to the outbreak.

In case you missed the series, here’s a brief recap of each webinar:

In the first webinar, “Learning and Information Needs for Frontline Health Workers”, Dykki Settle (IntraHealth) and Sean Blaschke (UNICEF) discussed their work with the free SMS mobile communication system, mHero. Informed by the challenges faced by communities in Liberia, mHero was developed with the aim of investing in and strengthening tools that have already been implemented in Liberia to support the development and accessibility of health workforce information.

In the second webinar, “Health System Support for Frontline Health Workers”, Dr. Chandrakant Ruparelia (Jhpiego) shared key considerations for designing training programs for healthcare workers in areas affected by the Ebola outbreak. Additionally, Marion McNabb (Pathfinder International) pointed to the importance of leveraging existing training programs and mechanisms effectively in the Ebola response. Panelists from Digital Campus and Medical Aid Films also shared their experiences with using video for behavior change communications and health messaging.

In the third webinar, “Community Mobilization and Interactions with Clients”, Gillian McKay (GOAL) presented information about the social mobilization campaign that GOAL is implementing in Sierra Leone through two key innovations: uniformed services training emphasizing protection for officers involved in the Ebola response, and an Ebola survivor and champions media campaign to build trust and support within communities affected by Ebola. Additionally, Reverend Moses Khanu shared information on frontline efforts and the resources and support necessary in Sierra Leone.

In the fourth webinar, “Data to Support Effective Response and Case Management”, Jonathan Jackson (Dimagi) provided information on his organization’s effort to build a mobile tool for frontline health workers that can aid in contact tracing while collecting information for real-time data visualization and analysis. Additionally, Garrett Mehl (WHO) and Matt Berg (Ona) discussed their collaboration on the WHO data coordination platform to promote a harmonized Ebola response.

If your interest is piqued by any of these four webinars, you can watch each all recorded sessions in their entirety for free when you register using this link.

With each webinar, you will also find the discussion among online participants in the comments section. You will see that many participants shared details about their work and experiences, as well as initiatives that are emerging or already in place in the Ebola response. Where possible, we have also included the presentation slides and resources shared by presenters during each webinar.

As mentioned during each webinar, you can find additional resources and interact with experts on the Ebola Resources for Health Workers site.

If you’re interested in learning more on the role of technology in the Ebola response, join our online courses in mHealth and Tech Tools & Skills for Emergency Management.

According to GSMA’s Digital Entrepreneurship in Kenya 2014 report, 99% of internet subscribers in Kenya access the internet through mobile devices. Kenya has been the leader in mobile banking, with apps like M-PESA, Zoona, and others. When taking TechChange’s Mobile Phones for Public Health online course with a group of 10 colleagues at PATH, I was curious to learn what mHealth looked like in Kenya and learn what lessons I can apply to my mHealth programs in Bihar, India. As part of my final project for the course, I asked Debjeet Sen, one of my colleagues at PATH based in Kisumu, Kenya, to share his views on the state of mHealth interventions in Kenya.

Like other developing countries, mHealth in Kenya primarily focuses on two core areas:

1. Data collection, where mobile devices replace and/or complement traditional paper-based tools;

2. Behaviour change, where mobile devices are used to disseminate key messages and good practices among communities.

And like any low-resource setting, there are inherent challenges in rolling out mHealth interventions, so it is important to be cognizant of them and develop appropriate counter-strategies.

Community health workers (CHWs) during a mHealth training in Kenya

Here are a few challenges that Debjeet sees mHealth interventions face in Kenya:

Multiple mHealth interventions have remained at the pilot stage

Many mHealth interventions in Kenya have not yet been integrated into larger health and information technology systems due to the absence of a clear scale-up strategy in the pilot project design and a lack of consensus on common software and hardware requirements. Different projects use different handsets with different operating systems for different mobile platforms. Aligning individual mHealth projects with regional and national management information systems (MIS) is necessary, but may not necessarily happen, as mHealth projects often function autonomously. Wherever possible, it is important to integrate mHealth data streams with existing MIS platforms in order to prevent duplication and mixing of data.

Many mHealth projects rely on the use of smartphones

Smartphones can be expensive and beyond the purchasing power of Kenyan government institutions and individuals. Most people continue to rely on low-end phones, which are cheap and widely available.

