Hacking Humanitarian Aid
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:19
Yeah, good morning.
00:23
Good morning, thank you. Let's see here. So as Geraldine said, I started 12 years ago working in humanitarian posts, a disaster work.
00:42
I spent about five years working within the more traditional system of this very top down, how are we gonna go in and help people do things for them, build the houses that they need, the medical systems that they need, things like this. And after five years of doing that, I got pretty jaded with the way the current system works.
01:03
A lot of people say now, oh wow, you're innovating within the humanitarian system, which seems really big, but if you really step back and look at the humanitarian system, it's actually quite an archaic system. So while that's a nice compliment to say that we're innovating the humanitarian system, it doesn't take a genius, really.
01:25
So basically after those five years, we've been working on a model and it was a lot of drinks with other humanitarians after work, sitting back looking at the system, collecting all these different ideas. And then the earthquake in Haiti happened and we said okay, if there was a time to try some of these new ways of doing things,
01:42
this was the time. Haiti's notoriously known as one of the most difficult countries in the world to operate without a disaster than there was a disaster. So we started this little group called Communautaire. Stands for, it's not French, sounds like it, but it has a lot to do with community. Stands for Communities United in Response, Relief, and Renewal. And it was just very inspired by what you saw,
02:03
what I saw a lot of times from within the local communities and how they responded to a disaster and how they really came together, put things aside, economic backgrounds, religious backgrounds, political views, things like this, put all this stuff aside and started to really work together. So I wanna talk to you about two things today.
02:21
One is about a lot of these technologies that we're seeing out in the maker space, in the maker movement, this additive manufacturing, CNC, things like that, and give you some really solid examples of how we are using them in the field, but the first thing that I wanna talk about is this difference between a participant and a beneficiary.
02:40
The humanitarian system very much looks at the people affected by a disaster as beneficiaries. How are they gonna go in and help them? How are they gonna benefit from their organization? Things like this. And then you have a participant, which is very much so if you look at the maker movement, it's a very do-it-yourself. People are doing things for themselves.
03:01
There's a lot more pride and dignity in doing something for yourself, and it's something that had always bothered me within the humanitarian work that we were doing is how can you do something for someone without requiring some sort of exchange and dignity during that process?
03:20
So I'm gonna use an example that we might all know, be able to easier relate to. And this is, this photo here is Post Bonnaroo, which is a large music festival. I'm sure most of us have been to music festivals and things like this. This is Post Bonnaroo, and this is how it's left. This is what I would equate to being the beneficiaries
03:43
when people come in, do large-scale production in order for the people going to the show, essentially, the beneficiaries. This one over here is this other little festival called Burning Man, which I've been a part of for a lot of years. This is a festival that's put on by the participants. Burning Man provides very little,
04:01
provides a stage and a platform and the means for people to create their own event. And this is how it's left. This is how it's left after Bonnaroo. This photo here actually was used by Burning Man as a public shaming for one of the biggest messes they've left scene after Burning Man. So it's not jaded at all, it's just that's actually
04:22
the worst one they've published. And this is typical after just about every music festival, things like this. So if you think about that and how, when humanitarian aid is just simply put on for the beneficiary or the attendee versus the attendees putting on the show themselves.
04:40
And this also relates a lot to a lot of the technologies that we're now using that enable people to do things for themselves. So like I was saying, you see a lot of this amazing things in how the community operates in a post-disaster zone. Six years ago, we did not know what a maker space was. We didn't know about this maker movement happening.
05:01
This was a lot of years coming completely from the opposite side of the humanitarian sector to where we developed this model and launched it in Haiti. We said, what if we just got a big workshop, a lot of tools, technology, things where the victims of a disaster could utilize this space to help themselves do things for themselves. Well, about a year into it, we had a fire
05:23
in our workshop there. We had a large workshop, tool-lending library, things like this. And this was our workshop, our original workshop. It caught fire, we had a whole bunch of people in there using it, it was a freak accident. We're situated in Haiti very, just outside the slums of City Soleil, which are the poorest slums
05:41
in the Western Hemisphere. The UN in the 90s deemed it the most dangerous place on earth, lots of violence, things like this. And rather than going in and kind of injecting ourselves into this community to see how we could help them, we set up just outside this community and invited them to come in and to do things for themselves, use our workshop. Well, when this fire happened, the community had been using it for about a year.
