Information management and humanitarian relief coordination - Magma

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Int. J. Business Continuity and Risk Management, Vol. 3, No. 4, 2012

Information management and humanitarian relief coordination: findings from the Haiti earthquake response Bartel Van de Walle* Department of Information Management, School of Economics and Management, Tilburg University, Warandelaan 2, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] *Corresponding author

Julie Dugdale Grenoble Informatics Lab (LIG), University of Grenoble 2 (UPMF), BSHM, 1251, avenue Centrale, Saint-Martin d’Hères, 38040 Grenoble, France E-mail: [email protected] Abstract: The overwhelming humanitarian impact of the January 2010 Earthquake in Haiti created a tremendous coordination challenge for the humanitarian relief agencies. In this paper, we first describe the coordination mechanisms that are implemented by the United Nations and the role of its Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). We introduce the cluster approach, which is instrumental in providing a more efficient and effective coordination in affected disaster areas. The main thrust of our paper is on the role and use of information management (IM) in these coordination efforts. To understand better the benefits and problems of information systems, we conducted interviews with experienced information managers who participated in the Haiti relief effort. While the interviewees saw clear benefits of IM for the coordination of humanitarian relief, concerns related to information overload, reliability and accountability were found to impede the realisation of the full potential of IM. Keywords: humanitarian relief; information management; coordination; Haiti earthquake; UN OCHA; Haiti. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Van de Walle, B. and Dugdale, J. (2012) ‘Information management and humanitarian relief coordination: findings from the Haiti earthquake response’, Int. J. Business Continuity and Risk Management, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp.278–305. Biographical notes: Bartel Van de Walle is Associate Professor at the Department of Information Management, Tilburg School of Economics and Management at Tilburg University, the Netherlands and Visiting Professor at Harbin Engineering University, China. He served as a Staff Advisor on science policy to the Flemish Minister of Science and Innovation in 2010–2011, and is board member of the Flemish Institute for Technological Research (VITO)

Copyright © 2012 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Information management and humanitarian relief coordination

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since 2010. His research interests are at the intersection of information and communication technologies and the (humanitarian) crisis management domain. He has published nearly 100 reviewed papers in proceedings of international conferences and journals. He co-founded the International Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) Community in 2004, and has since co-organised special sessions, tracks, international workshops, conferences and PhD Summer Schools in Europe, the USA and China. He serves since 2009 as the President of the ISCRAM Association. Julie Dugdale is the Leader of the MAGMA, Multi-agent Systems, team that is part of the Grenoble Informatics Lab (LIG), one the largest computer science research laboratories in France. She is also Associate Professor at Grenoble 2 and invited Associate Professor at the University of Agder (UiA), Norway, where she is a member of the Centre for Integrated Emergency Management (CIEM). She has worked for over 15 years on developing models and simulations of human behavior in crisis situations. She is particularly interested in human-technology interactions, and how people use technologies as cognitive supports to accomplish a task. She is deeply involved in the Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management (ISCRAM) Association of which she is the Vice President. In 2010, she received the ISCRAM Distinguished Service Award.

1

Introduction

The catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake had a magnitude 7.0 M, with its epicentre near Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. The earthquake struck at 16:53 local time on Tuesday, 12 January 2010 and inflicted immense damage in the capital and other settlements in the region. An estimated three million people, or about one third of the whole population, were affected by the quake; the Haitian Government reported that an estimated 316,000 people died, 300,000 were injured and 1,000,000 were made homeless. The Government of Haiti also estimated that 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings had collapsed or were severely damaged. About half of the nation’s schools and the three main universities in Port-au-Prince were affected, and more than 1,300 schools and 50 healthcare facilities were destroyed (Reuters, 2010). The headquarters of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and the offices of the World Bank were also destroyed. Within minutes of the earthquake, the Global Disaster Alert and Coordination System (GDACS) based at the European Commission’s research centre in Ispra, Italy, sent out an automated alert message to its 14,000 registered users, mostly disaster managers from organisations across the globe. The January 12 2010 GDACS message was a compelling ‘red alert’, indicating a high likelihood of severe humanitarian impact given the earthquake’s magnitude, depth and proximity to a densely populated area. Humanitarian aid agencies instantly started preparations for responding to this disaster, while further news was relentlessly monitored. Only five years earlier, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN OCHA) had commissioned an independent Humanitarian Response Review of the global humanitarian system to address the ad hoc nature of many

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earlier international responses to humanitarian emergencies (OCHA, 2005). The review assessed the humanitarian response capacities of the UN, NGOs, Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement and other key humanitarian actors, in order to identify and provide recommendations for critical gap areas. Following the recommendations of the review, the ‘cluster approach’ was proposed as a way of addressing gaps and strengthening the effectiveness of humanitarian response through building partnerships. In essence, the cluster approach aims to enhance humanitarian coordination by grouping response activities into a limited number of sectors or clusters. Moreover, this approach tries to ensure predictability and accountability in international responses to humanitarian emergencies, by clarifying the division of labour among organisations, and better defining their roles and responsibilities within the different sectors of the response. In Haiti, the cluster approach was formally introduced in August 2006, but clusters were not activated until September 2008, in response to a devastating series of tropical storms causing hundreds of fatalities. In the wake of the response to the 2010 earthquake, the Haiti cluster approach would be severely put to the test. Among the many problems of using the cluster approach in 2008, information management (IM) was found to be a very weak point of cluster coordination. Once collected, information was poorly managed both within and among clusters. Information on what organisations were doing, where they were based and when they were active was not timely, information was often lost and the clusters’ institutional memory barely existed. The low quality of IM was partly due to stretched capacities during the emergency and partly due to a lack of effective approaches and methods (IASC, 2010a). In this paper, we will examine the role of IM in coordinating humanitarian relief as experienced by information managers who were deployed in Haiti following the 2010 earthquake. We focus on the role of the clusters and UN OCHA, the IM processes, and the drivers and inhibitors of IM in relief coordination. The outline of this paper is as follows. The evolution of humanitarian relief coordination leading to the current cluster approach, and the role of humanitarian IM is presented in Section 2. The context of this research as provided by the 2010 Haiti earthquake is established in Section 3. Our interpretative case study research approach is outlined in Section 4, and the results of our interviews are shown in Section 5. The role of IM in humanitarian relief coordination is discussed in Section 6. Finally, conclusions and directions for future research are presented in Section 7.