Scarcity of a reliable power source

Electricity supply in Kenya is unreliable and regular electricity is mostly available only in semi-urban and urban areas. Since graphics-enabled smartphones are highly power-intensive, any mHealth project that relies on smartphones may face challenges if users struggle to keep their phones regularly charged.

However, there are opportunities that can help tackle these mHealth challenges:

Almost universal penetration of cell phones

Kenya has a very strong base for implementing mHealth projects, partly because Kenyans are familiar with the use of mobile phones for functions other than just making and receiving calls. Mobile banking app like M-PESA is used by tens of millions of Kenyans. In fact, many financial transactions in the social sector, such as paying for trainings and workshops, issuing stipends to community health workers (CHWs), and transferring conditional cash transfers are all done through M-PESA. In a way, this extensive use of M-PESA for the social sector is already (indirectly) helping improve mHealth outcomes.

Incentivizing end-users such as CHWs to buy the phones

A common mistake of many mHealth projects is to provide the cell phones for the project as “giveaways.” In turn, this results in less accountability and a lack of ownership among the phone users. Asking CHWs to partially cover the cost of the phones or buy them is a good strategy to create ownership and accountability. This also has ramifications for scale-up and sustainability, as governments in low-resource countries may be unable to cover the entire cost of purchasing cell phones.

Work is underway to develop a plan to coordinate mHealth activities in Kenya

There are plans to align multiple platforms, hardware, and software with a common national strategy and to ensure that data collected from these activities are facilitated to feed into national and regional MIS.

4. Simple smartphone apps.

The simpler smartphone apps have been demonstrated to assist frontline workers such as CHWs in data collection and as job aids to assist them in household visits and group and/or individual counselling. In an environment that faces challenges in literacy rates as well as financial and network connectivity, we cannot simply develop and run any iPhone or Android app. Sometimes, it is important to develop ways to access mHealth tools offline.

Community health workers explore Information for Action app during the field test

In particular, Debjeet discussed his work on the Information for Action app, an innovative app running on the Android platform designed by the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa. The app collects information from CHW home visits and immediately turns the collected information into actionable information in the form of a key message or suggested actions that can be shared by CHWs with caregivers. It is a dynamic app because it collects information and provides contextualized key messages and suggested actions on areas of children’s development, health, nutrition, and water and sanitation. The Information for Action app also stores records of individual home visits, which can be used by CHWs to plan for future home visits, as well as uploaded into a central data server/cloud, where supervisors can monitor for quality of home visits.

Currently, a field test of the app is being carried out in Kenya and South Africa to determine its operational feasibility and acceptability among CHWs, their supervisors, and community members receiving home visits from CHWs. Debjeet would be happy to share the app after the field tests are completed.

Debjeet asserted that the TechChange mHealth course has provided him with a structured overview of mHealth, which is a contrast to the way he has generally learned about mHealth through on-the-job experiences. The TechChange course has exposed him to interesting resources, people, and mHealth projects and he wishes to use the learnings from the course in his current projects at PATH

Why learning about mHealth in Kenya is useful for India

Since working in Bihar is quite similar to working in other countries of low resource settings like Kenya, it is helpful to learn about the challenges and strategies of different countries as we develop mHealth programs in Bihar. The PATH team in Bihar provides knowledge management support to a behavior change community mobilization project called Parivartan, which means “transformation”. The knowledge management team is in the process of conceptualizing a mobile based data collection and analysis system for village health sanitation nutrition committee (VHSNC). The committee members would develop effective social mobilization strategies to influence people to attend village health sanitation nutrition day (VHSND) at local primary health centers for health and nutrition related services. We have already started collecting a lot quality assurance sampling (LQAS) data through tablets and Kenya’s mHealth lessons definitely help as the fuel to work at per PATH’s technology and healthcare innovation in low and middle income group setting.

The knowledge on mHealth in Kenya which Debjeet has shared will help my team develop its own mHealth strategy in a low-resource setting such as Bihar, India.

If you are interested in learning more about the current state of mHealth, enroll in our upcoming mHealth course, TC309: Mobile Phones for Public Health today.

