Download - Disrupting Humanitarian Response
DISRUPTINGHUMANITARIANRESPONSEGISLI RAFN OLAFSSONHUMANITARIAN ADVISOR – NETHOPEPARTNER & CEO USA – BERINGER F INANCE
My background• NetHope – Emergency Response
Director 2011-2015• ICE-SAR – Former team leader
Icelandic USAR TEAM• UNDAC – Member since 2005• Author – The Crisis Leader• 25+ years in Disaster
Management• 35+ years in ICT• Trusted advisor to governments
in use of ICT in disaster response
Changes observed over the past decade• Improvements in field based connectivity• Move away from paper based data collection• Maps are no longer rough sketch on a piece of paper• Social media – a tool for awareness building and
response• The rise of digital volunteers• Humanitarian hackathons • Increased interest by academia in humanitarian
response
Challenges observed over the past decade• Better field based connectivity led to centralization of response• A myriad of mobile data collection system with no standards in place• Humanitarian responders don’t know how to ask for actionable maps• Awareness building through social media eating up bandwidth• We have no clue how to listen to what affected people are saying on
social media• Only a handful of response organizations know how to leverage digital
volunteers effectively and digital volunteers still creating datasets that nobody asked for
• Humanitarian hackathons leave everyone feeling like they did some good, but very few solutions come out of them.
• Lack of practical academic research in this space.
DISRUPTIONThe Need for Change
Disruption is happening already• Explosive growth in
mobile phone ownership• Resilience of mobile
networks• Social networks• Occupy movement• Social entrepreneurship• Impact Investment
DISRUPTIONIS HAPPENINGBut not for us…
Wikinomics (2006)• With the costs of
communicating dramatically dropping, firms who do not change their current structures will perish. • Companies who utilize mass
collaboration will dominate their respective markets.• We cannot solve the
problems of the information age using institutions of the industrial age
Philanthropy • A century old mechanism
for sharing your wealth with those in need• Non-sustainable model• Demand grossly out ways
the availability• High administrative cost
associated with grant writing, M&E, and fundraising
International Humanitarian Response• Built around the concept of lack
of local capacity to respond• Built around a top-down
approach to response• Distribution of material and
resources from donor countries• Highly political system where
competition is fierce and collaboration is scarce• Annual $16B-24B market
Change is hard when…• …your own role/power is affected by it• …money is involved• …you have a hard time thinking outside the box• …bureaucracy is stronger than progress• …you realize you are an outdated dinosaur fighting to
stay in power• …your idea of innovation simply leads to pilotitis
We need to think outside the box• How do we truly empower affected communities to self-organize?• How do we leverage digital aid to address most of the need?• How do we perform needs assessment bottom up, not top down?• How do we supplement and strengthen local capacity instead of
bulldozing over it?• How do we harness the passion within companies, movements,
individuals to solve problems?• How do we move from an unsustainable, non-scalable approaches
towards self-sustainable, replicable, and truly scalable models?
New premises to work from• We will soon be able to restore mobile connectivity in <24
hours• Large portion of the population worldwide will soon have
smartphones• Disaster prone countries will continue to build up their own
national capacity to respond• Over 80% of current aid will become digital in nature – driven
by mobile money becoming available worldwide• Government and philanthropical funding will reduce in size due
to politics and new ways of thinking by millennial generation
Learning from disruption in other fields• We need to focus on
innovation that leads to disruption• We need to provide funding
models that are tolerant to failure• We need to built an
ecosystem that supports entrepreneurial thinking in the humanitarian space• We need to focus on
sustainable business models
This is why I moved to Silicon Valley…• To learn about disruption in
the hub of innovation• To build up the networks
required to drive disruption into the humanitarian space• To understand how we can
adapt the venture capital model of financing to humanitarian response• To build up an army of
disrupters
What have I learned so far…• Even VCs are interested in
seeing disruption in this space• Silicon Valley is built on the
concept of giving back• True innovation comes when
you understand the fundamental problem that the user needs to resolve
• Solutions we create for humanitarian response must have daily use cases for them to truly be used in times of need
Do you have WiFi?Information as a life line
ROGER von OECH
QUESTIONS?
G ISL I .O L AFS SON @N ETH OP E . OR G - @ G IS L IO
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