06:02
That community, in Haitian Creole, there's a word called kombi, and it's a very, very old, like you guys were talking about, it's a very, very old principle of people coming together and harvesting each other's crops. It comes from the peasant movement. And so these slums of City Soleil actually called a kombi, it's the first time anybody
06:20
had ever heard of Haitians calling a kombi for an international organization. They were invested in the space. This was something that they could use. So they came in and rebuilt it. And I'm gonna show you our new workshop here via one of these cool technologies you may have seen outside called virtual reality. So here's our new workshop.
06:42
This is used by, let's see, in this whole center, this is kind of the maker space. We have another 3D printing and computer lab, things like that, where some of the techier stuff happens. This has been used by hundreds of different organizations. In Haiti alone, we call the overall space a resource center, so it's a maker space, co-working space, a lot of these buzz words
07:01
that we're using today, but still shared space full of resources, a resource center. So this, the virtual reality, we've started to do a bit of this to give people context. I know UNHCR is using virtual reality in Syrian refugee camps in order to build empathy
07:21
and have people understand what's going on. We use it for a lot of different reasons. Here's our workshop. Like I said, last year alone, we had 185 different organizations come and use this space and we really focus a lot on that cross-cultural communication and collaboration. So we had about 60% Haitian groups using this space
07:41
and about 40% international groups. So with this also, we have tons of different groups that wanna come in with their new technology, new ideas, we encourage them to incubate it in a space that isn't directly in the community first, but it's just outside the community, but has a lot of that community feedback. This is great when I can send this to groups
08:00
that are coming in, they're being like, okay, what kind of tools, what kind of workshop are we working with? What do we need to bring? You can easily just send them this and say, okay, well here, go ahead, take a look yourself. You can see what you're working with. You can see what tools we have and it really gives them a great idea of what this space is like. Back to my slideshow here.
08:24
Now as far as some of these technologies that we've been using and really providing, giving these tools and making them available to the beneficiaries or not to the participants really and how it is that they can use them. So we're in Haiti, Philippines, and we've been in Nepal for the last year.
08:41
One of the coolest stories, and actually I'd like to shout out to Field Ready who helped us in the early days 3D print these shipping containers. The UN gave us, these are little model 3D printed shipping containers because what we wanna do is we really wanna incorporate the community in the design of the spaces that we're doing. So it's very hard when it comes to designing physical space
09:01
that you're kind of becoming exclusive and that you have to be an architect or somebody that can draft and things like this. So we had this great idea. The UN gave us 16 shipping containers to build our space with. We asked Field Ready, can you 3D print 16 shipping containers that are to scale and how can we really engage the community in building out our space and designing our space?
09:22
This is kind of where once you give a lot of these tools and technology to the people therefore is where you start to get innovation that you couldn't really come up with on your own. This is very bottom up innovation. So this gentleman here, we wanted to make the space very inclusive. He is the CEO of the Disabled Peoples of Nepal Association.
09:42
And you might be able to see his staff there between his legs, his cane, he's blind. And so he had kind of heard about this 3D printing but had never really understood it. And we invited them over people with wheelchair, blind, people with all sorts of different disabilities to give us feedback on what this design
10:02
of the center ultimately would be their center would look like. And so he understood it, came up, told us a lot about how to incorporate blind person's perspective and all this sort of stuff. But then he realized in understanding what this 3D printing was capable of doing and he asked us a simple question. He's like, wait a minute, can you guys,
10:20
once you guys are done building this space, can you scan it and can you 3D print a tactile map of the entire space with braille so that any blind person can come in and navigate it and understand it? And we're like, that's absolutely brilliant. I've never seen that. That's something that we would have never, you know, our technicians or 3D printers, people would have never really come up with. This is where these innovation and ideas are coming.
10:43
You know, you provide the technology, they'll come up with it. So here's what we're currently constructing in Kathmandu right now. It's a maker space, co-working space, workshop, tool lending library. It's been a very collaborative design. Something we really like, you know, like creating the spaces so as soon as you step into them
11:01
you're automatically thinking outside the box. Some other examples of 3D printing are, there's tons, I'm just giving you guys a handful of different technologies and some solid examples, was in the Philippines we were asked by UNICEF, there was a large problem
11:21
with sexually transmitted diseases and that's because, you know, it's a very Catholic country and a lot of this is very taboo so they wanted to build a reproductive health clinic. But how do you build a reproductive health clinic and make that appealing and actually used by a lot of these street kids and homeless kids that are in the street and things like this?
