PreMAND field workers testing data collection tablets in Navrongo, Ghana (Photo: N. Smith)

Mira Gupta, one of the star alumna of our courses on Mapping for International Development and Technology for Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E), is a Senior Research Specialist at the University of Michigan Medical School (UMMS). Last October, USAID awarded UMMS $1.44 million to assess maternal and neonatal mortality in northern Ghana. This 36-month project, “Preventing Maternal and Neonatal Mortality in Rural Northern Ghana” (also referred to as PreMAND: Preventing Maternal and Neonatal Deaths) will help USAID, the Ghana Health Service, and the Ghana Ministry of Health design interventions to prevent maternal and neonatal mortality by investigating the social, cultural and behavioral determinants of such deaths across four districts in northern Ghana. For this project, UMMS will be partnering with the Navrongo Health Research Centre and Development Seed.

Project Regions and Districts

Project Regions and Districts

We sat down with Mira to learn more about this project and how her TechChange trainings in digital mapping and technology for M&E gave her the skills and background she needed to develop her team’s project in Ghana.

1. What interested you in taking the Mapping for International Development and the Tech for M&E online courses?
I was in the process of trying to learn everything I could about our GIS options when I heard about TechChange’s Mapping for International Development course. It provided a fantastic introduction to the range of approaches being used on international development projects and the variety of organizations working in that space. The course material helped me identify which types of visualizations would be most appropriate for my team’s research. I especially benefited from the many sectors represented in the TechChange sessions because while I was trying to create a project for the Health sector, I actually learn best through a Democracy and Governance framework given my previous background in this field. TechChange provided access to mapping specialists in both areas through its instructors and other class participants.

Just as I heard of the mapping course right as I needed it, the same thing happened again with the Technology for M&E course, which I took a year later. By that point, the PreMAND project had just been awarded and I learned that I would be responsible for the evaluation components. I was excited to take the TechChange course because I knew it would provide a great overview of the many different tools being used, and that I would benefit immensely from the participation of classmates working on projects in similar settings. As expected, the content presented was incredibly valuable in informing our project approach in terms of our field data collection, methods of analysis, and presentation of findings.

2. How did the mapping component of this USAID-funded project come together?

The Three Project Phases: Research will inform the visualisations, which will inform programming

The Three Project Phases: Research will inform the Visualisations, which will inform Programming

While working on a maternal and neonatal health qualitative study a couple of years ago, I sensed that there were themes and patterns in the data that were difficult to verify since the locations of the respondents had not been geocoded. Some of the variables indicated 50/50 probabilities of any particular outcome, which seemed to suggest that there was no pattern whatsoever when viewed as a large dataset. Because my background is in Democracy and Governance, I used election maps to illustrate to my research team that once geocoded there might in fact be very distinct geographical trends in the data, drawing parallels to the locational breakdown of political party support in the United States.

I was in the process of researching mapping resources when I first heard about the TechChange’s Mapping for International Development course, and through the course I met some of the mapping experts that ultimately served as key resources in the development of our project strategy. The course gave me the necessary base knowledge to effectively liaise between our health researchers and the mapping experts to determine the best approach to meet our data visualization needs. We were extremely fortunate to have USAID-Ghana release a call for outside-the-box submissions under its Innovate for Health mechanism, right as we were developing our program concept.

3. What are the biggest challenges you anticipate in undertaking this project?
For the visualization component, generating the base layer maps will be more difficult than we originally anticipated. The various pieces of data we need are spread throughout different government sources such as the Ghana Statistical Service, the Lands Commission, and the Ministry of Roads and Highways. We will need to consult with each of these groups (and likely many others), to explore whether or not they will allow their data to be used by our project. It will require some agility on our part, as we need to stay flexible enough so that we collect any outstanding geographic data we may need through our team of field workers. While there are many moving pieces at the moment, it’s exciting for us to think that we’re building what may be the most comprehensive geographic base layer map of the region, as an initial step in developing our health indicator analysis tool.

