By: Samantha Remeika, TechChange Vice President for Customer Success and Delivery

Right now, the 24th annual United Nations Climate Change Conference is taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan. This global multilateral decision-making forum on climate change brings together nearly every country in the world. One of the key priorities of this year’s COP is securing a new goal on climate finance, to ensure that every country has the resources to take strong climate action for a more sustainable future.

TechChange recently had the pleasure of supporting another event where climate finance had top billing: the Europe and Central Asia Regional Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction, the main intergovernmental platform for addressing regional disaster risk challenges for the 55 countries of Europe and Central Asia.

The Regional Platform was hosted by the Government of Montenegro on 6-8 November, 2024, in collaboration with the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, and with the support of UNDP, the European Commission, and the Council of Europe. This dynamic event presented a unique opportunity to address regional challenges such as critical infrastructure issues, early warning systems, and multiple crises compounded by conflict. Stakeholders from local mayors, NGO leaders, and industry experts were brought together in Montenegro and online via this hybrid event to share learnings and build solutions. 331 people registered, benefiting from nearly 20 hours of content in English, Russian and Montenegrin languages.

Climate Emergency and Resilience Finance

On the first day of the convening, one innovative session examined the importance of resilience finance in building climate-resilient infrastructure, enhancing disaster preparedness and response capabilities, and supporting vulnerable communities to adapt to climate change impacts. In “Climate Emergency and Resilience Finance,” a panel of experts and local governmental leaders from six different countries shared their perspectives and experiences in harnessing climate finance tactics to supercharge local and regional initiatives.

One of the speakers, Natalia Alieksieieva, Representative of the Executive Committee of Lviv, Ukraine, talked about how the ongoing war in her country made disaster much closer to everyday people’s lives, and how city to city initiatives and finance initiatives helped to build resilience even in the most difficult circumstances. Another speaker, Susana Sousa Gonçalves, the Director of the Civil Protection Department, in the Municipality of Matosinhos of Portugal, shared about how their group of cities strategized how to share funding and resources such as green bonds and insurance policies to reduce disaster risk. She continued: “We develop solutions locally, and then share them nationally, and regionally.

Work like this is essential in tandem with the top-down measures that will originate at COP, in pursuit of the objectives from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

This session provided a primer on Disaster Risk Financing and how governments and municipalities can be fiscally ready for the disaster up front, using various financial instruments and mechanisms. From sharing tools to outlining the various uses of multi-faceted capital campaigns, attendees of the Regional Platform were given the opportunity to learn about approaches that might work in their local areas, and network with other do-ers who could share their experiences making things happen. As Senior Disaster Resilience consultant Sandra Nedeljkovic said, “since we are connected as a region, a lot of us share the same risks, so it would be good to partner on instruments to face problems together.”

In 2025, TechChange plans to support a variety of hybrid events through the United Nations Disaster Risk Reduction Office, and contribute to this vital issue by convening and connecting committed professionals in forums such as these. We look forward to enabling a wide swath of implementers, governmental leaders, and NGO stakeholders to contribute to the global goals that will come out of COP 2024.

What role can mobile phones play in distributing a survey and collecting feedback and data from respondents? In particular, how can we use mobile technology to reach out to and engage individuals in developing countries that tend to be underrepresented in global surveys?

In the recent My World 2015 survey launched in December 2012 in honor of the end of the Millennium Development Goals in 2015 and the establishment of a new “post-2015” global development framework, the United Nations Development Program, the UN Millennium Campaign, the Overseas Development Institute, the ONE campaign, and over 700 on-the-ground grassroots organizations as well as international and local information technology companies created and continue to implement a worldwide survey seeking to collect the opinions of individuals everywhere on what matters most to them when it comes the future.

Survey respondents are asked to vote on 6 out of a possible 17 policy priorities, including a fill-in-the-blank priority that the individuals can add themselves. The survey aims to examine the public policy priorities of individuals across the globe. The survey allows respondents to choose 6 out of 16 pre-selected priorities or to submit their own priority in a 17th ‘fill-in-the-blank’ option. Respondents have participated in the survey via pen-and-paper ballot, via a central website, and through mobile technology (SMS, IVR, and a mobile application).

Here are five findings on the ways mobile phones have been leveraged for distributing the My World 2015 survey:

1. About 20% of over 2 million votes have come in via mobile phones.

2. Over 70% of the mobile phone respondents live in developing countries. These participants came from nations that score low on the Human Development Index (versus 31% in the overall survey).

3. More men have responded via mobile than women. (at a rate of 2 male respondent for every one female), and respondents via mobile tend to prioritize better job opportunities at a slightly higher rate than the majority of respondents.

4. Mobile distribution benefited heavily from local and international partnerships and, as with the web, more immediate and centralized collection of the data was possible. In implementation, the mobile phone promotion and distribution of the survey differed slightly from the pen-and-paper and web distribution of the survey.

5. A survey is only as effective as its promotion and distribution. Local and international partnerships helped distribute the survey through targeted high tech, low tech and no tech campaigns. Promotion for all three of the survey distribution methods included integrated campaigns targeting specific national and regional audiences as well as ongoing global efforts to raise awareness and foster interest in the survey.

How do these results so far compare to your own surveys? What kind of mobile data collection methods have you used in your projects and organizations? What challenges have you faced in gathering this feedback and engaging with survey participants in developing countries?