11:41
So we designed, we worked with the community, we worked with over 100 different street youth and the city and a bunch of different organizations, the World Health Organization and did a very collaborative design of what is now the Tacloban City Youth Center and this is a, this is kind of cool, this is a shipping container, reproductive health clinic,
12:01
skate park, adolescent training and a basketball court, all into one. So you don't have this kind of sterile reproductive health clinic all by itself, you've got this community engaged but what was really cool was after the completion of this project, it was completely owned by the community. It was and a lot of international aid comes in, builds something, gets it all up and going,
12:20
leaves, comebacks a year later and it's like, wait a minute, why isn't this getting used, why hasn't it been maintained, anything like this? And you really have to start from the beginning and get that, we call it design equity. Design equity, sweat equity and decision making equity are three different equities that you can get from the community when you're doing projects with them. So this was a cool example, I don't know if you see the little guy right here,
12:42
we were able to work with the youth for them to design their own space and before you go right into large scale production, you can 3D print things and so the kids would come up with a bunch of different ideas and here's the layout of the skate park, here's where the clinic is, things like this, we say that looks really cool, what if we 3D print that first and then you can have a working model and there was a lot of iterations of this,
13:02
rapid prototyping to where they would print it all out and be like, oh, this won't work and then they go back to the drawing board, change it, change it, so it really was their design. Let's see here, another good example, as we're like, we did the first 3D printing lab in Haiti, we're doing prosthetics, a lot of things like this,
13:21
Nepal has been very, very encouraging, the maker movement is extremely strong there, people look at India and China as tech and innovation, all that sort of stuff and they tend to forget about this little country that's directly in between them. So we brought in a simple 3D printer, we work with the Robotics Association of Nepal,
13:41
yes, Nepal has a very strong robotics movement, they're having to build things on their own and figure things out, but there's a lot of this hunger for tech and innovation within the space. So a lot of times we see these 3D printers getting used for knickknacks, 3D printing another Yoda head, things like this,
14:00
which is cool, it's a part of the do it yourself craft movement and things like that, but we're finding more and more in these developing countries where larger scale manufacturing's not readily available is where a lot of these printers are getting really, really used. This was within the first two weeks of providing the Robotics Association of Nepal a 3D printer, they printed one knickknack,
14:21
they then started printing chocolate molds for a company that wanted to do very specific ones, the third print they ever did was for a implant of a girl that had brain cancer, sorry, bone cancer, and the doctors found out about this publicly available 3D printer, they came right in, they started working on the teams,
14:41
they scanned her left foot piece that didn't have cancer, 3D printed a model for the other foot to use that as a metal mold to then do this implant, and this girl is now fast on the road to recovery. This is within two weeks of providing this technology. A lot of people sit with 3D printers on their desk
15:01
for a large amount of time and are like these guys are just really, really hungry for and going for it. Some of the other cool technologies, you guys might have seen the CNC machine out there, computer numeric control, what's really cool with these machines is that you don't have to be on the ground to help design and build these things.
15:22
So this is, you know, we are at an internet conference, almost all of these machines work via the internet, so we're working with a Japanese group right now, a university that are designing a new type of house that is literally computer numeric controlled, cut out via a router. So this is them, this is the Nepali guys cutting out the designs by the Japanese guys
15:42
where they sent one Japanese guy on the ground, but this had like this house that we're building. Here's on the, let's see the next photo is a photo of the house that they built in the Philippines in partnership with the Fab Lab Network. It's just cool that we're like these different technologies can
16:00
not always work. Internet. Yeah. Anyway, this is kind of the new, you know, the old system is where
16:21
people have to go be on the ground for six months at a time, get local contacts, things like this. Hey, there we go. But now we're growing out of that to where designers, technology, let's see here.
16:53
So yeah, here's the house. This house is the one that they built in the Philippines. Same thing designed by a bunch of people in Japan, assembled on the ground, all computer cut out.
