Nathan Lee

The vision of TED is “Ideas worth spreading”, so with disasters similar to the recent Haitian Earthquakes I thought I’d highlight and spread some of the ideas presented at TED over the years that are of interest in disaster situations and useful in (somewhat) “disaster proofing” the developing world.

The struggles post disaster although heightened dramatically are but a big bang version of the daily problems faced ongoing in developed nations. Extreme disease, poverty, health issues, hunger, thirst and helplessness are a constant when you’re in that half of the world that live on less than $2 a day.

Water

The most urgent need after any widespread disaster would have to be availability of clean water. The massive infrastructure damage that follows earthquakes is no exception: pipes and dams rupture, sewage leaks, electricity is knocked out to pumping stations, transport routes disrupted etc. For tsunamis the contamination of drinking water is a major problem. War and plague situations the problem becomes competition for limited fresh water or crowding near water which results in disease outbreak. Michael Pritchard’s got a device to turn undrinkeable water drinkable:

As a side note to get an idea of the scale he’s talking with the filtration of virii see my earlier post: Zoom in! Enhance.. Enhance! Oh, look! There’s a carbon atom.

So the idea is instead of shipping the rather heavy, bulky and “single shot” bottles of water: ship these filtration packs. They can then turn thousands of litres into drinkable water and most importantly they can do it away from central distribution centres (which means less risk of people in close contact spreading disease and less need to make risky treks or relocation to camps). If it can make the Thames water + rabbit shit + pond sludge drinkable then it can be used by people to get drinking water from the flood waters or stagnant dams.

Health

Life threatening injuries require urgent medical assistance, which often involves delivering things like vaccinations, antibiotics and other medications. These are sometimes delivered by doctors, other times by semi-skilled healthcare volunteers and sometimes by completely untrained people.

Marc Koska looked at what happens in poorer nations with reuse of syringes in poorer nations and proposed a solution that doesn’t cost any more than the standard syringe out there in circulation today:

So to prevent a natural disaster (or simply being a poor nation) turning into a subsequent AIDS/HIV, Hepatitis or other blood borne outbreak after the dust has settled: any and all syringes sent into a disaster zone need to have this “fire once and break” mechanism.

Aside from the immediate/urgent injuries of the masses affected by the disaster there’s also the medium to longer term concerns. Many are instantly thrown below the poverty level as their possessions may have been lost, destroyed or left behind. Sight is perhaps one of the most important sensory tools we have as humans and Josh Silver has an amazing demonstration of cheap, easily adjustable liquid filled eye glasses which could restore clear vision to people. This is in addition to the worth of such a device in any developing nation as a means for increasing productivity and removing poor vision as a barrier to economic independence for many aging people.

Bill Clinton (an idol of mine for public speaking) talks about the core problem with many developing/poor nations: the need for healthcare systems.

He makes the interesting point that one of the biggest problems in nations without systems is that in an environment of chaos you have no guarantee that effort will result in certain outcomes. Everything becomes a struggle, absolutely everything. Take a developed nation: you know that making the effort to go to a doctor with a child for vaccination will almost always result in you walking away with a vaccinated child (or an appointment the next day if for some reason they couldn’t see you that day).

Bill’s talk is about creating a repeatable model for installing self maintaining healthcare systems in countries that will address the issue of incapacity in those nations which is starting to become the biggest hurdle to tackling various health problems.

Money
A huge need for any disaster recovery is via emergency relief funds flowing in quickly and to the right people. This is what I’d probably call top down aid. But taking a step either side of the disaster event (lead up or later stage recovery) and you have a need for funding at the bottom level in the developing world.

The individual need for economic growth beyond organic funding (e.g. you need a piece of equipment that you simply do not have the cash for but which will allow you to generate income). What will work is not charity necessarily as the old “give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime” states.

Jacqueline Novogratz proposes an alternative to straight out charity she calls “patient capital”:

So rebuilding and pre-building (preparing a nation to be strong and ready to cope with disasters) this is of great importance. Low income entrepreneurs need access to finance too. There are now a number of micro-finance or micro lending options out there.

Now I’ll stretch the mandate of this blog entry (I am the boss of it after all) a bit and attempt to link into post economic credit crisis (see here for my background on the credit crisis in pretty pictures and animations) consumer spending habits and how it could be a good thing for having money available for such disasters. Watch John Gerzema talk about value shifts in consumerism:

So the idea he was discussing was that we’d move away from mindless consumption (I hope it sticks!). People becoming more humble in their purchasing or indeed less likely to purchase unnecessary goods in the first place.

Tourism is trending towards trips that are a bit more low key (which would perhaps make less “touristy” places more likely destinations, perhaps helping to get tourism going in developing nations).

Consumers could also start to put pressure on companies to make ethical choices and be less exploitative/more inclusive of the 3rd world (e.g. stuff like the Fair Trade Association).

I could go on for pages and pages with extrapolations from this basic concept with respect to the 3rd world, but perhaps I’ll leave that for another time.

Education
Education can’t be quickly dropped from helicopter and stuck in a kids arm via some healthcare worker. BUT I strongly believe that the key to solving just about any of our problems (and dramatically lesson the impact of natural disasters) is via education.