Linda Warnier is a Communication Officer at OECD and an alumna of TechChange’s Mobiles for International Development online course. She develops and implements digital strategies and uses paid and free tools to plan and perform online impact assessments for large international organisations including the OECD and, before that, the European Commission.

To read Linda’s full report of My World 2015 and Mobiles, please click here.

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To discuss this topic and similar issues related to mobile phones and data collection, be sure to join us for our upcoming online courses on Mobiles for International Development course and Technology for Monitoring & Evaluation!

TechChange Program Coordinator Matthew Heck explains technical aspects of Google Maps Engine to UN Summer Academy Director, Patrick van Weerelt (Photo: S5R3 / Simon Ruf).

In June 2014, TechChange Founder & CEO Nick Martin and Program Coordinator Matthew Heck conducted a training at the 2014 United Nations Summer Academy at the UN headquarters in New York City. 45 participants from across the UN system based in 25 different countries joined Nick, Matt, and TechChange Mobiles for International Development alumnus and guest expert, Arjen Swank of Text to Change in a hands-on workshop on “How to use innovation and technology for development”.

In the session, participants learned about and experimented with online tools for development including CommCare, Google Maps Engine, Magpi, Open Data Kit, and OpenStreetMap, Text to Change, TextIt, and more.

Here are some highlights from the workshop:

Nick Martin meets the participants of the 2014 UN Summer Academy and gives a quick introduction about TechChange and ICT4D.

TechChange TC105 alumnus Arjen Swank leads a workshop on TTC for the participants (Photo: S5R3 / Simon Ruf).

Check out Arjen’s latest blog post on the training and “Why basic mobile technology is still powerful” here and the UN’s summary of the event here.

In smaller break-out groups, Arjen Swank demos how Text to Change can be used via tablet (Photo: S5R3 / Simon Ruf).

UN Summer Academy participants experiment with OpenStreetMap (Photo: S5R3 / Simon Ruf).

If your organization is interested in training with TechChange online or in-person on technology for social change, please contact us at info [at] techchange [dot] org.

Spreading violence in South Sudan threatens thousands of civilian lives, political stability in the region, and even outbreaks of transmissible disease (NYT). As the fog of the initial outbreak of war begins to clear, the question becomes how the international community should begin to address this hot conflict, and prepare for what is likely to be a global humanitarian response effort. Student networks such as STAND are writing open memorandums to policymakers, while volunteer technical communities such as contributors to The Enough Project and the Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) are sending their pleas straight to the media. But as we move from advocacy to response, a number of core questions come to mind:

Who are the key actors?
What are their motivations?
What are our windows of opportunity to see a reduction in violence?

And as these questions get answered – how do organizations ensure that their work is complementary?

Coordinating the Information Flow

With information flows from the region taking the form of emails, phone calls, text messages, and videos from people’s mobile phones, connecting the dots is the entire point of organizations such as the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHNet), whose activation TechChange was proud to be part of last year, and reliefweb.int – a well known asset for first responders. But because South Sudan is still in the midst of a hot conflict, actors coordinating with one another must take into consideration the lives of individuals who are still in the region to ensure that no additional harm is done through the sharing of this information.

The good news is that there are guidelines for such a response effort, not least from what has been provided by the lessons from the Libya Crisis Map by OCHA, who are also keeping tabs on the current crisis (see image below). Andrej Verity, an Information Management Officer at UN-OCHA identified three specific ethical issues in Libya:

1. Identify. We did not want any information provided in the LCM that could be used to identify the individual who reported.

2. Location. To avoid anyone from being able to pinpoint anyone reporting, the data was generally anonymized to the centroid of the city it was reported from.

3. Do No Harm. Given the situation in Libya was conflict-based, we needed to ensure that whatever we did minimized the chance of causing anyone harm.

Connecting Grassroots to Government: South Sudan Watch

Connecting grassroots volunteer networks to government response is not an easy task, as our partners at the Wilson Center have explored these challenges in depth. Moreover, their recent workshop report lists “[f]actors obstructing the adoption of crowdsourcing, social media, and digital volunteerism approaches often include uncertainty about accuracy, fear of liability, inability to translate research into operational decision-making, and policy limitations on gathering and managing data.”

These are not small challenges, but one recent effort deserves recognition: A recent Ushahidi deployment for South Sudan Watch. According to the About page, it is designed to be just such a centralized reporting mechanism for watchers of the current conflict in South Sudan. Also worth noting, is that the entry forms have been modified to aid in conflict analysis, and the public information restricted to protect those on the ground and report contributors.

Will it make a difference? Maybe. Rob Baker of Ushahidi (and until recently a Presidential Innovation Fellow) shared with us:

“It won’t be easy, but we believe it is necessary to try. We can learn from past examples to help on the ground — nobody is here to just make a map, but hopefully to improve the situation on the ground through a better understanding of what is happening through technology and crowdsourcing.”

If you are interested in learning more, please do check out the live Ushahidi deployment and see how you can contribute. We’ll continue to add more information as it becomes available.

South Sudan Watch: http://southsudanwatch.ushahidi.com/

Want to learn more about how digital mapping and other technology like social media and and mobile phones are addressing conflicts around the world? Enroll now in TC109: Technology for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding, which starts January 13, 2014.