There are also a handful of challenges related to evaluation. The primary purpose of our project is to provide new information to clarify the roles of social and cultural factors in determining maternal and neonatal deaths, and shed light on a valuable set of drivers which up until now have been unclear. We are currently in the process of finalizing our M&E framework, which has been a complex process because our project doesn’t fit the mold that most performance indicators are designed for. As a result we’ve been carefully drafting our own custom indicators through which we’ll measure our project’s progress and impact.

One of our most interesting evaluation challenges has been the development of our Environmental Mitigation and Monitoring Plan, which is traditionally intended as a tool for implementing partners to take stock of the impacts their work could have on the natural environment. In our case, we’re using it as a tool to think through our ethical approach to the potential impact of our project on the social and cultural landscape, given the challenges associated with collecting very sensitive health information and the need for data privacy. It’s pushing our team to think through every step of our project from the perspective of our various stakeholders, and has yielded many valuable insights that have strengthened our program approach.

4. What are the tools that you became familiar with in Mapping for International Development and M&E and plan on using in this project and how will you apply them to your project?
I came into Mapping for International Development knowing very little about the resources available in that space. Several of the tools that I became familiar with through the class, such as OpenStreetMap, MapBox and QGIS were highly applicable to our project in Ghana. After participating in the session led by Democracy International and Development Seed, I reached out to those instructors for their input on how I could best translate my project concept into actionable steps.

The visualizations I hoped to create were complex enough that I soon realized it would make the most sense for our research team to work directly with a mapping firm. We were so impressed by the technical feedback and past projects of Development Seed that we established a formal partnership with them and worked together to refine the vision for the project that was ultimately funded. TechChange’s training gave me the knowledge I needed to select the right partner and understand how best to combine our research goals with the available mapping resources to maximize our project’s impact.

Programs used on the PreMAND project

Programs used on the PreMAND project

In Technology for M&E I learned about the capabilities of different devices, survey apps—those able to capture geodata were of particular interest to me—and even project management tools. There were many helpful conversations both in the class sessions as well as in the participant-led threads around the data collection process, data privacy, and the ways in which project findings can be best communicated to a variety of stakeholder groups. What I found to be most relevant and applicable to our Ghana project were the conversations surrounding human-centered design, and the use of rich qualitative data. I gained a lot from the session led by Marc Maxson of GlobalGiving, who discussed which forms of data are the richest and easiest to interpret. The University of Michigan and our partner the Navrongo Health Research Centre already excel in qualitative data collection techniques, but the conversations throughout the TechChange M&E course inspired some new ideas as to how we might incorporate multimedia such as video and photographs in our qualitative data collection process to make our project deliverables that much more substantive.

5. What is your advice for researchers working to integrate more data visualization and mapping in their research and project interventions?
My advice would be to focus on the end user of your data and identify their needs and interests early in the process. That clarity can then be used to inform 1) what content will be most useful, and 2) what presentation format(s) will be most effective. It’s important to do some form of a needs assessment and let stakeholder feedback guide the project’s design.

In the case of our Ghana project, we are implementing a two-prong approach to our visualizations because both the government representatives and our donor will find an interactive web application most useful, while local community members in the rural North will benefit more from group discussions centered around printed maps.

Feedback loop with two stakeholder groups: the government of Ghana and local communities

Feedback loop with two stakeholder groups: the government of Ghana and local communities

It is common to sometimes present health indicator data solely as points on a map, but we are designing our visualizations to be much more detailed with background layers including health facilities, schools, compounds and roads so that those viewing the health indicator data can orient themselves a bit better to the local context. Had our end-users only been the leaders of those individual communities such detailed maps may not have been necessary. Similarly, the visualizations for one stakeholder group might incorporate a lot of words or even narrative stories based on their level of education, while for other stakeholders, those visualizations will be more image-based and we’ll orient them to the maps through presentations in their local communities.

