INRERVIEW | Sustainable Development
Like Expression and Education, Connectivity Should be a Basic Right In the absence of proper connectivity, you cannot think about empowering or developing marginalized communities, says NetHope CEO Lauren Woodman. Please give us a brief overview of NetHope. Who are your international partners? NetHope is a consortium of 56 leading humanitarian, development and conservation organizations in the world. We are a consortium within the technology sector. We work with more than 60-70 large technology providers, and collectively the group tries to figure out how technology can be used in dealing with the issues faced by these 56 organizations. The consortium is diverse, and the issues we address include emergency response, refugee support, child vaccination, maternal health, financial inclusion, species protection and Climate Change. Our members include World Vision, Mercy Corps and many more large NGOs working in different geographies. We also work with large technology providers such as Microsoft, Salesforce, Facebook and Google. In fact Cisco was our first partner and helped us found NetHope nearly 18 years ago. We also work with USAID, other large donor institutions and many UN agencies. What role does geospatial and mapping communities play in this process? Quite a lot. For example, Esri has been our partner for many years. There are so many applications of 48
www.geospatialworld.net | July-August 2019
