Overview 2013
2013 has unfortunately been a busy year for humanitarian actors with many political conflicts in Syria, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan and South Sudan, and more, as well as natural disasters such as typhoon Haiyan last month. Our NGO has keep on providing a mapping dimension to our partners’ projects to facilitate the humanitarian response and development of populations in need. On our professional activities’ side, besides our historical partners we’re still collaborating with, we have also developed major new projects with several different NGOs and international organizations. On our volunteers’ side, an important increase in the number of volunteers has allowed us to start implementing new projects, and to consider very interesting new ones!
We thank all our partners, members and volunteers for their renewed support. We wish you all the best for this new year... and a good read!
Maeve de France,
President, CartONG
PS: all these evolutions have lead us to adapt our status during an extraordinary General Assembly in September.
Volunteer activities
If 2012 has allowed us to strengthen our capabilities (new website, tools, communication improved...), 2013 have seen a takeoff of our volunteers activities. Thanks to two very successful get-togethers in April and September, we have been able to implement the following projects:
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The emergency mapping team – created in partnership with the emergency & rescue NGO GIS74 based in Haute-Savoie, close to our headquarters – is now functioning. It has been activated this year by GIS74 for the earthquake in Iran in May (with no deployment eventually) and for tests with a new partner, SOS Attitude (expert in emergency shelter) for Mexico and the Philippines. We offer this service to all small NGOs working on emergency humanitarian response, so feel free to get in touch with us! We are in fact actively looking for volunteers interested to strengthen this team.
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As part of the post-disaster response after typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, CartONG joined the Mapathon started by OpenStreetMap-France in Paris on November 22nd, and organized besides an online live session. The invitation has been successful, and we will reorganize this kind of event in the future! CartONG also occasionally helped the VISOV (Volontaires internationaux en soutien aux opérations virtuelles) network, in particular with the identification of the islands most harmed by the disaster.
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In parallel to the emergency mapping project, we started to collaborate with the Paris-I University for a “GIS for development” course. CartONG’s volunteers have submitted requirements to the students (maps and data mining) that looked like what an NGO could actually need; the students have handed over the result this week. This collaboration allows on one side for the students to be trained in a practical situation, and on the other side for CartONG to gather data on countries we have defined as priorities for future activations.
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Two new projects have been induced over the summer in partnership with NGOs from Aquitaine (South-West of France). The first one is a project to map grassroots community organizations in Madagascar in partnership with the NGO TSAMAD. The idea is to map these associations who play a crucial role in the social, educative and sanitary system of the country, in order to help them being more efficient through coordination and improved visibility. The second one is the community mapping of the Skoura oasis in Morocco, in partnership with the French NGO Pédiatres du Monde and local organizations. These two promising projects are currently on the starting phase and would need volunteers on the technical side but also for project management and fundraising.
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Two short projects have been conducted early this year: digitization and mapping for the NGO ASA Madagascar, and supervising students creating a mapping platform for the association AnimAlerte (France).
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Our president was deployed in Ivory Coast for a follow-up mission on the study project on the cashew nut sector for the French NGO Rongead.
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Finally, CartONG continued its core mission of disseminating the tools of geographic information through several events: OpenStreetMap’s State Of The Map France 2013 (Lyon), “GIS for shelter and settlements” workshop (Geneva), 20th birthday of Groupe URD (Plaisians, France), Aquitaine’s International solidarity and developpement meetings (Bordeaux), “SIG la lettre” conference (Paris), FOSS4G (Nottingham), OpenKnowledge conference (Geneva), Youphil roundtable on data for humanitarian action (Paris), and of course our now traditional interventions in universities (Master 2 Carthagéo)…
All these projects have been made possible by the dedications of our volunteers, but we are still far from being enough to do all we’d like to do – so join us! We are looking not only for experts in mapping or programmers, but also people interested in project management, fundraising, translations, event organization, etc.
And if you’d like to support CartONG but don’t have a lot of free time, you can also become a member of the association or donate to us (donations are tax exemptible in France at a 66% rate – check in your country what is the applicable law). Every donation is useful: e.g. if you give 50€ (so 17€ after the tax exemption) it will allow us to help develop these volunteer projects that have little or no funding!
Pro missions
Like last year, our focus was on assisting our partners in improving their information management through mobile data collection. However, we also continued to work on our original expertise, mapping and GIS. Our experts have been active in the following missions this year, both in the field and from our headquarters:
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Pilot Monitoring of the Blanket Food Programme providing supplementary feeding for 6000 children from 6-59 months: mission to Niger with the Public Health Section of the UN refugee agency (UNHCR). Mobile Technology is used to assess different ways of tracking the attendance and monitor the efficiency of the program.
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Support Standardised Expanded Nutrition Survey (SENS) in refugees camps through three missions for the Public Health section of UNHCR (Burkina Faso, Kenya and Liberia). The data is collected by using Android smartphones and ODK applications. CartONG’s tasks usually comprise: coding/adapting different questionnaires in XML format, training survey managers and enumerators on the technology and the data flow, and continued remote support until the survey is completed. On its yearly report, UNHCR “recommends the use of smartphones for data collection due to more convenient data collection with improved error control, no need for data entry into computers and less data cleaning. This new technology has resulted in higher quality data being collected with less burden on enumerators at a lower cost than paper based surveys, as well as quicker dissemination of results.” (Use of Smart Phone in UNHCR SENS, UNHCR).