About Mira Gupta

Mira Gupta

Mira Gupta is a Senior Research Specialist at the University of Michigan Medical School (UMMS), where she focuses on program design, strategy and evaluation. She has developed successful international aid projects in 18 countries, including 13 in Africa. Mira began her career in the Democracy and Governance sector where she worked for organizations such as IFES, the National Democratic Institute, and the Carter Center. She also developed projects in the Economic Risk and Conflict Mitigation sectors before transitioning into Global Health. Her research on the effects of local power dynamics on health-seeking behavior in northern Ghana is published the current edition of Global Public Health.

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

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

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“.

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.

Monrovia OSM pre-Ebola
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

TechChange Ebola 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

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“.

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:

GDELT Global Dashboard

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: GDELT Global Dashboard: South Africa

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:

"South African shantytowns residents force anti-apartheid museum to close," 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. 

 

Some 85 percent of the world population has access to Internet nowadays. An increasing number of users venture online with a mobile device – smartphone or tablet – rather than with a PC. About 25 percent of the world population uses social media, while three-quarters of the online population uses one or more social networking sites. Around the world, there are some 1.28 billion Facebook users, with 540 million on YouTube, 187 million on LinkedIn, and 255 million on Twitter. (Source: Brief History of Social Media)

The unprecedented pace of technological advance over the past years, gave millions of people around the world the opportunity to use internet, social media platforms and mobile phones not just to consume information but also to produce it. The increasing sense of empowerment that social media lends its users, regardless of where and who they are, has led to a number of “social media revolutions” credited with toppling governments and totalitarian regimes around the world.

The Arab Spring is often heralded as one of history’s biggest social media victories. This wave of protests began in December 2010 and proceeded through 2011 as rulers were forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and protests broke out in other countries in the region, including in Bahrain, Syria, Algeria, Iraq and Jordan, to name just a few. While there was no cohesive campaign or strategy at grassroots level, social media played a crucial role during this time, allowing individuals to organise themselves, communicate and voice their complaints publicly. Many contributed to the virtual protests as well as the physical ones through the use of social media. Combined, these efforts caused governments to take notice.

The Internet and new technologies are increasingly influencing not only the way people respond to and recover from conflicts, but also the way they further engage in conflict transformation and peacebuilding. Part of creating communities that can advance peacebuilding is harnessing the power of technology to bring people together, promote conflict management and resolution, and create the public will to change attitudes and behaviours.

#GazaChildren

New tools for monitoring violence, sustaining dialogue during peace processes, and localising peacebuilding efforts have emerged in recent years as access to mobile phones and internet has increased worldwide. The outreach of these tools goes well beyond the conflict resolution expert circle, enabling people around the globe to share first-hand witness reports of violence, social unrest, human rights infringements, election fraud, political instability, etc. and become agents of change within their own communities. This collaborative approach is known as ‘crowdsourcing’ (i.e. crowd + outsourcing).

In early 2008, in the midst of post-election violence, Kenyans have for the first time used the Ushahidi open-source platform (Ushahidi is the Swahili term for ‘witness’ or ‘testimony’) to collect, visualise and interactively map eyewitness accounts of violence incidents (which would have otherwise remained largely unreported by media, government or police).

Ushahidi Kenya

The Syria Tracker Crisis Map is another impressive crowdsourcing effort launched shortly after the protests began, in April 2011, to collect citizen reports on human rights violations and casualties. Combining automated data mining and crowdsourced human intelligence, the Syria Tracker provides a continually updated list of eyewitness reports from within Syria, often accompanied by media links; aggregate reports including analysis and visualisations of deaths and atrocities in Syria; as well as a stream of content-filtered media from news, social media (Twitter and Facebook) and official sources. This approach could provide a powerful means to assess the human cost of war in Syria.

Syria Tracker Crisis

CrisisNET is another tool which harnesses ‘big data’ coming from social media to map violence. Their Syria mapping is as accurate as the one BBC did with reporters on the ground.

