Disaster & Humanitarian Relief

Mobile Tech in Humanitarian and Disaster Relief

Natural disasters and humanitarian crises can damage infrastructure, redistribute populations, and make it difficult for relief organizations to do their work; in these situations, mobile communications can be the best way to organize disaster relief efforts and provide early warning systems.

The GSMA has released finalists for the Global Mobile Awards (Editor's Disclosure: MobileActive's Katrin Verclas is a judge for the awards in the category focused on mobile programs for "Underserved Communities.")

The nominees in the "Best Use of Mobile in Emergency or Humanitarian Situations" struck us as particularly interesting. They demonstrate an interesting and varied use of mobile technology in an emergency. Here are a few.

01.31.12 AnneryanHeatwole Disaster & Humanitarian Relief

Txteagle in Flight: Mobile Data Collection for Disaster Preparedness

Txteagle is a data collection and engagement platform that leverages mobile airtime compensation for data collection and customer engagement. It is currently used by one nonprofit organization to survey constituents about disaster preparedness. We looked into the company and one of its customers.

Txteagle widely advertises its ability to reach 2.1 billion mobile subscribers currently. MobileActive.org spoke with Nathan Eagle, co-founder of the service, to learn more about how it works, how many active participants there are and where some of the large numbers come from. We also spoke with Terry Gibson, project manager for the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction, who is currently using txteagle to collect mobile data on 40,000 respondents in 48 countries.

02.07.11 MelissaUlbricht Disaster & Humanitarian Relief

Mapping SMS Incident Reports: A Review of Ushahidi and Managing News

In this how-to, we test out two systems for SMS incident mapping. Incident mapping is a simple but powerful concept that does what it says - using SMS to report a given incidence and mapping the data geographically.

It has been used in various scenarios ranging from reports from natural disasters to tracking violent crime, citizen reporting in elections.

Ushahidi, a platform for map and time-based visualizations of text reports, has been used most prominently in crisis mapping. The first instance of Ushahidi tracked the post-election violence in Kenya in 2007, closely followed by an instance covering outbreaks of xenophobic violence in South Africa in early 2008. Following the Haiti earthquake in early 2010, an Ushahidi deployment at Tufts University provided a platform for aggregating, translating and disseminating incident reports and requests for assistance. Ushahidi is an open-source PHP/Javascript platform.

05.03.10 MelissaLoudon Advocacy Citizen Media Democratic Participation Disaster & Humanitarian Relief Health

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