Alumni bios

Debjeet Sen is a Senior Associate with PATH. He has managed and supported a range of early childhood development (ECD), infant and young child nutrition, prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV, and maternal and child health projects — primarily in Kenya and Mozambique, but also in DRC, Ethiopia, India, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Rwanda, and South Africa. His core skills include technical design and management of complex projects, monitoring and evaluation (M&E), behavior change communication (BCC), curriculum development, capacity building and training, organizational development, documentation, and technical research and writing. He is currently based in Kisumu, Kenya. You can connect with Debjeet on LinkedIn.

Pratyaya Mitra is a communication professional with more than 12 years of experience in corporate and social sector. Currently working as communication and documentation officer in PATH Knowledge Management team in Bihar, India. Previously, worked with UNICEF as communication consultant for C4D, advocacy-partnership. Pratyaya worked in corporate communication and as copywriter with Ogilvy and Mather. He works with wide range of communication channels such as, written, audio visual, online, social media and mobile. He plays pivotal role in advocacy, PR and social and mHealth communication strategy to meet the project goal and business development. He did his masters in communication. You can connect with Pratyaya on Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook.

Frontline health workers in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia are responding to the largest Ebola outbreak in history. To protect themselves and their communities, health workers responding to Ebola need clear, reliable, and timely information on how to detect the disease, prevent its spread, and care for patients.

To respond to this crisis, mPowering Frontline Health Workers and IntraHealth International approached TechChange to deliver a free online webinar series on “Training Health Workers for Ebola—Protection, Detection, and Response”. In these webinars, more than 15 international and in-country health organizations will share information with participants on how to support health workers responding to Ebola. The four one-hour webinars will air on October 21, 23, 28, and 30, each starting at 10:00 am EDT.

The webinars are open to all, and we welcome participation from as diverse an audience as possible. This includes Ministries of Health, health workers, community leaders, program implementers (in-country and international), policy makers, and others. Health professionals from over 15 countries have already signed up, and participants represent government, health care facilities, international NGOs, and civil society, and other sectors.

The presentations and discussions in the webinars will (1) describe how to leverage available resources to train, support, and communicate with frontline health workers and others involved in the direct Ebola response through mobile technology; (2) consider ways to connect implementers to resources, collaborators, and sources of information; and (3) explore how to improve opportunities to enable implementers and programmers to share efforts, collaborate, and avoid duplication.

Webinar schedule:
October 21: Learning and information needs for frontline health workers
October 23: Health system support for frontline health workers
October 28: Community mobilization and interactions with clients
October 30: Data to support effective response and case management

All live sessions will be held from 10.00-11.00am EDT. For those who cannot attend the webinar sessions live, all webinars will be recorded and available here after the air dates.

These webinars are being supported by a 4-week discussion in the Health Information for All (HIFA) forums and we invite you to join and add your views. In addition, IntraHealth and mPowering are launching an online Ebola Resource Center for participants and others to share messages, training content, guidance documents, and other information. This site will also be a place for programs to share information about their work and to connect to others for support, ideas and collaboration. The Ebola Resource Center will launch on October 21.

If you and/or your organization have content on Ebola that you would like to share in the Resource Center, please email Dave Potenziani at Intrahealth at dpotenziani [at] intrahealth [dot] org.

We look forward to meeting you in the webinars & invite you to participate in the conversations in the HIFA forum.

You can find the webinar page and registration information at https://www.techchange.org/live-events/training-health-workers-for-ebola/.

Please share this information on this webinar series information with anyone interested in responding to the Ebola outbreak.

Photo credit: BBC

At TechChange, we’re always looking for ways to make online learning more interactive, engaging, and relevant for busy, global professionals interested in technology and social change. One way we do this is by bringing together our online TechChange community offline with hybrid learning. Specifically, we try to overlap the schedule of some of our online courses with industry events such as the recent M&E Tech Conference and annual mHealth Summit. We also arrange in-person meet-ups in various cities across the world including happy hours in Washington, DC and other meet-ups including most recently in Lusaka, Zambia.

Last month, we launched our very first round of TC111: Technology for Monitoring & Evaluation with a class of over 100 participants. As one of the top guest experts of the online course, Christopher Robert, who is CEO of Dobility Inc. and a Harvard adjunct lecturer, joined us in the first week of the course while he was traveling in Zambia. To take full advantage of the course, some of our participants based in Zambia asked him if he would be willing to meet with them in Lusaka. So, three of these M&E tech course participants (Ladislas, William, and Mine) met Christopher and his colleagues on the same day to continue the technology for M&E discussions from the online course in-person.