17:01
It's a really cool structure. It's not necessarily a solution when it comes to housing, but it's providing an alternative that gets people outside the box thinking and trying new things. We're currently, because you can't always get a lot of these tools and technologies in the countries that we're working in, sometimes you have to build them. And so this is what we're currently constructing
17:20
in Nepal right now. It's in a plasma cutting CNC machine. So rather than cutting out wood, it'll cut out metal. And you can't, there isn't one in Nepal. You can't go down to your shop and buy it. I'm definitely jealous of the instance in China where they were like, here's $100,000, go buy a bunch of equipment. We're not always able to do that.
17:40
So we're actually having to really hack these systems and figure out how it is that we can build this stuff using the local resources. This also makes it more scalable. People can take this, we'll work out the bugs and other people can replicate it elsewhere. And then just for fun, there's actually been doing a lot of work with drones and some of the technology
18:01
that's coming out with that. So a lot of building assessment. This is actually how we'll be 3D printing the tactile map of our property is via a drone software that will go around, take thousands of photos, stitch it all together, then create an online computer model. So here we're doing some assessments of getting structural measurements
18:21
and all this sort of stuff of damaged buildings without actually having to even go in the building, which might not be that safe, especially after an earthquake when there's a lot of tremors afterwards. This humanitarian world is very, very, just it's starting to know what needs to innovate.
18:40
And it's not exactly sure what that looks like. There's definitely popping up here and there. But this whole maker movement, there's a little buzz, things like this, this do it yourself, what does this mean? So coming in September, we figured why not? I'm sure many of you have heard of Maker Faire. We're bringing Maker Faire to DePaul for the first time.
19:02
And it's also gonna be the world's first humanitarian focused Maker Faire. So a lot of these Maker Faires are about creating this, creating craft, which is great. It's getting a lot of the Western world back into that act of making and doing things for yourself. But how are we really gonna display to the UN,
19:23
to the humanitarian systems, what is the possibility of this technology, and especially when you give this technology to the people that can really use it and really scale it on their own. Back to how the aid industry is going to innovate.
19:42
It's currently trying to innovate from within, but what it really needs to do is it needs to take a lot of these people, like the people that are in this room, that are very naturally innovators, that are very naturally thinking forward and invite them into the system. So there's some examples of where the aid system's trying to develop from within, and it's a very slow going process.
20:03
Whereas you look around us from San Francisco, it's a hotbed of innovation, we're starting to create these pathways to where these people that very naturally innovate are coming in and influencing the more traditional aid system. I say this because this is basically an open call to get involved.
20:20
There are a lot of people in this room, there's a lot of different ways to get involved, whether it's online design, where you're emailing one of our machines that are building something. There is, Andrew, what is it called? MakerNet? Yeah. Absolutely, so like MakerNet,
20:41
where you don't always have to go be on the ground for six months, a year at a time. You can get involved in a lot of different ways. We are doing an open call for makers, for the Maker Faire, which means if you guys, a lot of makers have been kicking around little ideas that could potentially have humanitarian impact, this is a great example to not only go try it out on the ground, but also to get it in front of
21:02
a lot of the major aid organizations that are based in Kathmandu. I think that's it. Is there questions? I think she wanted to ask those. Hi Sam, thanks a lot for that, that was awesome. I missed half of it, but nevermind. You were talking about a lot of these things,
21:24
work with the internet, and my friend was here a couple of weeks ago, and I was asking him if he does online learning through universities, edX or something like that, and he told me that he has issues in Kathmandu about the internet access, that it's so slow.
21:41
So how do you overcome those kind of problems? How we overcome is we pay a whole lot for high speed internet. So you look at internet as a shared resource, these are resource centers, so I think we currently pay $400 for fiber optic internet, which there's this technology leapfrogging
22:00
that's happening in a lot of these countries, so we were able to go straight to a high speed fiber optic internet, but then really share that, so that doesn't solve the entire city's problem, but it is coming faster and faster.