CrisisNET

There are several ways in which today’s social media can be leveraged to prevent and manage conflict. Early warning is critical for early response. Permanent conflict monitoring for real-time awareness can help inform appropriate and timely interventions. Likewise, social media can provide real-time feedback on what works and what doesn’t, thus serving as a complementary channel of information for impact evaluation. Finally, as the Arab Spring mobilisation has clearly shown, social media can facilitate self-organisation for early response. Needless to say, the capacity to self-organise also renders conflict prevention networks more resilient. In other words, social media can be used to power civil resistance in nonviolent movements that seek to end oppression and bloodshed. As one Egyptian activist reported during the revolution, “We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.” Social media can be similarly leveraged to facilitate a resilient people-centered approach to conflict prevention.

Twitter and social activism

This post originally appeared on Pax Christi International.

About Ramona Kundt

Ramona Kundt

Ramona Kundt is a Brussels-based communications professional working with Pax Christi International, a network of peacebuilding NGOs. Her work is focused on advocacy, campaigning and communications coordination on issues pertaining human rights, human security, disarmament, religion and violent conflict. An alumna of TechChange online courses in Social Media for Social Change and Technology for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding, she is particularly interested in how social media can influence the way people respond to conflicts, and engage in conflict transformation and peacebuilding, for a lasting positive social change. She has volunteered with various humanitarian and development projects in Africa, most recently in the Maai Mahiu Internally Displaced Persons Camp, in Kenya.

 

In our modern times of media cycles fighting for our short attention spans, it is easy to ride the momentum of a highly visible campaign that can quickly fizzle out once another competing story emerges. Since the kidnappings of approximately 300 Nigerian girls by militant Islamist group Boko Haram last month, the international community has embraced the hashtag, “#BringBackOurGirls”, in a very vocal and visible social media campaign demanding action to rescue the Chibok girls. But one month since the mass kidnapping without the rescue of the girls, do we need to take a different approach? Will #BringBackOurGirls be just another campaign we forget about once the next celebrity scandal becomes breaking news?

#BringBackOurGirls goes global starting in Nigeria

Most of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign activity has been highly visible on Twitter, Facebook, and international media outlets. In this fascinating Twitter heat map created using the tool, CartoDB, featured in TIME Magazine, we can see a time-lapsed digital map of how the hashtag, “#BringBackOurGirls” spread globally, starting organically from within Nigeria in mid April.

(We’ll be touching upon CartoDB, and other digital mapping tools in our upcoming Mapping for International Development course later this month.)

The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag has been embraced widely by many public figures and has garnered wide support across the world. Michelle Obama, David Cameron, and Malala Yusafzai have posted images with the hashtag, along with celebrities such as Ellen Degeneres, Angelina Jolie, and Dwayne Johnson. To date, nearly 1 million people signed the Change.org petition. Countries including the USA, UK, China, Israel have pledged to join the rescue efforts, and other human rights campaigns have joined the #BringBackOurGirls Twitter momentum, as seen on this Hashtagify map.

hashtagify #BringBackOurGirls

Is #BringBackOurGirls repeating the mistakes of #KONY2012?

Kony_2012_Poster_3

A great example of a past campaign where this happened was with the KONY2012 campaign, which brought some albeit short-lived urgency to addressing the child soldiers recruited by Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Michael Poffenberger, who worked on that campaign, will join us a guest expert in TC110: Social Media for Social Change online course in June 2013 and compare it the current #BringBackOurGirls campaign. Many have drawn parallels to both campaigns and warned of the false optimism that hyped social media messages can bring when context is not fully considered and understood.

According to Lauren Wolfe of Foreign Policy magazine, “Understanding what has happened to the Nigerian girls and how to rescue them means beginning to face what has happened to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of girls over years in global armed conflict.” To some critics, this hashtag trivializes the weaknesses of Nigerian democracy that have been exposed. Critics of using social media in advocacy campaigns have used the term “slacktivism” to describe the passive, minimal effort needed to participate in these movements. Others have cited such media waves being exploited for individual gain, as opposed to genuinely benefiting the girls. Florida State University Political Science professor, Will H. Moore, argues that this hashtag activism is not only hurting the larger cause of rescuing the kidnapped girls, but actually helping Boko Haram. Jumoke Balogun, Co-Founder of CompareAfrique, also highlights the limits of the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag impact.