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Humanitarian relief coordination and IM

In this section, we discuss the United Nations (UN) cluster approach to humanitarian relief and the role of IM in relief coordination. In the first part of this section, we briefly outline how the UN’s view on humanitarian coordination has evolved and resulted in the current cluster approach. We also present some ongoing challenges. The second part of this section elaborates the UN’s view of IM as an important foundation for effective coordination, as exemplified in the Operational Guidance Note (OGN) on IM issued by the UN. We conclude this section by presenting results on the effectiveness of this Guidance Note as identified in a recent study.


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2.1 Humanitarian relief coordination 2.1.1 The coordination of humanitarian affairs In 1971, the UN1 passed a resolution which aimed at building a framework for effective coordination among six large humanitarian agencies of the UN: the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Food Program (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the UN Development Program (UNDP). These six agencies were to be coordinated by the UN Disaster Relief Office (UNDRO) (McDonald, 2007). However, the work of UNDRO was unsatisfactory and in 1991 the UN passed a further resolution, which resulted in the establishment of the Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA). The creation of the DHA aimed at improving operational effectiveness in the field. Additionally, the resolution led to the creation of the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) and the post of the Emergency Relief Coordinator (ERC). The IASC functions primarily as a mechanism for inter-agency coordination of assistance in humanitarian emergencies. It is a unique forum responsible for coordination, policy development, and decision-making among UN agencies and key non-UN organisations (IASC, 2010b). The ERC combines all functions carried out by the UNDRO and the representatives of the Secretary-General in emergency situations into one single focal point. Table 1

Global cluster leads Area of activity or cluster

Global cluster leads

1 2 3 4 5 6

Agriculture Camp coordination and management Early recovery Education Emergency shelter Emergency telecommunications

7 8 9 10 11

Health Logistics Nutrition Protection Water, sanitation and hygiene

FAO UNHCR and IOM UNDP UNICEF and Save The Children UNHCR and IFRC (Convener) OCHA, process owner UNICEF, common data services WFP, common security telecommunications services WHO WFP UNICEF UNHCR UNICEF

Source: http://ochaonline.un.org/

In 1998, the DHA was reorganised into the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). OCHA is mainly responsible for coordination of humanitarian response, humanitarian advocacy and policy development. A further key activity of OCHA is to promote preparedness and prevention of emergency situations. Participating organisations include UN agencies, the Red Cross and various NGOs. Coordination is administrated by the IASC, which ensures an effective decision-making process in response to emergencies between various agencies. Figure 1 shows how OCHA is built up and how its several bodies interact. OCHA’s responsibilities include the development

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of humanitarian policies, needs assessments, consolidated appeals and field coordination arrangements (OCHA, 2010). Figure 1

UN OCHA organisational structure (see online version for colours)

In 2005, OCHA launched the ambitious Humanitarian Reform (2010) initiative to improve the effectiveness of humanitarian response and relief by ensuring greater predictability and accountability, and by strengthening partnerships between the various agencies. As a fundamental basis for this reform, the IASC issued the ‘Guidance Note on using the cluster approach to strengthen humanitarian response’ which set the scene for implementing the cluster approach for better coordination (IASC, 2006). The Guidance Note originally defines nine areas of activities that need leadership and accountability, and distinguishes between technical areas (these are nutrition, health, water sanitation and hygiene, and emergency shelter), cross-cutting areas (these are camp coordination and camp management, protection, and early recovery) and common services (logistics and emergency telecommunications). Agriculture and education were added later, leading to a total of 11 areas or clusters. All of the clusters are shown in Table 1, together with the corresponding global cluster leads (i.e., responsible organisations). A comprehensive list of UN agency acronyms is provided in the Appendix.

2.1.2 Challenges in humanitarian relief coordination While the 2005 humanitarian reform initiative is now widely seen as a significant development, gaps in the implementation of the cluster approach for effective humanitarian coordination have been identified.


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Coordination implies the execution of a large number of decisions on various levels with multiple actors conducting diverse actions (Pavard et al., 2008; Dugdale et al., 2006). Actors not only need to work within the structure of their respective organisations but also adhere to rules and regulations given by other actors or structures of partner organisations. Other problems, such as mistrust among organisations, may lead to duplicated work-efforts, thus in addition increasing costs and decreasing efficiency. Döring and Schreiner (2008), upon examining inter-agency coordination within the UN, have identified several factors on a structural and cultural level that impact coordination in humanitarian relief. Structural factors are for instance organisational design and individual factors pertaining to personal characteristics of employees. Cultural factors concern both the culture of a specific agency as well as the collective culture of the UN. Moreover, these factors not only impact successful coordination by themselves but also through one another as a result of interdependencies among them. Successful coordination hence depends on a delicate interplay between these factors. Brenna and Sondorp (2006) have identified three areas of concern for humanitarian coordination in politically unstable areas and conflict areas. First, while the cluster approach urges international aid agencies to work with and support local organisations, Western governments impose certain political views and rules on humanitarian workers. This might prevent humanitarian organisations from collaborating with, and supporting, local groups that have essential knowledge and a country-wide network, since they may be classified as terrorist groups. Second, local governments in turn also impose regulations on humanitarian workers, potentially making it difficult to collect data of the needs of civilians. A third area of concern is the violence towards humanitarian workers; assisting civilians is indeed extremely difficult, if not impossible in certain conflict regions. Other problems arising in crisis regions are due to the nature of unpredicted emergencies, such as responding to a sudden emergency as well as planning ahead, especially in regions of political instability where displacement and return of civilians takes place (Musani and Shaikh, 2006). Logistical problems are plentiful too, and need special consideration and organisation. Balcik et al. (2009) list numerous factors that impact the coordination in human relief. Among these factors are the number and diversity of actors, including language barriers and cultural differences, and the nature of donations and inherent expectations by donors, which in some cases leads to competition among organisations for donations. Additionally, the unpredictable nature of disasters complicates the supply of often scarce resources. Relief logistics pose further problems, relating to the supply, storage and transport of resources. Infrastructures are often destroyed and demand for resources is extremely high and urgent.