Here’s what happened at the TechChange Tech for M&E meet-up in Lusaka:

Reuniting alumni from different communities
It turned out that Ladislas, William, and Mine had already known each other as alumni of the Global Health Corps (GHC) fellowship. According to Mine Metitiri, a Senior Research Associate at the Zambia Ministry of Health, “A number of Global Health Corps fellows are taking the TechChange Tech for M&E online class and we recommended Chris to be a speaker at our annual training at Yale. Hopefully it works out because he had a lot of great things to say that are relevant to our fields of work.“

Strengthening online connections and learning offline
TechChange alumni such as William Ngosa who works at the Ministry of Health in Zambia appreciated the chance to reunite with his GHC colleagues and to meet Christopher and his team members, Faizan and Meletis. “It was a privilege to meet one of the speakers in the online course to provide a meaningful and enriching learning experience,” said William.
Christopher Robert and his team really enjoyed meeting the Zambia-based course participants as well. “It was lucky that we had the chance to meet!” said Christopher. “These Tech for M&E course participants are doing some wonderful things with ICT for social good there in Zambia. It’s always inspiring to meet people doing good work!”

Sharing good news of a job offer for M&E consulting
One of the participants, Ladislas Hibusu, received a M&E consultant job offer after interviewing with Jhpiego while taking the M&E online course.

“At this M&E meetup in Lusaka, I mentioned that during the M&E course, I interviewed for a position at Jhpiego. I am happy to announce that I have been offered an M&E Consultant role and thanks to the valuable insights to this course, as I was able to apply the knowledge I learned in the course. Although I have had limited experience in applying much of my M&E theoretical work in the field, I am happy to say this Tech for M&E online course is addressing most of challenges that I anticipate in my new role.” – Ladislas Hibusu

Everyone congratulated Ladislas and Christopher Robert joined us for another live event the following week wanting to continue the discussions with other participants in our course.

Several of TechChange’s online courses are designed to facilitate interactions like the one in Lusaka. Participants from all over the world are able to connect with like-minded professionals in the international development sector and continue discussions on specific topics. Watching live and recorded videos, completing different activities, and participating in ongoing discussions on an online forum combined with offline, in-person learning is really what enriches e-learning.

Interested in technology for M&E and want to connect with other M&E practitioners across the world? Register now to lock in early bird rates for our next round of our Technology for Monitoring & Evaluation online course which runs January 29 – February 20, 2015.

On September 25 and 26, over 200 development practitioners and technologists filled FHI 360’s conference rooms and hallways in Washington D.C. to discuss the intersection between technology and monitoring and evaluation (M&E). Some of the conference attendees included participants and guest experts in TechChange’s ongoing online course on Tech for M&E and it was great meeting so many these online course participants in person and offline.

Supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, GSMA, and FHI 360, the M&E Tech Conference was a two-day conference held in D.C. (followed by another one event in New York) to discuss the emerging role of technology in M&E and its implications to everyone involved in the international development industry. The release of the discussion paper, Emerging Opportunities: Monitoring and Evaluation in a Tech-Enabled World kicked off the first panel, followed by two days of great panel discussions and engaging break-out sessions. The event also featured a panel facilitated by TechChange online course facilitator, Kendra Keith on “What’s Next in Visualizing Data for Better Decision Making?” and a lightning talk on ‘How to Use APIs for Real-Time M&E’ that I presented.

In case you didn’t make it to the D.C. M&E Tech conference, here are a few key takeaways from the event.

1. Technology is not a substitute for good M&E methodologies

One of the panelists perfectly summed up the current state of technology in M&E from a technology perspective: it is not always clear why the M [monitoring] is associated with the E [evaluation]. While technology has made data collection and reporting easy, making sense of the data and how it affects programming still requires newer tools and M&E methodologies.

Good M&E requires capturing and analyzing both quantitative and qualitative data. While there are emerging M&E tools (e.g., SenseMaker) and techniques (e.g., natural language processing), cost and expertise continue to make capturing and analyzing qualitative data difficult. As mixed methods–using both qualitative and quantitative data — are discussed more in an M&E setting, practitioners still have a great deal of work to do.