Hashtag activism, alone, is not enough

With all this social media activity and international press, what actual progress has been made in rescuing the kidnapped girls? If the objective is raising awareness of the issue, yes, the hashtag has been successful. If the objective is to rescue the girls, we still have a long way to go, even if the hashtag campaign has been part of a multi-pronged approach to galvanize resources into action.

The bottom line: social media can be a powerful tool to bring visibility and awareness to a cause, but a hashtag alone is not enough to bring about social change. There are a myriad of resources that must be coordinated to effectively implement this rescue mission, which will only become more difficult as more time passes. However, prioritizing and shining a sustained light on the problem, instead getting distracted by competing media cycles on celebrities getting into petty fights, is the first step toward a solution.

===

What do you think about the impact of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign? We’re only scratching the surface here on the topic of social media for social change and invite you continue the discussion with us in our upcoming Social Media for Social Change online course which runs June 16 – July 11, 2014.

By Sairah Yusuf, TC141: Mapping for International Development (Fall 2013) alumna

Before taking this Mapping for International Development course last fall, I had absolutely no previous background on mapping tools, so everything about digital mapping was new to me. For my course final mapping project, I created a digital map of the countries and locations of participants of an international training camp held by Generations For Peace (GFP) in November 2013 (Amman Camp 2013). Given my involvement in evaluating the impact of this training, I wanted a way to visualise the effectiveness of the training.

Here are the steps that I took for my introductory experience in creating a map for my work at Generations For Peace:

Step 1: Define the purpose of your map

Throughout the course, the importance of defining the purpose of your digital map as a first step emerged with debates regarding representation and privacy concerns. My aim with this map is to understand the cascading effect over time of these Generations For Peace volunteers, who will be passing on their skills to new volunteers in their home countries in the Middle East. By maintaining this map from November 2013 to November 2015, I hope that it will be possible to visually demonstrate the geographical impact of this training.

Step 2: Select your dataset

I used data from Amman Camp 2013, including the home country of each individual trained and the geographical reach of the training. I felt that this data was simple enough to work with, given that this was my first exposure to mapping. That said, I had to create the dataset from scratch, entering street addresses/locations for each participant.

Geocoding data in the MENA region proved to be the biggest challenge because geocodes for most street addresses (which were predominantly in Arabic) could not be found in the APIs I used. In addition, we had trainees from the occupied Palestinian territories at the GFP Camp. I struggled with pinpointing their locations on the map since the occupied Palestinian territories did not show up as a country option in many of the geocoding tools I tried. I had to get around this by tagging individuals from this region as hailing from Israel and then manually changing the name later to reflect their location. This issue was important to deal with because I did not want any of these trainees to view the map I had created and feel like I had misrepresented where they were from in any way due to geo-political sensitivities.

Step 3: Select your mapping tool or software

The Mapping course featured a variety of tools including Google Maps Engine, MapBox, Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, CaerusGeo, and Palantir. I chose the Mapbox/TileMill combination over other options because I felt it allowed me to customise my map more – I could colour in different countries and introduce different levels of interactivity within the map.

Step 4: Choose your design

My design choices were partly shaped by wanting to keep my map easily readable, using block colours and simple labels, and also to keep my map customisation as simple as possible since this was my first mapping exercise. I also wanted the countries in question to stand out quite clearly.

By introducing dots in different colours for new individuals these volunteers train in their own countries, over the course of 2 years, for example, this would show how much of a geographical “spread” the training from Nov ’13 had. It would also help distinguish between volunteers with different levels of training. For example, as time goes on and individuals complete GFP programmes and further training, it is possible to change the colour of the dots representing those who were trained at the original Camp to red, demonstrating their status as a GFP “Pioneer.” Any new volunteers they train can be represented in “blue.” The idea is therefore to improve this map and maintain it over a period of time to represent these changes.