2.2 Humanitarian IM 2.2.1 IM for humanitarian relief coordination In 2002, OCHA held the first ever symposium dedicated to the topic of humanitarian IM. The symposium convened IM professionals from UN agencies, NGOs, and governmental agencies, as well as representatives from donors, the private sector and academia in the stately settings of the Palais des Nations in Geneva. A core and common theme of the symposium was the need for guiding principles. Indeed, as humanitarian information was gaining recognition and purpose, the need was established for a set of humanitarian and

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operational principles that promote humanitarian objectives and foster trust and accountability among organisations. The symposium participants identified ten operational principles to guide humanitarian IM and exchange including accessibility, inclusiveness, interoperability, accountability, verifiability, relevance, objectivity, humanity, timeliness and sustainability. These principles are elaborated in Table 2. Related to this is the development of, and adherence to, procedural, technical and ethical standards for information collection, exchange, security, attribution and use. Using standards should assist information managers in better handling the large volumes of data and information generated during a crisis, in ensuring the integrity of the data and in avoiding having to start from scratch every time an emergency erupts (OCHA, 2002; Van de Walle et al., 2009). Table 2

Ten fundamental principles to guide IM

Fundamental IM principle

Description

Accessibility

Humanitarian information and data should be made accessible to all humanitarian actors by applying easy-to-use formats and by translating information into common or local languages when necessary. Information and data for humanitarian purposes should be made widely available through a variety of online and offline distribution channels including the media.

Inclusiveness

Information management and exchange should be based on a system of collaboration, partnership and sharing. It should involve a high degree of participation and ownership by multiple stakeholders, especially representatives of the affected population.

Inter-operability

All sharable data and information should be made available in formats that can be easily retrieved, shared and used by humanitarian organisations.

Accountability

Users must be able to evaluate the reliability and credibility of data and information by knowing its source. Information providers should be responsible to their partners and stakeholders for the content they publish and disseminate.

Verifiability

Information should be accurate, consistent and based on sound methodologies, validated by external sources, and analysed within the proper contextual framework.

Relevance

Information should be practical, flexible, responsive, and driven by operational needs in support of decision-making throughout all phases of a crisis.

Objectivity

Information managers should consult a variety of sources when collecting and analysing information so as to provide varied and balanced perspectives for addressing problems and recommending solutions.

Humanity

Information should never be used to distort, to mislead or to cause harm to affected or at-risk populations and should respect the dignity of victims.

Timeliness

Humanitarian information should be collected, analysed and disseminated efficiently, and must be kept current.

Sustainability

Humanitarian information and data should be preserved, catalogued and archived, so that it can be retrieved for future use, such as for preparedness, analysis, formulating lessons learned and evaluation.

Source: OCHA (2002)


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McDonald (2007) notes that the sharing of information is a necessity, the foundation of any kind of coordination. In the complex setting of a humanitarian disaster, coordination and effective decision-making depends on information obtained from and shared by other actors. Adhering to the ten fundamental principles is hoped to lead to a higher quality of information sharing, and hence better decision-making and ultimately better outcomes of coordination in humanitarian response. In an analysis of information sharing among humanitarian relief organisations, Saab et al. (2008) discussed three crucial issues for IM in humanitarian coordination. First, the authors noted the importance of standardisation in humanitarian relief. This includes standards for information, standards for the interoperability of systems, and standards of worker skill sets. The second issue is an adequate basis of technological as well as human capacities. Humanitarian aid workers should not only be adequately equipped with IT, but also need to possess the right skills to use the available IT. Third and last, and a recurring constant in the field of IM in humanitarian response, is the significance of information availability and analysis. This includes the effective collection, compilation, analysis and dissemination of timely and relevant information.

2.2.2 Responsibilities and challenges in IM The members of the clusters increasingly understand the importance and advantages of effective IM, and diverse coordination mechanisms have emerged within and among clusters that result in specific IM initiatives. OCHA’s challenge is to facilitate these coordination initiatives to enhance effective inter- as well as intra-cluster collaboration. For that purpose, OCHA issued the ‘Operational guidance on responsibilities of cluster/sector leads and OCHA in information management’ (or OGN on IM) to guide the cluster leads and OCHA in their IM processes (OCHA, 2007). The OGN on IM emphasised adherence to the fundamental principles listed in Table 2, and outlined the responsibilities for the cluster leads and OCHA. Obviously, the cluster leads are responsible for effective IM within their clusters. Their responsibilities include the allocation of the necessary human and financial resources, encouraging the sharing of IM resources and capacities to enhance harmonisation and economies of scale, ensuring adherence to global policies, norms and standards as well as the generation of up-to-date cluster specific information. OCHA, on the other hand, is responsible for ensuring effective IM at an inter-cluster level. OCHA is responsible for providing the clusters with a space to access information, maintenance of the common datasets, geospatial data and analysis, the management of inter-cluster information, advocacy for the data and information sharing, and providing technical IM advice. Also, OCHA must analyse cross-cluster needs and identify gaps and establish an IM network at the country level. In 2010, the IASC Task Force on IM commissioned a review of the actual implementation of the OGN on IM in order to assess whether it satisfies the envisioned goals of IM and to suggest adjustments to it if and where needed. For this review, face-to-face interviews were conducted with cluster leads and IM staff in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Chad, the occupied Palestinian territory, Egypt and Jordan. In addition, a survey was distributed on-line to cluster leads as well as to OCHA and cluster IM staff, and a number of telephone interviews with global cluster leads was conducted in the concluding phase of the evaluation (Van de Walle, 2010). In general, the review concluded that the level of implementation of the OGN on IM at the cluster level was perceived as weak, both by OCHA and the clusters themselves. It

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was observed that the necessary human and financial resources for IM are, in general, lacking or of secondary concern. IM focal points, which serve as a liaison with the other organisations for IM issues, are often not appointed or at best assigned as an additional task to a cluster member. There is no agreed standard on the required level of expertise of the IM focal point, and no evaluation of the ability of the IM focal point to work with different partners and clusters. In addition, the recruitment process to hire an IM person takes too long. The review also indicated that clusters contribute mostly in an ad-hoc way to inter-cluster IM coordination, yet support is weak in the efforts to ensure coherence and coordination between intra and inter cluster IM initiatives. There is no self-assessment at the cluster level on the performance of inter-cluster coordination. Clusters generally have good intentions to share cluster specific information (e.g., contact lists, meeting minutes, standard forms, policy or technical guidance, datasets, needs/gap analysis, etc.) with OCHA in order to support inter-cluster data sharing. There exists however a general feeling of discomfort among the clusters concerning the required formats of those information sets, and the lack of feedback that is received on the information that has been supplied. Finally, it was also confirmed by the review that OCHA indeed provides a wide variety of information products and services to the humanitarian community. In general, the appropriate IM resources are assigned, with a few exceptions. OCHA has produced and made available, a minimum set of predictable standardised information products in collaboration with clusters/sectors. The standardisation however is often experienced as cumbersome and too restrictive by the clusters, and the follow-up on compliance with standards (or the lack thereof) is often insufficient and difficult to correct. The decision making process during humanitarian relief coordination is, in general, an informal process based on the exchange of information during a face-to-face meeting. The impact of information provided by the cluster leads or by OCHA to the decisions made therefore cannot be clearly assessed. Feedback to the information provider is often lacking or mostly informal, and consequently it is impossible for the provider to identify what information elements were relevant. Information is sent out, and gets possibly shared, but lack of feedback to the sender prevents closing the information loop.