Kenneth M. Chomitz, Kerry Bruce (a guest speaker for TechChange’s Tech for M&E course), and Maliha Khan discuss the current state of Tech for M&E

Mobile phones have been a hot topic in development, but one of the lightning talks revealed a surprising fact: Mobile surveys are not as effective as we think they are. The average response rate for surveys conducted in-person was 77% compared to 1% for mobile phone surveys. While the comparison may not be fair, it is worth noting that the introduction of any technology also requires M&E.

2. Technology introduces new data issues to M&E regarding responsibility, security, and selectivity biases

During the first panel, one of the panelists mentioned that the next “scandal” in development will be about revealing sensitive data. While not a new topic in development, data responsibility becomes increasingly important with the introduction of technology. Unfortunately, data security was primarily relegated as a panel (Whose Data? Whose Privacy?) and a shout out as one of the 9 Principles for Digital Development. This panel also marked the release of the Responsible Development Data Guide, a resource I co-authored, that focuses on protecting digital data and beneficiary privacy in international development.

Linda Raftree (a regular TechChange guest expert) and Michael Bamberger lead a break-out session discussing the emerging opportunities and challenges of using ICTs for M&E

Another common problem that arises with introducing technology to M&E is selectivity bias. Digital surveys tend to be limited to digitally literate populations with access to technology. Yet, even digital literacy and access to technology doesn’t guarantee a truthful response. For example, the panel on data privacy shared that women often didn’t respond truthfully to mobile surveys because their husbands or family members often monitored their personal phones.

Technology also biases researchers and evaluators towards quantitative methods and data. Qualitative data collection, analysis, and visualization software has not kept pace with tools for quantitative data.

3. Data matters more than ever in development

Recognizing the challenges and opportunities technology brings to M&E, the event included many conversations on data. There were break-out sessions on topics like data visualization, leveraging big data, how mobile phones can help in M&E, data security issues, and more.

Data visualization

The data visualization panel showed that there are a lot of new techniques to visualize data. Network visualization is a fantastic way to view a system (e.g., an organization or a program). It’s a simpler way to see where multiple links connect and understand where they need to be strengthened. Mapping allows for easier analysis of aid efficacy. Development Gateway presented their Aid Management Platform with its mapping feature that is aimed at governments in countries with development programs. In particular, they highlighted the success in Malawi and their public facing site with an interactive map. Excel–the tool that most people have and use to create pie charts–can be used to create some outstanding visualizations.

Neal Lesh of Dimagi presents trends in mHealth systems from over 175 CommCare projects

Open data

Most importantly, we are all looking forward to the day when open data is the standard. Many organizations spend a lot of time and money collecting the same data. If open data was the standard, available data can be used as baselines and potentially show impact after a project. Open data can also push for data structure standards (e.g., IATI) and allow data to be decentralized with application programming interfaces (APIs) connecting the data sources.

The challenges technology introduces to monitoring and evaluation, like data security and access, are topics we are also currently discussing in our Tech for M&E online course with a class of 100 students from all over the world. Due to popular demand, we are offering the next Tech for M&E course in January 2015. If you are interested in joining the discussion, apply before November 1 to get $100 off the full price of the course during this early bird discount period for the next Tech for M&E course.

If you did attend the event, what did you take away from the conference? Did you attend the conference in New York? Share some of your highlights and insights!

By Timo Luege, TC103: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management facilitator

As Ebola continues to ravage Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, people from all around the world are working together to stop the disease. In addition to the life saving work of medical staff, logisticians and community organizers, information and communication technology (ICT) is also playing a vital part in supporting their work.

After consulting the TechChange Alumni community and other experts in international development and humanitarian assistance, I pulled together a list of different technologies being applied to manage Ebola. Below are six examples showing how ICT is already making a difference in the current crisis.

1. Tracing outbreaks with mapping and geolocation
Aside from isolating patients in a safe environment, one of the biggest challenges in the Ebola response is tracing all contacts that an infected person has been in touch with. While that is difficult enough in developed countries, imagine how much more difficult it is in countries where you don’t know the names of many of the villages. It’s not very helpful if someone tells you “I come from Bendou” if you don’t know how many villages with that name exist nor where they are. The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team has helped this process through creating maps since the beginning of the response.