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A mission with the Joint IDP Profiling Service (JIPS, a consortium of humanitarian organizations lead by UNHCR) to New Delhi, India, for urban profiling of different refugee groups and Indian migrants, followed by a coding training in Geneva. Since an urban setting comes with different requirements, also GPS coordinates were collected to get a sense of the distribution of the target population. The final results can be found here.
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Support the Shelter Cluster through a Global Focal Point for Advocacy and Communications, including emergency missions to Myanmar and Mali. The Advisor also assisted with streamlining the Global Shelter Communication products as well as developed templates.
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CartONG was involved in the roll-out of the latest UNHCR GIS to Kenya and Iraq. This included ArcGIS server adjustments as well as field deployments to install the software and launch the test phase. The aim is to connect field GIS Officers to the centralized database with editing rights for some layers. This is also an opportunity for UNHCR HQ to disseminate their new templates and symbology.
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Another type of nutrition survey was supported for Terre des Hommes-Suisse through a mission to Burkina Faso: CartONG helped TdH to switch to mobile data collection using smartphones in Sourou region. Our team coded the questionnaires, set up all the smartphones and trained the NGO’s local staff to use the tools in their next survey without support.
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A mission to South Sudan for the REACH consortium, supporting a household economy analysis as part of the BRACE programme with smartphone technology. CartONG’s tasks covered questionnaire coding, developing the survey procedures, training as well as remote support.
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Reporting and Technical Project Management for REDD+ Project in Quang Binh Province, Vietnam: Four support missions for the German cooperation agency GIZ. This project was a continuation of last year’s Bufferzone Development Plan and REDD+ Scoping reporting mission.
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Responding to a Call for Proposals, CartONG was selected by UNICEF together with our colleagues from MapAction and iMMAP to provide mapping and information services for their Western and Central Africa Office. The first assignment was assisting with streamlining questionnaire and methodology for their smart phone based assessments of schools and health centers after the crisis in Mali in remote support.
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A new project started this year with Médecins Sans Frontières-Suisse: MSF trusted us for the pilot of their online Map center providing basemaps for their countries of operations and a database with reference data. Additionally, CartONG has been requested to create emergency maps for their deployments. The partnership has already been successfully tested for the Philippines and Central African Republic crisis, and will be expanded next year.
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A new phase commenced for the NOMAD consortium we’re leading with iMMAP: the aim of this project is to provide information and guidance for NGOs wanting to deploy mobile data collection tools. Thanks to a grant from the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, we were able to reshape and update our online selection assistant that allows NGOs to find the solution most fitting their needs, and to organize a stimulatingworkshop for providers & users in Paris in May!
In 2014 CartONG will continue its partnership with UNHCR, UNICEF, IMS, MSF and iMMAP. Project planning is already underway.
CartONG releases CartoBlog!
We have started a project we were planning for a long time: CartoBlog, our technical blog, have finally been released! We'll use it to share our experiences, technical tests, feedback on solutions, interesting articles we read, etc.
The staff and volunteers of CartONG will speak of GIS, mapping, mobile technologies, databases, etc., for humanitarian organizations. But we’ll also try to give you tips on workflows and mission planning… anything that can be useful for your daily work! This blog will be managed by our team, but if you’d like to contribute to it, you’re most welcome – just get in touch!
Technical article: information management in the Humanitarian sector
The needs to have both technical and coordination skills.
If you are reading this newsletter, there is a fair chance that you know what Information Management is and what it is useful for, and even more so concerning geographical IM. We are all agreed that, technically speaking, having a decent IM strategy means that you facilitate:
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Data capture, with a proper data structure and model for a consistent database,
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Proper storage and classification, with metadata specifying the data’s quality, sources, and a temporal dimension that helps understand the data on the long run,
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Dissemination inside and outside the organization, with data that explains itself.
However, it’s not all about technology. It helps, but none of these aspects click together if there is no strong coordination and a centrally decided governance to help fashion it properly. The key question is how you manage to set up the strategy, which depends of course on the size and type of your organization, but with some undergoing rules:
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Make sure that all actors are committed to the strategy, with a proper change management focus.
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Show the different users the benefits that it will bring them, depending on their profiles. They must gain an appreciation of the importance of the approach to become part of it.
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Have user-friendly tools to capture, analyze and disseminate information, that ensures positive user experience.
This will be a win-win approach for organizations and individuals that are part of these organizations. But, more than that, it is also a first step towards a more coordinated approach at another scale, that of the humanitarian world- as the data’s quality improves, there will be a natural incentive to share it more widely, as well as to build it together.
This will be a real improvement, for the following reasons:
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As more actors get involved in the data, it will improve its accuracy at a given moment, reduce unnecessary data (noise) and ensure that it is ready-to-use in maps and reports, therefore making the information created more effective.
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Having more actors involved associated to a real metadata policy will also improve the data’s life expectancy, taking into account not just the post-crisis emergency mapping but also the rebuilding, mitigation and awareness arousal to reduce future risks.
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In such situations, the data can also become an extra link between organizations in the field that can encourage them to exchange more frequently and coordinate their action for better efficiency. It can also help avoid duplication of efforts in data capture.
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It will also help channel the initiatives towards the essential goals, making the initiative ever more human and relevant to the situation.
- The CartONG team
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