3

The 2010 Haiti earthquake

3.1 The earthquake of January 12th 2010 The island of Hispaniola is the second largest island in the Caribbean, at 29,273 sq miles, (75,843 sq km), and contains the two sovereign states of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The island is long known to be seismically active and has a well documented history of destructive earthquakes. In addition to earthquakes, the island has been struck frequently by tropical cyclones, causing flooding and widespread damage. On January 12th 2010, at 16:53 local time, an earthquake of magnitude 7.0 on the Richter scale struck Haiti. The centre of the earthquake lay 17 km southwest of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and was less than 10 km deep. Being close to the epicentre, the city of Port-au-Prince was severely damaged and smaller surrounding communities were seriously affected (Figure 2).

Information management and humanitarian relief coordination Figure 2

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Earthquake affected areas (see online version for colours)

Source: OCHA Situation Report #1, 12 January 2010

An initial aerial assessment after the earthquake showed that Port-au-Prince had been largely destroyed, including primary government buildings and the UN headquarters. Furthermore, other crucial buildings throughout the capital city had suffered severe damage, including hospitals, schools and the state penitentiary. The widespread devastation and damage caused by the earthquake throughout Port-au-Prince and wide surroundings also impacted the country’s vital infrastructure necessary to respond to the disaster. The damaged or destroyed infrastructures included air, sea, and land transport facilities as well as communication systems. The public telephone system was out, and two of Haiti’s largest cellular telephone providers both reported that the earthquake had affected their services. According to Reporters Sans Frontières (RSF), Radio Lumière, which broadcasts out of Port-au-Prince and reaches 90% of Haiti, was knocked off the air during the first week (Ross, 2010). In an interview shortly after the earthquake, the Haitian Minister of Education stated that the education system in Haiti had ‘totally collapsed’. First numbers that were released in a situation report by the UN on the 27th January 2010 stated that 112,392 people were killed and 196,501 were injured by the earthquake. Furthermore, 262,901 people had left the earthquake-affected areas. An estimated number of 800,000 to one million Haitians were displaced. By August 2010, this number increased to an estimated 1.3 million. The extensiveness of this disaster made the humanitarian relief work particularly difficult and complex. The global humanitarian response to the earthquake, however, was swift and wide-ranging. Table 3 shows the amount of international funding and additional support offered within just two days of the earthquake.

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Table 3

Funding and additional support from governments and other organisations; status: 14 January 2010

Organisation/country European Commission CERF

Amount (USD)

Additional support

$4.37 million $10 million initially

United Nations Foundation World Bank

$1 million $100 million

Australia

$9.3 million

Belgium

$650 million

Brazil

$5 million

Britain

$10 million

64 firefighters and 8 SAR personnel

Canada

$4.8 million

Transport planes, helicopters, a hospital ship and disaster response team on standby

China

$1 million

Denmark

$1.9 million

Finland

$1.8 million

Germany

$2.17 million

Irish Telecommunications company Digiciel

$5 million

Will also repair the damaged telephone network

Italy

$1,46 million

The Netherlands

$2.91 million

60 person search and rescue team

Spain

$4.37 million

3 planes with rescue teams and 100 tons of emergency relief equipment

Sweden

$850 million

Tents, water purification equipment and medical aid

Switzerland

$1.9 million

USA

$100 million

Total

$268.48 million

3,500 soldiers; 300 medical personnel; 1 aircraft carrier; 3 amphibious ships

Source: UN Situation Report #3, 14 January 2010

3.2 The cluster approach The priority during the first days after the earthquake lay with search and rescue and the supply of medical services and resources, including clean water and sanitation, emergency shelter, food, logistics, and telecommunications (OCHA, 2010). Initially, the UN did not seek to impose an immediate coordination of all efforts but instead allowed as much help to be provided as possible. As the head of the UN mission in Haiti, Edward Mullet, stated, the UN did not want to “bureaucratize that assistance that came on the ground in a very spontaneous way and that did save lives” (Dolmetsch, 2010). During these first days, ground personnel were nevertheless able to activate five of the nine clusters: logistics (lead: WFP), shelter/non-food items (lead: IOM in consultation with IFRC), water and sanitation (lead: UNDP until UNICEF arrived), health (lead: WHO),


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and food (lead: WFP). One week later, by January 17th, 2010, 12 clusters were setup, all coordinated by OCHA, with ‘food aid’ as a special cluster setup in addition to the 11 usual clusters. Table 4 shows the clusters and initial funding requests on January 17th, less than one week after the earthquake. Table 4

Clusters and their lead agencies, and initial funding requests Cluster

1

Agriculture

2

Camp coordination and management

3

Early recovery

Cluster leads

Initial funding requests

FAO

$23,000,000

IOM

$46,097,744

UNDP

$41,218,850

4

Education

5

Emergency shelter

UNICEF

$23,050,000

IOM and IFRC

$38,250,000

6

Emergency telecommunications

7

Health

WFP

(Not specified)

WHO and PAHO

$82,300,000

8

Logistics

WFP

(Not specified)

9

Nutrition

UNICEF

(Not specified)

10

Protection

UNHCR

$16,230,000

11

Water, sanitation and hygiene

UNICEF

58,825,000

12

Food Aid

WFP

$246,039,060

Source: UN Situation Report #6 17 January 2010

The coordination challenges during the initial response phase were unprecedented. For example, one major logistics problem that arose immediately was the allocation of landing slots for the airport in Port-au-Prince, which itself was damaged as a consequence of the earthquake. Shortly after the earthquake, the number of planes landing at the airport rose from around the typical 13 per day to 1,400. The US Military instantly took over the control and started allocating the landing slots. However, the powerful position that the US Military held over the airport also raised several difficulties among the UN agencies and NGOs. For instance, the UN stated that delivery from the WFP was unnecessarily delayed. Additionally, doctors without borders were not content with the US Military operating the airport. The situation improved only after the USA and the UN signed a two-page memorandum of understanding on January 22nd and after the UN engaged in direct contact with the Pentagon and the US Agency for International Development (Rivera, 2010). In the first weeks, a major fuel shortage and a low number of vehicles hampered the coordination of food deliveries. Even though food supplies were mostly sufficient they could not be delivered properly due to the lack of vehicles and fuel (Rivera, 2010; Dolmetsch, 2010). Six months into the relief operation, the UN issued a report containing all-important data and information about the progress and development in Haiti until that time. The UN report showed the effort by all UN and other aid agencies, and made it clear that despite all effort, complete recovery was yet to be accomplished. In addition to the ongoing work, it was also noted that Haiti is hurricane prone, which forced all aid agencies to act rapidly and to put extra effort into preparing for additional mitigation measures (UN, 2010). Table 5 summarises the main data from the UN report, and gives an impression of the scope of the relief operations in Haiti in terms of challenges and realisations.

