What is the most urgent issue 72 hours after disaster?
To give a brief understanding, let’s learn from devastated Tsunami event that occurred ten years ago in Aceh, Indonesia. Vast area destroyed, many people need medical attention, refugee camps, road blocked and whole lot of individual/organization that came to help could not do their task efficiently.
The whole point of this situation is that after 72 hours, International organization such as UNICEF, red crosses, etc. will flock to the affected area. They carry their own team, supply and aid to help victims. The problem occurs that there was no coordination at all.
From my initial interview with humanitarian workers involved in Tsunami, the most important issue to solve is refugee. For a medical attention, the solution will be available by providing first aid and there are lots of ways to quickly address this issue. We can quickly distinguish between dead victims, heavy injured victims or light wounded victims. But the real problem lies within refugee. Many people live under tents and in Tsunami event previously, hundred thousand people with light injuries and no food and sanitation seeking assistant and they have many needs.
With no coordination at all, issues that arise from this situation stays the same. Humanitarian organizations sometimes bring the same aids and focused to one camp and often abandoned the other camps because of the lack of coordination and information.
This is where humanitarian worker longing for an integrated yet light technology system that could help them minimalize these situations. The vision that I have, that after 72 hours, first responder in a small team already dispatched with the system that can be carried by a small device such as mobile phone with a particular app called “FirstHand” to do assessment. They visit every camp, record all the data needed and then save their finding to their device that updated to one central server in a main camp. Every refugee camp should always connected to the system that always updated, so the other organization that come to this site will only need to access a certain website or url using browser or this app, then they will receive the complete information about this refugee camp. For example: in a map shown the number of refugee camps in which can be zoomed in into detail information such as the number of refugee (man, woman, children) the need of this particular camp (food, drink, tents, clothes etc.), and history of aid and supplies that they received so far (of course this is only an initial idea, the information collected will be more complete once this implemented, also will be based on further research). This data is always updated and saved in one database server. So all of organization can also access this server and decided what they will bring to a particular camp based on the information before they visit the target camp. There will be no more a bottleneck situation where one camp received a lot of attention and other is abandoned.
Even if the internet is failed, the one solution to keep the refugee camp up-to-date is by providing a mobile telecommunication car that connects small area to internet. Or, in the extreme situation where it is not possible, the data carried and entries manually using smartphone/electronic device, before and after visiting a camp by a particular volunteer (or first responder) in a humanitarian team, then updated once the first responder back to the main camp where connection to the server is available.
This implementation seems a small step, but in fact, it could help many people, women and children and even save many lives 72 hours after disaster. I hope UNICEF could begin to initiate this idea and become a focal point and later become referral for information when disaster occurs. Let’s make this idea happen!