Information sharing vital to humanitarian response

The importance of accurate and timely information to help prevent, prepare for or mitigate humanitarian crises has been emphasised in a new statement on best practices adopted by relief professionals from the United Nations, nongovernmental organisations and donor community. "By sharing information we all become aware of which humanitarian and funding needs are being met," UN Deputy Emergency Relief Coordinator Carolyn McAskie said in a keynote speech at a Symposium on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange in Geneva, Switzerland last month. "Without this information we run the risk of unwittingly duplicating efforts," she added. After the symposium, four days of discussions among 250 aid practitioners were synthesised in a six page statement on Best Practices in Humanitarian Information Exchange. It was posted on the Reliefweb site for two weeks to give all participants the chance to comment before being adopted today. [see statement at http://www.reliefweb.int/symposium/final_statement.doc] During the Geneva meeting, McAskie cited Afghanistan and the volcanic eruption near Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as examples of emergencies where information management was well-coordinated. "In the extremely complex operating environment of Afghanistan, existing information systems... were enhanced to create one common information framework dealing with emergency as well as transitional issues," she said. In Goma, she added, "OCHA [the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs], with the full support of its partners, was able to deploy - at very little cost and relatively quickly - existing information management capacities to provide up-to-date information services to the agencies on the ground through a rudimentary, but effective, humanitarian information centre." Data and information must be relevant, accurate and timely to be useful, according to the statement. "Ensuring quality requires the development of, and adherence to, standards for information collection, exchange, security, attribution and use," it said. The statement called for improved preparedness, including baseline data for high-risk areas and rapid response humanitarian information centres; and better field-level information coordination. The symposium statement called for donors to recognise the importance of information preparedness to humanitarian action. "Many donors and aid organisations are still willing to spend millions of dollars on material relief and yet are reluctant to support information initiatives which seek to put across explanations as to what these donors or agencies are doing, and why," according to Edward Girardet of Media Action International. The statement acknowledged OCHA's role as a focal point in the area of humanitarian information and calls for the creation of a "multi-stakeholder steering committee" to look at several key issues: ensuring information systems meet operational needs; developing standards of information quality; and strengthening relationships among different information partners, including the media. Field-based humanitarian information centres - when established in crisis situations - should be "open-access physical locations," and "serve as a neutral broker of humanitarian information, providing value-added products and beneficial services to the field-based humanitarian community," the statement added. Participants at the symposium emphasised that technology is a powerful enabler, but that human judgement is the basis for operational decisions and systems should be relevant and easy to use, particularly in remote areas. "We need simple and user-friendly technologies that allow us to begin operating the moment we hit the ground," said McAskie, adding: "If the information we seek sits somewhere in a database, it is utterly useless if we do not all possess the same basic technical skills to retrieve it." Information management systems should also aim to reduce the effects of information overload, according to the statement. "Just as the uncoordinated arrival of relief supplies can clog a country's logistics and distribution system, the onslaught of unwanted, inappropriate and unpackaged information can impede decision-making and rapid response to an emergency," McAskie said.