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Table 5

Developments six months after the earthquake Clusters

1

Agriculture

Damages and challenges

Achievements

Only 40% is funded Over 60% of the rural livelihoods depend on agriculture

2

Camp coordination 1.6 million displaced people and management

• Provision has been coordinated to over 60% of the displaced population • 721,106 individuals have been registered in 267 sites • Site assessment is still ongoing

3

Early recovery

4

Education

Cluster members have been working to strengthen government leadership and build collaboration with a wide range of partners 23% of all schools have been affected

Percentage of re-opened schools:

1,093,415 learners have been affected

Port-au-Prince: 80% Leogane: 72% Petit et Grand Goave: 100% Jacmel: 100%

5

Emergency shelter 188,383 destroyed or partially and non-food items damaged houses

6

Telecom

7

Health

Access to health services is still problematic

Over 400 health partners help providing ongoing services

8

Logistics

Roads still need to be assessed

An information sharing platform has been put in place

Gaps in logistics assets and capacities, given the coming Hurricane season, have been identified 9

Nutrition

692,440 people are at risk of malnutrition

10 Protection

Child protection

70,279 distributed tents

Patrols are conducted via joint efforts by the Haitian National Police, the UN Police and UN Military 1.5 million affected children 1,676 separated children

11 Water, sanitation and hygiene

Access to water and sanitation still problematic

12 Food aid

52% of households suffer from food insecurity

258 children reunited with their families

4.3 million affected families were assisted in early stages 18,747 million tons of food were delivered

Source: UN (2010)


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As an illustration of the complexity and unprecedented scope of the coordination effort, Table 5 shows that six months into the relief operation, the health cluster consisted of nearly 400 aid agencies, rendering their coordination work highly complex. Sub-clusters were established, their membership based on areas of interest and specialisation. The health cluster held daily coordinated meetings in co-operation with the Ministry of Health thereby including it in all relief efforts, in coordinating missions of assessment, in the organisation and management of the distribution of medical supplies via a central warehouse, in the distribution of weekly bulletin reports, and lastly in the contribution to immunisation efforts (PAHO, 2010).

3.3 Humanitarian information systems The Haiti earthquake disaster gave rise to an unprecedented use of information systems. In addition, humanitarian workers were trying to cope with a massive amount of information through web portals, platforms, and new social networking media, such as SMS feeds, Facebook, Twitter, etc. (US Department of State, 2010). In the following subsections, we will describe three prominent systems that were used to support humanitarian relief in Haiti: the UN inter-agency OneResponse website, the Sahana Free and Open Source Disaster Management System, and the crowdsourcing platform Ushaidi that stood out for its use of social media in the response.

3.3.1 OneResponse OneResponse is the leading UN collaborative inter-agency website designed to enhance humanitarian coordination within the cluster approach, and support the exchange of information at the country level. The website helps the clusters and OCHA in fulfilling their IM responsibilities by providing guidance and help. OneResponse was first field-tested in May 2008 after Cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar. Since 2008, in collaboration with Microsoft, the UN has gradually improved OneResponse (2011) using the feedback from clusters following deployment in different humanitarian disasters. Key characteristics of OneResponse include: •

A global entry page, where all global cluster guidance materials are collected.

•

Country or emergency specific content hosted on the field level site.

•

A specific disaster site created within 24 hours, during the onset of a new emergency.

•

A low-bandwidth version of the site to enable access and exchange of information in poor connectivity environments.

•

Information categorised as either public or private. This allows sensitive information to be made accessible only to cluster specific working groups.

•

Clusters directly managing their own content on the site.

After a humanitarian disaster, a dedicated OneResponse site is created in collaboration with all clusters. OneResponse, thus, provides all clusters with a common website, preventing multiple, non-interoperable websites to be setup after a disaster. Clusters can put information on the website, which is managed and maintained by OCHA. Thereby,

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clusters can easily share important information; for example they can share information on who is doing what and where. Moreover, the website is also available in low-bandwidth to overcome problems arising from poor connectivity after a disaster. The primary audience for the website are humanitarian workers at the country level, including cluster leads, cluster members, OCHA, and UN common services.

3.3.2 Sahana The Sahana project targets a universal provision of disaster management applications in order to help manage coordination in disaster situations through the effective use of web-based ICT (Currion et al., 2007; Sahana, 2010). Sahana was initially created after the Tsunami in Sri Lanka in 2004 and has since been used in numerous other disasters, such as the earthquakes in Pakistan in 2005, in Indonesia in 2006 and Peru in 2007. The Sahana system consists of seven modules that concentrate on common disaster coordination problems (Wikipedia, 2010; Sahana, 2010). These seven modules are: 1

missing person registry

2

organisation registry in order to track ‘who is doing what and where’

3

request/pledge management system, which matches requests for aid and resources to pledges of support

4

shelter registry that stores data and the location of regional shelters, as well as providing a geospatial view of all shelters

5

inventory management, which gives the location, quantities and expiry of supplies

6

situation awareness, which gives an overall overview and enables people to add information

7

volunteer coordination.

After the Haitian earthquake, Sahana launched the ‘Sahana Haiti 2010 Earthquake Disaster Response Portal’. This portal was a live and active webpage, which provided access to all of Sahana’s modules. Initial inquiries after the earthquake primarily targeted mapping the staff of all organisations present in Haiti, including their locations as well as assets and resources available, through the Sahana’s Organization Registry. Having mapped the available organisations, a next step included mapping where relief was most needed. Support was given through the request/pledge management system, which allows requesting assistance and matching it to appropriate responses (Sahana, 2010). In collaboration with the WFP, Sahana adapted their request management systems for use by the WFP and partner organisations. Merely a month after the earthquake, the food cluster food request portal (FRP) system was adapted to identify the location and number of beneficiaries and to appropriately schedule delivery of food. Additionally, the Sahana persons registry as well as the shelter registry was used extensively after the earthquake. Moreover, Sahana enabled the use of geo-referenced data stemming from all kinds of sources. Thus, the portal has culminated in a very extensive module mapping virtually everything that was happening in Haiti (Sahana, 2010).