Filling out more details in the second click feature can provide relevant information about each individual – what they’ve done in the past and what programmes they are working on now, for Generations For Peace.

Takeaways:

Basic mapping software can actually be quite accessible, even with very little technical training. However, there’s definitely something of a “glass ceiling” in its use, after which more technical expertise is required. Overall, Mapping for International Development was a really great course, and I’ve already recommended it to others! This online course covers debates in the field in some depth, but also focuses on mapping tools in the field in enough detail to have a platform to build on afterwards.

Are you new to digital mapping as well? Would your work benefit from geographically visualising projects and impact? Register now for our online course on Mapping for International Development.

Bob Corbett’s final mapping project on flood-prone areas in Bangladesh. (Note: this map was prepared as a mapping exercise. Anyone viewing the map should understand that it would need to be reviewed and validated by a qualified expert before it should be relied upon.)

By Bob Corbett, TC141: Mapping for International Development alumnus

During my undergraduate work in Landscape Architecture, I learned a method of analyzing spatial data by overlaying various types of information on acetate sheets or tracing paper developed by Ian McHarg, a Scottish landscape architect. The technique is described here (Note: I am not related to the author). I have always been fascinated by this technique and the GIS capabilities available today make this type of analysis readily possible. This offline overlay technique was the basis of my final mapping project in TC141.

In mid-2011, I launched SMS in Action, an Ushahidi Crowdmap that lists text message based programs worldwide that contribute to the social good. To date, nearly 240 programs classified under 29 different categories have been profiled on SMS in Action and viewed by thousands of visitors from 119 countries. With my general interest in mapping piqued by my Crowdmap experience, I ventured into crisis mapping with the Standby Task Force and more recently, Crisismapper deployments using the Tomnod platform. I have since worked on a variety of crisis mapping efforts from locating refugee encampments in Somalia, to tracking forest and bush fires in Colorado and Australia and identifying storm damage after Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda in the Philippines to name a few.

TC141: Mapping for International Development

Taking the online course, Mapping for International Development, allowed me to combine my interests in ICT4D, international development, data visualization, and a love of maps. I very much enjoyed the format of TC141 with the combination of live presentations, weekly readings and videos, exercises, discussion forums, and the step-by-step instructions and “how-to” materials. Although I tried to “attend” each live presentation the fact that everything was archived for viewing at my convenience was a real plus. This being my first online course, I was surprised at the level of personal interaction available between participants as well as with the facilitator. Chris Neu was a great facilitator: always enthusiastic, arranged interesting presenters and shared an immense amount of information with course participants. I had no specific goals for the course at the outset other than to broaden my knowledge of available mapping technologies. I quickly realized TC141 provided me a chance to gain a capability to work with GIS, a long-term interest of mine. As a result, I selected QGIS, the open source GIS platform as the primary platform upon which to develop my course project.

Mapping with QGIS and MapBox’s TileMill
In a preliminary course exercise we were introduced to MapBox/TileMill. In a follow-up exercise I used MapBox/TileMill to create a simple map of the top ten world coastal cities at risk from flooding due to climate change – including Dhaka, Bangladesh. Given that we have a family friend from Bangladesh, I felt a more detailed investigation of flooding patterns in Bangladesh, an increasingly frequent problem, might lend itself to my major project for the course.

Drawing upon existing sources of information available via the Internet, I located shapefiles for administrative districts, the extent previous flooding, road systems, airport and hospital locations, topographic information, population data and more. After importing this information into QGIS I was able to identify recently flooded and flood prone areas of the country. Seeing how flooding can compartmentalize the country and disrupt the movement of people and relief supplies between areas, I then performed a quick search of key medical facilities and major airports to better understand which would be affected and which might be available to support relief efforts. The QGIS-based flood map was then exported into MapBox/TileMill where it was further refined using the tools and capabilities within the MapBox platform.

