Aid agencies 'must use new tools'

The UN Foundation/Vodafone Foundation Partnership new report, New Technologies in Emergencies and Conflicts: The Role of Information and Social Networks, looks at innovation in the use of technology along the timeline of crisis response, from emergency preparedness and alerts to recovery and rebuilding.

A rising star in the effort is Ushahidi, an open-source combination of text messaging and Google maps that got its start following the violence in the wake of the 2007 Kenyan elections.

Since then, it has been used to map conflicts and indirectly monitor elections from Colombia to the Democratic Republic of Congo to Afghanistan.

And more effective than the traditional megaphone is FrontlineSMS, a tool used to broadcast emergency information via SMS to anyone in a region with mobile signal.

Read full article in BBC.

emily | 9:01 AM | |
The Permanent Link to this page is: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2009/12/025115.htm