GLOBAL EM
Technology in Humanitarian Response: Developments and Limitations
SAEM PULSE | JULY-AUGUST 2022
By Sonya Naganathan, MD MPH on behalf of the SAEM Global Emergency Medicine Academy
20
In 2021, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported 235 million persons in need of humanitarian assistance and projected that number to increase to approximately 274 million people in 2022 (with projected costs of USD $41 billion). Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen are the three most expensive crises. Afghanistan, which carries the highest cost, will require 4.4 billion dollars in assistance to reach the 24.4 million people in need. Most recently, the war in Ukraine has catapulted the world of humanitarian relief back into the daily news cycle. There have been numerous reports of civilians, hospitals, and humanitarian aid workers being intentionally targeted
by the Russian military—leading to tragic loss and destruction of lives and infrastructure. As a result, the humanitarian crisis and response has rapidly decompensated, marred by myriad safety and logistics concerns. Over the last decade, a series of catastrophes have spurred the development of digital and other technologies to attempt to mitigate some of the risks and inherent challenges to these settings. There has been an ever-growing call for more. Let’s look back.
Open Source Software
Towards the end of 2007, two months of political unrest following the election of then Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki
led to efforts focused on harnessing the power of the public to generate real-time information. Ushahidi, a company born out of this crisis, crowdsourced information using text message and email and mapped the reports of protests and violence (via their open-source platform) to various public websites including Google Maps. Ushahidi has since grown to develop its technology, demonstrating its use in different settings. Notably, Ushahidi’s crisis mapping efforts were instrumental in disseminating vital information in the immediate aftermath of the Haitian earthquake in 2010. By allowing others to send text messages to a centralized location, Ushahidi volunteers were able to map the GPS coordinates and