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3.3.3 Ushahidi and other social media The Ushahidi Platform is an open source web application for information collection, visualisation and interactive mapping. Ushahidi aimed at ensuring a quick and appropriate support to victims and responders alike (ICT for Peace, 2010). It allowed people to collect and share their own stories using various mediums such as SMS, web forms, e-mail or Twitter. The first Ushahidi platform launched after the Haiti earthquake was used to distribute data by means of SMS, e-mail or the web, and visualise that information on a map and with a timeline. Figure 3 shows a screen shot of Ushahidi showing all the important information depicted on a map. Figure 3

Ushahidi’s visualising tool (see online version for colours)

Source: http://haiti.ushahidi.com

While Ushahidi is a leading platform, other social media have been used by all aid agencies, including the UN agencies or US organisations. These media sources include Facebook, Twitter, and wikis among others. The Thomson Reuters Foundation put in place another free-of-use emergency information system, which provided users with practical and reliable information. As with Ushahidi, the system makes crucial information available to subscribers via text messages to their telephones (Reuter AlertNet, 2010).

4

Methodology

In the context of a developing country confronted with a disaster of unprecedented scale and impact, it is challenging to identify and select the appropriate research method to study the use of information systems and management in the ongoing relief coordination effort. Given our objective of drawing from ‘real life’ experiences from IM experts who ‘were there’, and based on earlier experiences with an earlier field research project on the use of IM in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Muhren et al., 2008), we decided to use the interpretive case study approach (Klein and Myers, 1999).

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4.1 Interpretive case study approach A critique often heard with regard to case study research – and other qualitative methods for that matter – is that they ostensibly provide for more room for the researcher’s subjective and arbitrary judgment than other methods, and hence are seen as less rigorous than quantitative research methods. Flyvbjerg (2006) counters this critique and argues that “(…) the case study has its own rigor, different to be sure, but no less strict than the rigor of quantitative methods. The advantage of the case study is that it can ‘close in’ on real-life situations and test views directly in relation to phenomena as they unfold in practice.” Interpretive methods of IS research take into account the context in which the information system is used with the particularity of also acknowledging the mutual interaction between the system and its context. In order to succeed in the opening up of these mutual interactions, the researcher has to interact with the research participants. Klein and Myers (1999) state that the “data are not just sitting there waiting to be gathered, like rocks on the seashore”. Data are produced in a social interaction of the researchers with the participants. On the practical level this shows itself throughout our research by means of a rich and provocative interviewing style. As in our earlier interpretive case studies (Muhren et al., 2008, 2009) we adjust our style to the respondent: his or her language, worldview, professional experience, and personality, etc. We use statements, dichotomies, metaphors and dilemmas; we rely on examples and anecdotes and call on their imagination to find out the bottom-line. All of these serve as heuristic devices by which we constantly develop and adjust hypotheses concerning the phenomena to which the respondents refer. For our research design we drew on Walsham (1995a, 1995b, 2006), and Klein and Myers (1999), who provide comprehensive guidelines on how to conduct interpretive case study research in the domain of information systems. This led us to the semi-structured interview technique as a primary evidence generation mechanism (Palvia et al., 2003).

4.2 Implementation of the case study For our exploratory research, our main objective is to identify problems as experienced on the ground during the initial phase of the Haiti response. We identified four senior level key actors in humanitarian IM, who had been locally and actively involved with the relief efforts in Haiti, who lived through the early response phase, and had to experience and deal with the challenges of effective IM. The four actors were respectively a search and rescue team leader and disaster technical advisor; the head of coordination of a first aid and support team; an IM officer for OCHA; and a global IM focal point. The following three reasons were instrumental in selecting these four interviewees. First, they were all amongst the very first responders to arrive after the earthquake. The search and rescue team leader arrived within 24 hours and was in fact the first international response team leader on the ground. The other three interviewees arrived within days, and all had to setup their systems as they arrived. They all were actively involved in the setup and early use of their systems, and this during a very critical phase of the response when lives could still be saved. Having the opportunity to gauge their experiences in such a critical period was unique. Second, all of them are experienced responders, having responded to earlier disasters for many years. This strongly reduces a possible ‘novice bias’ as they had all ‘been there’ before. Their experience allowed them


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to distinguish the usual trivial software errors from consistent and fundamental shortcomings of the information system. Third and last, one of the authors has established a prior working relationship with all four interviewees, and has participated in training sessions and exercises with each of them on joint and separate occasions previously. This has created a relationship of trust, which has contributed to an openness and ‘parler vrai’ during the interview sessions and hence provided the researchers direct access to ‘unpolished’ realities as experienced by the interviewees. At the same time, another characteristic of these and other key actors is that they are professional responders, and are often already dealing with the next disaster by the time researchers approach them for further analysis. This does not only limit their availability (which was a struggle even with our limited sample), but it also implies that researchers have to be quick in interviewing them, since their experiences of the last disaster quickly vanish as they are dealing with the current one. So while the number of interviewees for our research is undeniably limited, both the interviewees’ key roles and the timeliness of our research may counter-balance – at least to some extent – this shortcoming. In spring 2011, telephone interviews of one hour (on average) were conducted with these four actors. For each interview, permission for audio tape-recording was asked for and granted, and confidentiality was guaranteed. As explained above, our main purpose was to let the interviewee tell his or her own story. Based on what was said, we followed up with further questions in that direction in a semi-structured manner. The semistructured questions related to OCHA’s OGN on IM, so that we could better understand the interviewees experience with the use of IM for humanitarian relief coordination. Full transcripts of all the interviews may be found in Koeppinghoff (2011).

5

Results

In this section, using selected quotes obtained from these interviews, we illustrate what challenges and opportunities were identified in the use of IM in humanitarian relief coordination. We begin with the OGN on IM, then highlight humanitarian IM processes, and lastly focus on inhibitors and enablers of humanitarian IM.

5.1 The OGN on IM As discussed in Section 2.2.2, the OGN on IM is considered an instrumental aid for cluster leads and OCHA to understand and execute their increasingly complex responsibilities related to the effective and efficient management of information during humanitarian operations. Interviewees’ replies showed that the OGN on IM is well known and that overall it is perceived as a good framework. At the bare minimum it can be seen as an initial starting point, which may need to be adapted to the situation of the emergency: “(The OGN on IM) gives a good framework for people to sort of plug in to and the Clusters know, or theoretically know, that they are to provide an IM person and to take care of their own information and also to better understand what OCHA is trying to do in terms of inter-cluster work… it’s an initial starting point and in every emergency (…) it transforms a little bit to fit the local context but it’s a fantastic starting point.”