Mapping Bangladesh’s Flood-Prone Zones
Given that our Bangladeshi friend is engaged in development activities in the Khulna administrative district, I wanted to see whether flooding in Khulna might impact their area. Based on Internet research, I chose flooding from a 6-meter storm surge as the basis to work from. I then located ground elevation data for Bangladesh and loaded the file into QGIS. By filtering the elevation data I was able to “see” the general extent of flooding that might be expected in Khulna District by a 6-meter storm surge. I was very pleased with the resulting maps and the new skills and capabilities that I had gained. Prior to taking TC141, I was not even aware of QGIS or MapBox/TileMill. I feel compelled to note that my “flood maps” were solely academic mapping exercises and should not be interpreted to be definitive maps of anticipated flooding in Bangladesh. However, it did show me the new capabilities I had developed as a result of TC141.

Mapping in My Future
TC141 offered much more information than I have touched upon here. One area of discussion in the course was OpenStreetMap and Humanitarian OpenStreetMap. With my past involvement with crisis mapping I have developed an interest in pre-disaster planning. Although post-disaster efforts often involve hasty mapping after an event I am interested in what types of information and infrastructure could and should be mapped in advance of disasters as part of a preparedness program. For example, if we believe that climate change is expected to result in an increased frequency and intensity of tropical storms, typhoons, hurricanes, cyclones, etc. shouldn’t first responders and aid agencies have reliable maps to work with prior to a disaster? The Philippines experience, on average, 20 tropical storms per year. Accurate up-to-date maps of facilities and infrastructure needed to recover from such emergencies post-disaster should be mapped in advance in OpenStreetMap as part of a preparedness program. I am interested in learning more about the types of facilities and infrastructure that need to be mapped in advance as part of a preparedness effort and see OpenStreetMap as a logical platform for presenting that information.

Interested in learning how to build your own digital maps using the tools that Bob learned? Enroll now in our 4-week digital mapping course, Mapping for International Development.

As Syria’s civil war draws close to its third anniversary, actionable data for foreign aid workers remains scarce. Although the conflict has seen the birth of civilian reporting agencies (warning, graphic content) which have uploaded more YouTube videos than CBS News, CNN, Fox News, ABC News and the Associated Press combined, basic questions about where humanitarian aid is most needed and which delivery routes are safest remain unanswered.

It was this lack of information that drew Caerus Associates to partner with First Mile Geo to research opinions about living conditions, safety, and resource access from residents in Aleppo, Syria. Formerly the source of 35% of Syria’s manufactured goods, Aleppo has become a major conduit for humanitarian aid crossing the border to Syria from Turkey. Working with teams based on the ground in Syria, Caerus Associates and First Mile Geo were able to obtain essential data from each of Aleppo’s 56 neighborhoods. The study represents the single most detailed project conducted on the Syrian conflict, showing time-series data with neighborhood-by-neighborhood results over a period of four months.

Field teams conducted bi-weekly data collections on the locations of roughly 180 security checkpoints, as well as the conditions of bakeries throughout the city. Field teams also collected data about political perceptions, service access, and the presence of key groups on a monthly basis. The result is a collection of highly detailed maps that show everything from the price of bread in a neighborhood to the presence of armed groups. Of course, maps and data need to be accompanied by analysis and context, which are provided in an accompanying report that shares just a few of the following key findings:

  1. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), an Al-Qaeda affiliated group is taking over Aleppo. While ISIS was a marginal player, controlling only one neighborhood in September of 2013, it now controls 10 neighborhoods – more than any other than any other armed opposition group in Aleppo. ISIS’ reputation for kidnapping aid workers and disrupting humanitarian operations make the neighborhoods it occupies in the east of Aleppo particularly dangerous to access.