See: West Africa Ebola Outbreak – Six months of sustained efforts by the OpenStreetMap community.

Map of Monrovia in OpenStreetMap before and after volunteers mapped the city in response to the Ebola crisis. (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap)

In addition, the Standby Task Force is supporting the response by helping to collect, clean and verify data about health facilities in the affected countries. The information will then be published on UN OCHA’s new platform for sharing of humanitarian data.

2. Gathering Ebola information with digital data collection forms
Contact tracing involves interviewing a lot of people and in most cases that means writing information down on paper which then has to be entered into a computer. That process is both slow and prone to errors. According to this Forbes article, US based Magpi, who just won a Kopernik award, is helping organizations working in the Ebola response to replace their paper forms with digital forms that enumerators can fill out using their phones.

Digital forms not only save time and prevent errors when transcribing information, well designed digital forms also contain simple error checking routines such as “you can’t be older than 100 years”.

If you are interested in digital forms, check out the free and open source Kobo Toolbox.

3. Connecting the sick with their relatives using local Wi-Fi networks
Elaine Burroughs, a Save the Children staff member who is also TechChange alumna of Mobiles for International Development, shared that they are using their local Wi-Fi network to connect patients in the isolation ward with the relatives through video calls. Both computers have to be within the same network because local internet connections are too slow. In situations where video calls are not possible, they provide patients with cheap mobile phones so that they can talk with their relatives that way. Elaine added: “Several survivors have told us that what kept them going was being able to speak with their family and not feel so isolated when surrounded by people in hazmat suits.”

4. Sharing and receiving Ebola information via SMS text messages
I have heard about a number of different SMS systems that are currently being set up. Some are mainly to share information, others also to receive information.

mHero is an SMS system specifically designed to share information with health workers. It works with UNICEF’s RapidPro system, a white label version of Kigali-based TextIt which is one of the best SMS communication systems I know. RapidPro is also at the heart of a two-way communication system that is currently being set up by UNICEF, Plan International, and the Scouts.

The IFRC is of course using TERA to share SMS, a system that was developed in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake and already used in Sierra Leone during a recent cholera outbreak.

5. Mythbusting for diaspora communities via social media
Social media also has a place, though not as much as some people think. With internet penetration at less than 5 per cent in Liberia and less than 2 per cent in Sierra Leone and Guinea, it is simply not relevant for most people – unlike radio for example. However, all of these countries have huge diasporas. The Liberian diaspora in the US alone is thought to be as many as 450,000 people strong – and they all have access to social media. Experiences from Haiti and the Philippines show that the diaspora is an important information channel for the people living in affected countries. Very often they assume that their relatives in the US or Europe will know more, not least because many don’t trust their own governments to tell the truth.
Social media can play an important role in correcting misinformation and indeed, both the WHO and the CDC are using their social media channels in this way.

6. Supporting translations of Ebola information remotely online
Last but not least, Translators Without Borders is helping NGOs remotely from all over the world to translate posters into local languages.

Low tech does it
As a final word, I’d like to add that while technology can make a real difference we must not forget that very often low tech solutions will be more efficient than high tech solutions – it depends on what is more appropriate for the context. So don’t start an SMS campaign or launch a drone just because you can. It’s not about what you want to do. It’s not about technology. It’s about what’s best for the people we are there to help.

A Summary Infographic

We will be discussing these technology tools, Ebola, and many similar issues in TC103: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management and TC103: mHealth – Mobiles for Public Health. Register by October 31 and save $50 off each of these courses.

Do you have additional examples of how ICT is helping in the Ebola response? Please share them in the comments!

This post originally appeared in Social Media for Good.

About the TC103 facilitator: Timo Luege

The field of digital data collection is constantly and rapidly changing, and as we’ve seen in the many iterations of our online courses on Mobiles for International Development and mHealth, Magpi has been a leading innovator in mobile data collection.

That’s why we were not surprised to learn that Magpi has been ranked “Top Digital Data Collection App” by Kopernik, a Rockefeller Foundation and Asia Community Ventures non-profit that ranks technology for development tools in their “Impact Tracker Technology” program.

