Members of a team from Madras, India who participated in the ICRC’s EnableMakeathon make final adjustments before showing their invention to judges. Photo: ICRC
It’s a given that mobile phones have changed nearly every aspect of life, from banking to finding one’s way when lost. They are also a staple part of the humanitarian toolkit, used for data collection, cash transfers and mapping, among many other things. Likewise, drones or ‘unmanned aerial vehicles’ have received a lot of attention in humanitarian circles because of their potential for doing field assessments or for bringing aid such as medical supplies to places where access is difficult.
But the focus of humanitarian innovation is rapidly widening. As aid agencies’ use of mobile phones in their work is becoming more sophisticated, their understanding of how to use, or not use, drones is also evolving. During much of this process, however, humanitarians have largely been beneficiaries of technologies already developed in the private sector.
But that is changing as more humanitarian organizations seek to drive technological change or at least to better understand developing technologies and apply them more quickly in the field. After all, mobile phones were ubiquitous in many parts of the world for a long time before they became part of the aid workers’ toolkit.
Getting ahead of the curve, and working with local communities to best understand their needs, also puts everyone in a better position to ensure that the technologies being developed empower local communities and don’t create new vulnerabilities. This is a key idea behind the Red Cross Red Crescent’s ‘principled approach to innovation’, in which humanitarian values are placed at centre of the creative process.
But not all innovations involve gadgets or computer software. New platforms for sharing developments, such as the recently launched Movement website RedInnovation.org, aim to tackle problems through crowdsourcing, posing questions to fellow humanitarians about challenges such as how to develop a water purification system “that can be set up within a short period of time and continue to function for a long time without the need for maintenance… The heavy machines, tablets and filter systems [available] cannot yet provide this solution.”
Technology becomes an enabler for that most ancient of innovative incubators — conversation and brainstorming — but at a global scale.
When it comes to engineering humanitarian solutions, the answers sometimes have less to do with new gizmos than with new attitudes, behaviours, management or partnership models. Here are a few interesting innovations cropping up around the Movement.
Photo: Katherine Mueller/IFRC
Members of a Liberian Red Cross Safe and Dignified Burial team record data about Ebola cases using mobile phones, which allows for later analysis and mapping of cases. Photo: Victor Lacken/IFRC
It’s the stuff of science fiction: machines that make decisions about who and when to kill. Referred to as “autonomous weapons”, they’re already in use to some degree. But as more sophisticated systems are being developed we wanted to an expert in the field about whether such systems comply with international humanitarian law and what it means for humanity to give machines the power over human life and death.
In this episode, we talk with humanitarian communicator Kathy Mueller who produced our first magazine podcast series, The Wildfire Diaries, about massive wildfires in Northern Canada in 2017. We talk about that series, her many international missions, and the big changes in humanitarian communications since she began with the Canadian Red Cross almost 20 years ago.
In this episode, we talk about the power of storytelling to inform and inspire. “Storytelling is a fundamental aspect of human communication,” says our guest Prodip, a volunteer and multi-media storyteller for the Bangladesh Red Crescent. “It inspires us to be a hero of our own community.” We also speak with one such community hero, Dalal al-Taji, a longtime volunteer and advocate for inclusion of people with disabilities in emergencies response. “In disasters. persons with disabilities sometimes get forgotten.”
A mother’s search for her daughter highlights how easily people fall out of touch — even in the digital age.
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