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B. Van de Walle and J. Dugdale “It is a tool, in such a way that OCHA can point towards the Clusters and say, ‘you should be doing this’ or ‘you should be doing that’”.

These comments show an appreciation for the OGN on IM defining the responsibilities for both the clusters and OCHA: clusters should appoint an IM ‘focal point’, who should have sufficient expertise and an ability to work with different partners and clusters, while OCHA should establish an IM Working Group in order to coordinate IM activities and support sectors/clusters in their IM activities. However, the realities of the first days and weeks paint a less rosy image: “There is always a difference between the theoretical written part and the operational, technical level. It is not because there is a guidance note on how to do some things and how to take care of certain things on paper that you can achieve the levels in the operations. Certainly not the first 48-72 hours. Structures need time to get into place…”

During the early stages of the response in Haiti, OCHA had its IM staff on the ground within the first days, while the clusters took considerably longer, leading to some (cautious) criticism from some of the interviewees: “In terms of coordination of IM in Haiti, a lot of the clusters didn’t necessarily have their IM focal points on the ground in the first week. Most of them were starting to show up in the second week. Typically, OCHA will have people there a little bit earlier. Especially if it’s a country where they don’t have IM people in there, we are usually one of the first in there with IM staff. Clusters tend to take a little bit longer before they get in.” “I would say that in Haiti, the roles of IM – and I’m speaking maybe of the first couple of weeks – yes, there were people who were assigned those roles and those roles were clearly defined. As I said, very few clusters had IM people come in by that time… teams are not coming quickly enough to do the IM part.”

As has been identified in the earlier review of the OGN on IM, it is often the case that the necessary human and financial resources for IM are lacking or of secondary concern (Van de Walle, 2010). IM focal points often are not appointed, or at best assigned as an additional task to a cluster member. There is also no agreed standard on the required level of expertise of the IM focal point, and no evaluation of the ability of the IM focal point to work with different partners and clusters. That this was also the case in Haiti was expressed by one of the interviewees: “Many clusters don’t have permanent IM staff so they might bring in consultants and it depends on that person, what is the background and so on.”

In addition, the turnover of IM staff in Haiti was very high, with new staff often arriving too late for an effective handover between the departing and arriving IM staff: “..there is definitely a problem. Let’s say someone goes there for two or three weeks, they finally get themselves going and when they leave, the next person doesn’t come for two weeks. It’s hard to get them started.”

The lack of handover may lead to an unrecoverable loss of specific knowledge of the local humanitarian situation, and compromise the on-going coordination efforts.


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5.2 Collection, sharing and analysis of humanitarian information When responding to our questions on the collection, sharing and analysis of humanitarian information, serious problems were encountered regarding the collection and sharing of data as well as with the data analysis. At a basic level, processes for collecting and sharing data are in place and these, in theory, support the ten fundamental principles to guide IM listed in Table 2. At the outset, we had expected that some of these principles would have filtered down and been implemented at the ground level and that critical issues highlighted by Saab et al. (2008) would have been addressed. However, in practice IM problems are numerous as the following quote illustrates: “Some of that information may be coming in a different language, some of the information may lack geo-spatial information, such as ‘someone is trapped inside the University of Haiti’ – do you know where the University of Haiti is? You needed to do a lot of processing and sometimes verification of those reports coming in. On top of that you have to prioritize all those reports coming in. When you’re getting these massive amounts of reports coming in and all you have is a few people sitting in a tent, this becomes very difficult and you have limited bandwidth, so you cannot look it up on Google maps trying to figure out things and so on.”

Not only is access to current data a problem but also the lack of archived data hinders coordination efforts: “Haiti is a country where you had a humanitarian presence through decades almost. Yet when the clusters came in, there was no data from any of the previous emergencies that had been there. A year earlier, there was a hurricane in Haiti. None of that data from that disaster was available to any of the clusters as they came in after the earthquake.” “It has to do also with the fact that people move. So, the people who were dealing with the Hurricane a year earlier simply weren’t there any more. There is no single place to put data once you leave; there is no repository for data anywhere. It probably sat on their laptops as they left the country. There was no formal process for sharing that information forward. There is no central place for storing it. Basically, there are no continuity plans.”

An obvious solution to this, and indeed one that is proposed by OneResponse, is to provide a data repository. However, maybe because OneResponse did not function as well as the interviewees would have liked, the existence of various information systems was not necessarily seen as a key problem. Rather, the interviewees stressed that common data standards are the solution: “To me it’s not about whether you have a single platform or not. What is more important is that we try to work towards standardizing the data, formats, etc. what we’re using. So it doesn’t matter where the information is, as long as you know how to find it. I would rather want to see a crises information repository than a crises information platform. In other words, I would like to have a place where I can easily know or find out, for example, where do I find a list of all the schools in Haiti and of their geographical location; and that the format of reporting that is a standard format. So if I got a dataset from the government, UNICEF or Save the Children, I can look at all the three of those and can mash all three together, I can get a complete view of where the schools are.” “I don’t see a problem, with the clusters having their own individual websites as long as they use certain standards that allow information or data to be interoperable. You have, for example, the RSS feed so you can pull the

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B. Van de Walle and J. Dugdale information from the Logistics Cluster very easily and put it on the OneResponse website. They are happy to do that, we’re happy to do that and they can do specialized things on their websites. I’m generally ok with that.”

While OCHA has been offering or recommending standards that allow datasets and databases to be compatible in order to support inter-operability of data, the compliance with standards still proves to be difficult in practice.

5.3 Enablers and inhibitors of IM One major problem that was identified by all interviewees was the huge information overload experienced in Haiti. “They were getting one or more reports per minute through e-mail… When you’re sitting in a tent in the middle of an airport and you’re trying to process and analyze all the information. Some of that information may be coming in in a different language, some of the information may lack geo-spatial information,…” “We were getting, and I cannot remember the exact numbers at this point, but I mean, even just contacts: we were trying to run a general contact list of the whole humanitarian community and we were having, on one day we would have anywhere from 250 to 500 people coming through the reception tent. These people wanted to add their information to the contact list or they cannot find someone on the contact list so they want that information. So just that sheer volume of information just related to that contact list and although it was manageable, it took a lot of time. And meetings and locations of the responding people and so on were just massive.

Part of the information overload problem stems from an increasingly large number of unusual, different sources of information, such as SMS, e-mail, social media, etc. Linked to this are the problems of how information contained within these different sources can be quickly and efficiently assessed and how to ensure the trustworthiness and validity of the data: “I think one of the things that happened in Haiti and that we had not seen before was that we had a lot of reports come in about people that had been trapped in the rubble through media that we had not had those reports come in through earlier. For the first time you could say that a lot of people were sending SMS….” “how do we deal with this overflow of data that’s coming in now through this new media, such as Twitter and Facebook as well”. How do you deal with all of that information?”