22:20
You said before that you were provided with some sort of technological devices or stuff that you can use by the UN. What do you think that organizations like the UN or the EU could do to help you innovate the humanitarian aid system? Like in terms of what they should do more, what they should stop doing,
22:40
what they should improve to help you? I mean I think it's on the way there is the World Humanitarian Summit in a couple weeks in Istanbul that is gonna be looking at a lot of these different things, so I think it is showing the support from communities like this and not having to have them stumble and discover it on themselves,
23:01
like this is kind of like part of the Maker Faire too is like getting it right out as if it's like window shopping for them in some ways. They have to, the best way they can adapt is they have to know first what's going on, so we're just kind of trying to do a lot of that proof of concept. Proof of concept is always really good. Large humanitarian systems and governments
23:20
can't have a really hard time innovating because they have no room for failure, so smaller, more nimble groups we call our spaces, spaces of safe failure, so prototyping and getting these ideas and designs out so they can be adapted by larger organizations is a really good way. Thanks Sam for your awesome work
23:41
and for the support you've given us at Field Ready over the years. The humanitarian system, which you're critiquing with this, I would agree with your analysis, it's very top-down, I see it every day, has probably spent about a quarter of a billion dollars
24:00
on trialing humanitarian innovation and as you've indicated, there are various degrees of success for that. The humanitarian response in Nepal is about, the pledged amount is about four billion US dollars, although there's different amounts quoted.
24:21
I'm just wondering kind of, would the character of what you're doing at Communautaire change substantially if you had access, maybe not to a quarter of a billion US dollars, but maybe a couple of million of US dollars to really support what you're doing,
24:41
or would the character of what you're doing change? Like if we got this, if we were able to mobilize aid money or development money to support the maker movement in Nepal and to try and build that bottom-up approach, do you think that would change what you're doing or do you think it would actually only enhance what you're doing? It's a really, really good question.
25:01
I've been a part and I've seen a lot of smaller innovative nonprofits start and get large funding a little bit too early. It's like giving an 18-year-old a Ferrari and a million dollars and being like, all right, what's gonna happen if you do this? So we've actually, we're just now starting to apply, what's that? Yeah, exactly.
25:22
We're just now starting to apply for institutional funding. This is six years on. We really feel like our identity has become strong enough as an organization so that where we can start to take on this funding, a lot of groups, it's called being funder-driven. And before you know it, the big risk in that is you're constantly looking back
25:41
at where the money's coming from instead of what the need is in front of you. And so that is a very serious concern. That's why we've taken six years doing this very painstakingly and have adopted much more of a business model. I've also seen a lot of organizations get half a million, a million dollars, and then two years later, they're like, okay, well, we're out of money.
26:01
An amazing program stops. So that's becoming very, if you ask me, the philanthropic dollar is the least sustainable thing on Earth. So you have to be really careful in how it is that you do scale and really do your due diligence. So that brings up a model a lot of people ask, like, how have we been able to do this without large institutional funding?
26:22
And it comes back to that dignity part too. When people can pay a little bit of a something for a service or a product, there's a lot more dignity in that. They're not just getting a handout. And so we have a very sliding scale business model to where the UNICEF did pay us well in order to do the youth center in Tacloban.
26:42
But that gets turned right around and allows the guy that wants to come in and build bunk beds for his kids to do it for next to nothing. We still always charge a little bit of something so that there's that value within the space.
27:04
I think you're facing in Nepal also a lot of corruption. And sometimes I have the experience that the Nepali government also sees foreign help as an option to get rid of their tasks for schools,
27:21
building schools, get the system running. How do you cope with this difficult task? So cooperate with the government and doing your own thing and how it's working for you. Well, we always work with the government as much as possible as I believe that humanitarian systems should and do.
27:44
As you look at example, I think Nepal has actually managed the response there really well in that the UN and the UN in, I believe, I could be wrong, I think the UN's budget in Haiti is potentially more than the government's budget is. Yeah, he agrees, smart guy.
28:01
So you gotta be really careful where Haiti has become, is now like an A-dependent state. Because all of these people have gone in without any permission from the government and they've just come in and done things. Then you have some place like China where you have a very, very strict, before you're gonna go in and do any sort of project, it's gotta be very government approved. And I think that Nepal has actually played
28:22
that system really well as far as having control to where it's not dominated by the international response and it's still actually doing institutional strengthening within the government. It is frustrating sometimes to the humanitarian sector when you wanna just come in and get something done and you've gotta go through the government, but in the long term, that's really better.
28:41
I mean, one of the things we're challenged with right now is that internationals can only be in Nepal for five months in a calendar year. So that's really forced us to be like, okay, how quickly are we gonna be able to transition from mostly internationals leading the organization to Nepalis and that's already happening.
29:02
Yes? Thank you guys.