Rankings for this category were based on scoring for criteria including affordability, usability, rapidity – the “ability to send and receive large volumes of data on a real-time basis”, scalability, and transferability – “flexibility in using the services for different purposes, sectors, and contexts”. This is first time Magpi has appeared on this Kopernik list where the judges tested the tools in the field.

For those who might not yet be familiar with Magpi, it is a user-friendly mobile data collection application that works on various mobile devices. Magpi uses SMS and audio messaging, and is built specifically for organizations with limited IT and financial resources. The company formally known as DataDyne is now Magpi and they have retired the DataDyne name as well as updated their website here, which lists some of the new comprehensive features they’ve recently added. Magpi is led by Joel Selanikio, who is also an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University’s Department of Pediatrics

Congratulations to the Magpi team! We look forward to having you guys join us again in our upcoming online courses!

The Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) has been gathering and databasing all the news events related to conflict and political protest dating back to 1979. GDELT continues to be fed new data through the various global news services, automatically updating every day. At the end of July GDELT released their Global Dashboard which visualizes all of their data collected from February 2014 to present on a map of the world. It’s a fantastic tool for conflict management and resolution professionals who are interested in big data, since it takes their information and puts it in a visually attractive, easily navigable format. This is an exciting development, so how does it work and what can peacebuilding practitioners get out of using GDELT’s event data?

The first thing to keep in mind is that the Dashboard is new. As it stands there are only two filters for event data (‘conflict’ or ‘protest’), but there are plans to expand these filters so that users can easily focus on the events that are of most interest. For now they’ve done a pretty good job of helping filter out conflict events, which are basically events involving kinetic violence, from protest events, which could end up being violent but are generally more along the lines of protests and social action. While basic, these are good starting points for an initial filter. The nice thing about the dashboard though is that if I have some expertise about the region or event I’m interested in gathering data on, I don’t need the filters because I can use geography and date to narrow my search. The Dashboard allows the user to take advantage of their contextual knowledge to filter the data, so while the built-in filters that come later will be helpful researchers can still use the database efficiently now.

Let’s say we’re interested in recent protest events in South Africa, but we want to know if there have been any in smaller cities, since we know that there’s likely to be a lot of political action in places like Cape Town and Johannesburg. I started with the Dashboard zoomed out to the maximum, so I could see the whole world, then went to the bottom left and set the date that I was interested in seeing news from. For this test I picked August 3, 2014. Below is what the screen looked like at this point:

We can see the whole world, and in South Africa there are big dots indicating aggregated data. Since I want to see what’s happened outside the main cities, I zoomed in until the dots started to disaggregate, then I selected the ‘protest’ filter to remove the ‘conflict’ events. Once I was zoomed in the filter was set, I found that there was a protest event in Port Elizabeth so I clicked on the dot and a box with the web addresses for news articles about a protest against money being spent on a museum appeared:

I clicked on the Google News link, which took me to the related articles that Google had collected about that protest and read one that had been reposted by a local news service from the Agence France-Presse:

I managed to do this in a few minutes using the Dashboard, work that would have taken longer if I was just doing searches for protest news out of South Africa. What makes the tool really useful is that I can search in a few different dimensions. If want to know if this is the first time there has been social action around the museum in Port Elizabeth, I can leave the map zoomed in to that location and scan through the dates going back to February. What we can do, relatively easily, is see events and narratives spatially and analyze how they change over time.

This is a big dataset, so I thought hard about what its value added is from a methodology perspective. As I dug through the data, I realized something important. I’m not sure this is a database that will be particularly useful for forecasting or predictive analysis. You might be able to identify some trends (and that’s certainly a valid task!), but since the data itself is news reports there’s going to be a lot of variation across tone and word choice, lag between event and publication, and a whole host of other things that will make predictive analysis difficult.

As a qualitative dataset though, the GDELT data has incredible value. A colleague of mine pointed out that the Dashboard can help us understand how the media conceptualizes and broadcasts violence at the local level. Understanding how news media, especially local media, report things like risk or political issues is valuable for conflict analysts and peacebuilding professionals. I would argue that this is actually more valuable than forecasting or predictive modeling; if we understand at a deeper level why people would turn to violence, and how the local media narrative distills or diffuses their perception of risk or grievance, then interventions such as negotiation, mediation and political settlements can be better tailored to the local context.

