An innovation born out of crisis in Africa rather genius in Silicon Valley, is precisely the sort of inventiveness needed to shape humanitarian relief work in the 21^st Century, according to the Director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College London.

“There’s been a paradigm shift. We’re living in the instantaneous age.  We’ve seen in Haiti and Chile how we can produce everyone-as-informant mapping, where an individual can send an anonymous text to the authorities locating vulnerable people, so that a ‘crisis map’ can be drawn up,” says Dr. Randolph Kent.

The new tool used in the recent earthquakes was invented by a Kenyan-born organisation, Ushahidi, which means testimony in Swahili. “It’s an example of the sort of revolution in future humanitarian management which we in the HFP have been urging – harnessing leading-edge science and technology to find imaginative solutions which will save millions of lives in future generations,” says Dr. Kent. 

Ushahidi was inspired by a Kenyan lawyer, Ory Okolloh, who was observing the disputed election in 2007 and after receiving threats she posted on-line the idea of an internet mapping tool to allow people to report threats and violence anonymously.  Wizzard tekkies saw the post and built the Ushahibi web platform which collected cellphone reports of riots, rapes and deaths and then plotted them on a map. 

“This isn’t error proof technology – people can lie and exaggerate their problems, get a location wrong and rumour can divert resources by suggesting hotspots which don’t exist,” says Dr. Kent, “but the new technology gives us something new - good-enough-truths based on aggregate information.”  He says a crisis map can reveal underlying patterns of reality such as how many kilometres inland a hurricane has killed and are the rapes and looting broadly dispersed or concentrated near military bases and specific centres.

“The humanitarian paradigm of the past was: ONE-to-MANY.  The humanitarian paradigm of the future is: MANY-to-MANY-to-MANY.  Victims themselves report their on-the-ground experiences.  They are first-hand historians and a self-organised mob of volunteers.  Their data is translated by aid workers and journalists into a crisis map which targets response.”

Dr. Kent says the HFP works as a catalyst for radical thinking in ways to manage future humanitarian crises.  Its Exchange Programme has been leading on developing a two-way-dialogue to ensure scientists and technologists on the one side, and humanitarian practitioners on the other, understand each other better and develop a coherent common language.  The HFP works with humanitarian organisations to develop long-term perspectives which consider “what might be” and to challenge orthodox thinking in order to identify new science and technology which will provide ways of mitigating “cataclysmic threats to human kind in our children’s and grandchildren’s generations”.