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Disrupting Humanitarian Response

Date post: 18-Feb-2017
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DISRUPTING HUMANITARIAN RESPONSE GISLI RAFN OLAFSSON HUMANITARIAN ADVISOR – NETHOPE PARTNER & CEO USA – BERINGER FINANCE
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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

WW W.N ET HO PE . OR G


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