Big Data is a space that is both alluring and enigmatic for conflict resolution professionals. One of the key challenges has always been making the data available in a way that is intuitive for non-technical experts to use. GDELT’s Dashboard is a great start to this, and the possibilities for improving our understanding of conflict through the narratives we can observe in the media are going to grow rapidly in the next few years.

This post originally appeared in Insight for Conflict on September 19, 2014.

TechChange COO Chris Neu is fond of pointing out that in social change, technology is only 10% of the equation while the rest is about the humans using that technology. That 10% is a pretty powerful percentage though, and when technology is used effectively, it can amplify voices of peace and empower local communities that want to find alternatives to violence. It’s easy to forget though that technology isn’t the most important part of any information and communication technology (ICT) for peacebuilding enterprise; it’s the people, both the beneficiaries and the peacebuilders (who can be one and the same!). Because what we’re doing with ICTs in any peacebuilding context involves asking people to share data and participate in interventions, we must be aware of the risks participants face and how to manage those risks. The problem is that we face a variety of risks at multiple different levels when using ICTs in any political environment, so what are a few things we can focus on while planning a project?

An Institutional Review Process as a Starting Point
There are a variety of simple starting points. For example, if you are an academic or affiliated with an academic institution, they require you to go through an institutional review process before you can do any research involving human subjects. This would include doing a crowdsourcing project using SMS text messaging or social media. Many institutions have some kind of process like this, so check before you deploy your project. While tedious, the process of defending your risk management procedures can help you identify a lot of problems before you even start. If you don’t have an internal review board, grab a copy of the ICRC’s “Professional Standards for Protection Work” and check your project design and risk management against the recommendations in Chapter 6.

Along with doing this kind of standard review, what are some other factors that are unique to ICTs that you should be aware of?

1) National Infrastructure and Regulatory Policy
The first is that ICTs are part of national infrastructure, and are regulated at the national level. When you use any kind of transmission technology in a country, the rules for how that data is transmitted, stored and shared are set at the national level as part of regulatory policy. If the government in the country you’re working in is repressive, chances are they have very broad powers to access electronic information since they wrote the regulations stipulating data privacy. In general locals will be aware of the level of surveillance in their lives, so do your legal homework about the regulations that people have actively or passively adapted to. These are usually titled something like “Telecommunications Act” or “Electronic Transmission Act”, and are often available for public viewing via the web.

2) Legal Compliance
If you’re going to go forward with an ICT-supported peacebuilding program after doing your legal homework, ethical practice starts at home. Unless you are reasonably adept at reading and interpreting legislation, did you have someone with a legislative or legal background interpret the privacy laws in the country you’re about to work in? Does your team have someone with expertise on the technical and policy aspects of using ICTs in a conflict-affected or high risk environment? Has the entire project team had some basic training in how ICTs work? For example, does everyone understand the basics of how a mobile phone works, how to protect sensitive data, and the implications of having people share data on electronic platforms? Before showing up in a conflict-zone and asking people to participate in your project, you should make sure your team understands the risks they are asking people to take.

3) Informed consent
What do the local project participants know about ICTs? In terms of safety, people are generally aware of what will get them in trouble. Always assume that your perception of risk in a country is under-informed, even if you’ve read the laws and done some regulatory analysis. With this in mind, if you’re going to ask people to take risks sharing electronic information (always assume that sharing electronic information is risky), do you have a process for assessing your participants’ knowledge of ICTs and then addressing any gaps through training? Do you and your team understand the technology and regulations well enough to make the risks to partners clear, and if they still choose to participate provide risk management training? Informed consent means making sure you and your partners are both equally clear on the risks involved in what ever project you’re doing.

Peacebuilding carries some level of inherent risk – after all, we’re dealing with conflict and violence. ICTs carry a unique set of risks, compounded by both the nature of digital information and the capacity for governments and conflict entrepreneurs to exploit this information. An effective ICT for peacebuilding program addresses these risks from both the legal and technical sides, so that implementers and local partners are equally informed and able to use the tools in the safest, most effective way.

Want to learn more about the ethical issues facing peacebuilders using technology? Enroll now in our Technology for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding online course which runs October 6 – 31, 2014

Image source: Tech Republic