Health problems, inescapable poverty, religion based persecution/superstition etc. can all be pushed out of the spotlight by giving people access to education. Access to good, secular education (yes, I do happen to think that teaching kids that “god did it” instead of real science is a rather horrible thing to do) can and does help people’s lives get better. Unfortunately the very worst of bible thumping misinformation (Dying from AIDS is preferable to using a condom type stuff) is getting pushed in massive amounts into the poor nations where lack of funding leaves a massive gap.

But I digress!

With education comes the ability to read and write. This means health pamphlets, coordination with government/aid workers etc. It means independent research/learning can take place (see the end for a great example!).

So in the pre-disaster situation: with education comes the opportunity to better your position in life (economically, intellectually etc). Women are often (always?) the last in a given society to access this basic mechanism for improvement. With that in mind, Michelle Obama’s plea for education (filmed last year) directed at girls is definitely worth a listen:

Education is one of those ways of “disaster proofing” (well.. strives toward disaster proofing at least). It replaces ignorance with knowledge, superstition with reason and prevents a whole sway of flow on consequences throughout society if people are uneducated, poor and with no possibility of escaping such a situation.

Like any good teacher, the ones servicing the eager young minds in developing nations will need materials. So to address that, from a technology standpoint: Richard Baraniuk talks about a system for sharing/open sourcing learning:

I don’t need to go into how beneficial free, shareable knowledge can be in boosting the education levels in any given country. A number of universities have opened up their course materials to anyone with an internet connection. Of course this does tend to be a bit inaccessible where internet is not available or computers are scarce so I guess he talks about community authored, publish on demand inexpensive books which could be extended to poorer nations with little access to the internet. This links in with the programs to bring laptops and internet to the developing nations, so access to content in the first place is definitely an important part of multi-pronged approach to educating the poor.

Mapping

Back to an immediate need in any disaster operation: The need for maps in terms of directing basic humanitarian functions through to use of GPS devices for efficient transport is critical.

There are programmes out there like Tracks 4 Africa who take the approach of handing out GPS mapping units to a community of volunteers and create an average of some fairly volatile paths.

Another community/volunteer approach is described in the “Making maps to fight disaster, build economies” by Lalitesh Katragadda at TEDIndia last year:

Communication

“Data is king” an old buddy of mine Rob once said and making sense of the massive amount of data that is produced during these disasters is far beyond anyone’s ability to sift through it all. So Erik Hersman’s TED Talk on reporting crisis via texting proposes a solution:

It’s a bit of a longer term goal, but a universal means of communication is important in any disaster situation. While I won’t claim that English is the panacea of communication the point is made by Jay Walker on the world’s English mania. It certainly seems like English is in many places in the world the possible “go between” language to unite many different nationalities.

In terms of lifting up the developed world the vast quantity and quality of materials available in English is undeniable, so ability to understand that is great.

Information Visualisation

Hans Rosling shows the best stats about the developing world you’ve ever seen (maybe you have seen it before in my previous post), particularly important to make the right policy decisions and to separate out the myth from that supportable by the data:

Having the right data analysis and visualisation tools is important for managing both the recovery from a disaster (the obvious problem being the collection of data to begin with. The wild variations over initial days of crisis of “estimated deaths” is but one example) and the prevention of the next event via generally improving the country’s situation to begin with.

Optimism for the future

I’ll end this rather lengthy post with some talks (or “grim inspiration” for the first one) on Optimism.

The first (a bit of a long one) by Robert “I’m not Mr optimism” Write is assuring us that history has an overall direction despite the apparent downs. From single cell organisms to today there is hope found in our evolution(s):

And I think a great example of how someone with nothing but a bit of ingenuity and some scraps of materials can do something quite impressive:

and his return to TED two years later a much more confident speaker (even throwing in some jokes..).

Which reinforces my earlier section on education and access to knowledge. William had access to a fairly hard won education. In his readings he came across one book that talked about the principles of wind electricity generation. This gave him the inspiration to dig up some pipes, an old bicycle dynamo and some other bits to make a windmill to power lights, radios and later irrigation pumps and the neighbours’ mobile phones.

If there’s a thing that people need particularly in a disaster situation or at the bottom of the economic rung: it’s optimism.

As William said in his speech: “Trust yourself and believe. Whatever happens don’t give up.”

Donations

All the best wishes for those doing good in Haiti and helping rebuild a destroyed country.

In terms of providing no bullshit assistance (without trying to convert people/spend it on bibles) I’d recommend Oxfam and the Red Cross, two great organisations that have helped millions over the years:

• Oxfam Australia’s Haiti donation page (or the US one for the yanks and UK one for the poms)
• Australian Red cross Haiti Quake appeal (or the US one, UK one)

In terms of some of the longer term goals I talked about, I think the tireless work of people like Fred Hollows is invaluable (restoring sight to people in the poorer nations). See The Fred hollows foundation to donate there. Again, another “let’s get maximum bang for buck” type organisation.

FOOTNOTE: As a (kinda) disclaimer I donate to the above charities as per any “ordinary bloke” off the street might, but have no financial/business or any other ties whatsoever. This blog is not funded by anyone other than myself.