The problem with information provided through social media was widespread, as illustrated by one of the interviewees stating: “(…) it is quite interesting to hear that especially the information come in through social media and so on, when it got down to the street level, the information was not very accurate. In other words, up to 90% of the reports of people trapped in the rubble were not correct. The same way, I heard from the Marines that most of the information they were getting about looting, etc. usually was not very correct. (…). I’ve heard from other places that the social media reports are also not very accurate, because people will also try to use them to try to get help to their areas.”


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With hindsight, the widespread use of social media in the Haiti response had a profound impact on the humanitarian community and is now seen to have created a paradigm shift in humanitarian response. Indeed, for the first time, people affected by the disaster were able to directly communicate to the rest of the world using social media. This caused the mobilisation of thousands of ordinary citizens around the world to help with the aggregation, translation, and organisation of technical efforts to support the disaster response (Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011).

6

Discussion

During humanitarian response and relief operations, it is crucial that the information available to the humanitarian workers and their organisations is as timely and accurate as possible. Recognising this, the UN OGN on IM) has outlined the role of IM in humanitarian relief by assigning clear responsibilities to the clusters and UN OCHA, the main humanitarian actors involved. IM in humanitarian relief is still a rather recent development, with new approaches being developed and new systems being used at every new humanitarian disaster (Van de Walle and Turoff, 2007). The humanitarian relief in Haiti included an unprecedented flow of information, which rendered the situation extremely complex and coordination exceptionally challenging. It is therefore not surprising that our interviewees agree that IM does increasingly support the relief operations and coordination in Haiti, yet they also identify important key inhibitors in the current disaster. One major inhibitor of coordination identified in the interviews is the inadequate assessment of information. Analysis done within the clusters continues to be unequal across the board. Moreover, analysis on an inter-cluster level was experienced as weak and superficial. As Haiti experienced a large information overload, analysis is increasingly important, and hence poor analysis can have detrimental outcomes. It was also clear for the interviewees that IM in humanitarian relief still faces many challenges of logistical or financial origins. The interviewees stress the importance of continuing to train staff in IM and support clusters as much as possible with guidelines and resources. Given that this problem is widespread among the clusters, this is an important role for the IASC to take on. All interviewees agreed that OCHA’s presence in humanitarian relief and particularly in Haiti helped improve the coordination efforts. OCHA’s efforts gave other organisations a sense of initial coordination and were perceived as a good starting point. Open systems such as Ushahidi and Sahana proved very helpful, mainly due to their universal usability and accessibility. For example, one major initiative by several actors within the Sahana system was to involve a global community of volunteers to help match aid requests sent via SMS by Haitian citizens to the aid available from the local and international organisations. Volunteers located all over the world were invited to help with translating the SMS messages and putting them into the right Sahana format, thus helping the matching process (Sahana, 2010). This further use of ‘virtual humanitarian volunteers’ was reflected upon by our interviewees, who envisioned that potentially a huge amount of data collection, sharing, storing and analysis can be done remotely without requiring aid workers to be present in the field. One interviewee suggested that there could be, comparable to the US military system, a central IM point processing all the data for an emergency. This centre would be

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controlled and organised by OCHA. This solution could also overcome connectivity problems, data storage limitations or lack of human resources. However, this model would require a large initial financial investment, and inequalities in financial resources among the clusters could affect their willingness to support this model. Yet, even if remote support will be improved, there will still be a need for qualified and well trained IM staff on the ground to make sure that the right information reaches the right workers in the correct format and in a timely manner, despite the most adverse conditions any humanitarian disaster brings (Van de Walle and Turoff, 2008). Nevertheless, as all interviewees concur, that reality in the field is unlikely to change any time soon.

7

Conclusions

Using an interpretive case study approach, we have interviewed IM experts from different organisations active in Haiti after the earthquake to understand how they experienced the acquisition, assessment and processing of information for coordinating their humanitarian relief work. Humanitarian relief presents a very complex situation in a highly dynamic field that requires the most efficient work possible in order to remediate dramatic situations. Many different factors intensify humanitarian work and its coordination. Not only do structural and cultural factors play a crucial role, but also logistical or political instabilities may aggravate the work to be done. Haiti represented a highly unique situation concerning the use of information systems in humanitarian relief: a wide range of systems was used, and the sheer amount of information caused a tremendous overload among the humanitarian workers. The interviews conducted confirmed that information overload was indeed a critical problem, interfering with daily coordination activities. Whilst all interviewees recognised that IM is essential for efficient humanitarian coordination, many aspects of information collection, sharing and analysis still need further improvement.

7.1 Limitations of this study The case of Haiti is a very unique one in the humanitarian relief realm in several respects. The emergency was not only immense but was followed by an even larger response, resulting in an unusually large number of humanitarian agencies present in Haiti. This changed and complicated the coordinating efforts enormously. As such, this study only provides a limited view on the coordination challenges and the role of IM therein, based on the experiences of a limited number of local actors. The findings of the study can hence not simply be generalised to apply to any organisation, let alone to other humanitarian relief operations.

7.2 Suggestions for future research Future research in the area of coordination of humanitarian relief and the impact of IT and IM on humanitarian relief efforts could focus on several points that were touched upon in this paper. As what possibly can be seen as the most significant innovation in the use of information systems in the Haiti earthquake response, a global humanitarian volunteer community emerged and effectively assisted in ways that did not exist before


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(Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, 2011). For the future, it is important to improve collaboration with this community. However, this also means that the coordination of all actors and technologies in the humanitarian relief realm will become increasingly complex. The importance, coordination and processes of remote support offered in this new constellation must urgently be further studied.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to acknowledge Corinna Koepinghoff, MSc for her assistance in conducting the interviews with the IM experts.

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Notes 1

The Appendix presents a general overview of all principal organs of the UN.

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Appendix The UN system (see online version for colours)


List of acronyms ERC FAO IASC ICRC IFRC IOM MSF OCHA UNDP UNHCR UNICEF UNOSAT WFP WHO

Emergency Relief Coordinator UN Food and Agricultural Organization Inter-Agency Standing Committee International Committee of the Red Cross International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies International Organization for Migration Médecins sans Frontières Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs UN Development Program UN High Commissioner for Refugees UN Children’s Fund UN Office for Satellite Technology World Food Program World Health Organization

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