Screen Shot 2014-02-25 at 4.24.54 PM.png

  1. The Syrian Government may be actively restricting basic services to opposition-held neighborhoods in Aleppo. Residents who participated in surveys conducted with First Mile Geo reported an average of 6 hours per day of electricity in opposition-held neighborhoods, while those living in government-held areas reported an average of 12 hours per day. Additionally, more than 40% of bakeries – a key source of food in opposition-held Aleppo are closed compared to just 10% of bakeries in government-held areas. The study confirms what many in the humanitarian-aid communities have feared since the beginning of the conflict: the most inaccessible areas of Aleppo are also the ones most in need of humanitarian assistance.

formatted_screenshot.png

First Mile Geo worked with organizers on the ground in Aleppo to survey which bakeries (bread that bakeries produces is a staple food in Aleppo) were still functional.

  1. Lastly, there is little consensus among Aleppines regarding who is the legitimate representative of Syrians. While the just 12% of Syrians felt that the Assad regime was legitimate, less than 2% of the participants said that the Syrian opposition (the “Etilaf”) represented the Syrian people. The majority of Syrians felt that “No One” represented them. Most importantly, these opinions were held evenly across all neighborhoods and did not correlate with whether whether or not a resident lived in a government or opposition-held area. Without a strong mandate from the Syrian people, it’s unclear what (if any) influence is wielded by parties negotiating for peace in Geneva.

Beyond providing key insights about realities on the ground in Aleppo, this study also highlights the importance of geographically oriented information. Even within the geography of one city, the disparities between basic services and safety can vary dramatically between neighborhoods and even city blocks. As developing countries continue to urbanize at a rapid pace, geographic methods such as those used by First Mile Geo will continue to grow in importance for humanitarian organizations looking vulnerable populations.

Interested in digital mapping of Syria or other challenging contexts in international development? Sign up now for our upcoming Mapping for International Development online course which runs May 26 – June 20, 2014. Would you like to access First Mile Geo’s data for your own use? Read their blog post to learn more.

The release of the South Sudan Ushahidi map has spurred an online dialogue on the possibilities and challenges of how we understand crowdsourcing, big data, and technology for conflict management and peacebuilding. A series of blog posts from Chris Neu of TechChange, Daniel Solomon, and myself highlighted these issues, which I wanted to combine with brief descriptions because I think they’re an interesting series for those grappling with how we make use of emerging data and technology tools in pursuit of peace and stability. It’s worth giving all four a read, since they represent a nice arc of thinking about big data for conflict prevention and peacebuilding.

  1. Can a Crisis Map End the Crisis in South Sudan? by Chris Neu. This was the first post about the South Sudan Ushahidi map that got the chain of posts started. Greg Maly had advocated getting a map up as the situation in South Sudan began deteriorating, so with the help of Rob Baker, a deployment was launched. After the map was live, comments came back in – a number were constructively critical and thought provoking. The key points were focused on the utility of the data that could realistically be provided.
  2. Two Tweets Reveal Central Problem for South Sudan Crisis Map by Chris Neu. Chris’ following post brought up the important issue of ethics when using data submitted by individuals in such a chaotic environment. “Is it ethical to restrict information to the public? Is it ethical to reveal information about the vulnerable?” Both questions are valid, but the one that gained some traction focused on the data we expect to get from conflict zones.
  3. The Murky Swamp of Mass Atrocity Data by Daniel Solomon. Up to this point this online discussion had focused on the map and software, so Daniel Solomon took the conversation and framed it in the context of conflict itself. He outlined a set of important issues about how conflict affects data, and thus how our efforts to crowdsource and use big data could actually lead to greater confusion instead of clarity.
  4. Finding Big Data’s Place in Conflict Analysis by Charles Martin-Shields. Daniel Solomon’s post inspired me to think through the methodological challenges of using Big Data for conflict analysis. The two posts got some good traction and discussion going, which is always exciting.

I wanted to pull all four posts together in one place since I found them to be useful individually, and interesting as a whole. They also provide an arc of event, critique, and potential solutions that are useful when practitioners are trying to decide how and when to use crowdsourcing or Big Data in their conflict analysis and resolution work.

Interested in this topic? Want to join the conversation and learn more? Enroll today in our Technology for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding online course to learn more about digital mapping, social media, mobile platforms, and other technologies for promoting peace.