Distribution by Region

Distribution by Organisation Type, Document Type, Region and Year

Technology occurs mostly in documents published in Europe, followed by Asia, North America, Africa and Oceania with comparatively smaller contributions. Overall, the top five contributors in terms of occurrences are IGO, NGO, State, RC and NGO_Fed organisations.

IGO, NGO_Fed and NGO documents provide the greatest number of occurrences, primarily from activity reports published in Europe. Occurrences from State were mostly obtained from activity reports published in Asia.

RC documents mostly generated occurrences in general documents published in Europe.

Technology ...

• is a/an

  • sector, area

  • means, tool, enabler

  • solution, key, ally

  • resource, intangible asset

  • cross-cutting issue

  • contribution towards resilience

  • essential part of nursing practice

  • infrastructure

  • innovation

• is grouped by time frame

  • new, modern, latest

• includes fields

  • information and communication

  • agricultural/farming

  • energy

  • medical, health

  • humanitarian

• is described by origin

  • Japanese technology

• has applications and products

  • mobile/phone, computer

  • [crop] production

  • satellite

  • polypropylene

  • low-carbon

  • renewable energy

• has analogue and digital media

• has characteristics

  • appropriate

  • advanced

  • innovative

  • improved

  • high

  • green

• is not equally accessible

  • the global digital divide, esp. in developing countries

  • for women, affected populations, amongst humanitarians

  • due to training & resource requirements

  • with issues of control, ownership & production

  • being supplied by companies without humanitarian interests & conflicting interests

• has varying effectiveness

  • for human development, humanitarians, agriculture

  • depending on the project (slow- vs fast-onset events)

  • due to sometimes steep learning curves

• has varying potential

  • both positive & negative

  • including systemic change, challenges to IHL, organisation agility

  • which is not well understood, measured

  • which can speed up the nature of events & responses

  • which can be oversimplified

• has implementation challenges

  • for local actors, remote areas, practitioners, the humanitarian technology market

  • requiring funding, trained staff, adequate skills, appropriate use

• is transferred between groups

  • to empower affected communities (e.g. post- disaster)

  • which is a challenge for humanitarians & local actors

  • which may be more effective in South-South transfers

  • which may cause new issues & burden actors, reducing effectiveness

  • which should be relevant, appropriate, with the right conditions & preparedness level to successfully adopt

  • which requires strong project management

  • which requires long-term & exit strategies (especially given the pace of technological change)

• is misused

  • by authoritarians, military

  • in medicine (sex selection)

It can be a powerful international mechanism for mobilising the tangible and intangible assets (such as capital, technology, skills, access to markets) that are essential for sustainable growth and development.

He suggested that technology was a powerful tool for inter-community and international sharing of best practice.

We embrace technology as a means to better connect the world around us.

Technology has proved to be a crucial ally in LAC to increase efficiency and effectiveness in monitoring gender equality achievements.

• sector

  • transportation

• area

  • science, education, global public health, the environment, youth advocacy, the arts

• means

  • to circumvent restrictions

  • to monitor human rights violations

  • to have voices heard

  • to better connect the world

  • of development implementation

    • finance, capacity building

• tool, enabler

  • for sharing best practices

• ally

  • to increase efficiency, effectiveness in monitoring

• solution, key

  • to development

  • which is helpful but partial

• resource

  • finances, manpower

• intangible asset

  • for sustainable growth and development

    • capital, skills, market access

• cross-cutting issue

  • training, performance, quality management

• contribution towards resilience

• essential part of nursing practice

• infrastructure

• innovation

Technology is a vast term encompassing everything from satellites to water purification systems. And there are many ways in which communities are creating and adopting innovations from solar power to seed modification. However, the most significant technological shift of recent years has been the enormous increase in digital communications technology (mobile phones, internet and associated tools).

• time frame

  • new technology

  • modern technology

  • latest technology

  • emerging technology

• field

  • information and communication technology (and similar)

  • agricultural/farming technology

  • energy technology

  • medical technology

  • health technology

  • humanitarian technology

  • telecommunications technology

• origin

  • Japanese technology

• application

  • mobile/phone technology (and similar)

  • [crop] production technology

  • satellite technology

  • polypropylene technology

  • low-carbon technology

  • renewable energy technology

  • computer technology

• medium

  • digital technology

• characteristic

  • appropriate technology

  • advanced technology

  • innovative technology

  • improved technology

  • high technology

  • green technology

  • clean technology

Humanitarian technology refers to the use and new applications of technology to support efforts at improving access to and quality of prevention, mitigation, pre- paredness, response, recovery and rebuilding efforts. While much has been learned from a range of pilot projects and field implementation, the practice of humani- tarian technology remains first and foremost defined by its potential contribution rather than by an actual integration in standard practices.

Innovations appear almost daily in almost every aspect of humanitarian action, from robots being deployed for search and rescue or demining, to remote surgeries or improvement in vaccine transportation and conservation, water purification or sanitation. Considering the wide range of innovations, the focus of this World Disasters Report had to be narrowed to what is rapidly becoming a major field of humanitarian practice: humanitarian information and communication technologies (HICT).

Information and communication technology is increasingly being used to ensure accountability. Participatory exercises to hold state institutions accountable, such as public expenditure tracking surveys, citizen report cards, score cards, social audits and community monitoring, have all been used to develop direct accountability relationships between service users and service providers.

Information and digital technology: as our use of information and digital technology continues to increase, the threat posed by external parties wanting to gain access to our systems and data for fraudulent purposes also poses a greater risk.

Youngsters learn trades such as tool and die-making, information technology, welding, machinery and motor repair.

The information technology revolution has profoundly affected the way the IFRC carries out its work. National Societies and their staff now have unprecedented access to information and the capacity to engage, interact and influence through their place in the global information environment. Internal and international coordination is transformed by accessible, low-cost, real-time communications, bringing benefits in day-to-day work and when responding to emergencies.

We introduced new technology that could identify and enrol patients quicker, and completed a pilot study to see if text message reminders could help keep patients in treatment.

Failure to keep pace with new technologies and ways of reaching our supporters and the communities we serve, in the way that they prefer, could reduce our impact and effectiveness.

But not all new technology is digital – in Afghanistan, Sierra Leone and Uganda we supplied new eco cooking stoves that save families substantial amounts of time and fuel, and reduce deforestation.

The project has constructed latrines at 15 schools and rehabilitated or drilled 108 water boreholes, but the project's most critical component is community-led total sanitation and hygiene. Improved facilities and new technologies are only worthwhile if communities value them.

The project also seeks to make mobile technology women friendly. This increases the decision making capacity of women as well as enabling improvements in health. AIL has trained and closely monitors its health staff as they assist poor, rural women to use the phones and health apps and record the data.

Mobile technology is increasingly a vector for recipients of humanitarian aid to give feedback to the providing agency, communicate their needs and express their views.

Farmers Field School (FFS) is a very good platform for learning sharing and technology transfer regarding the climate resilient agriculture practices.

MyChild system is an information technology platform with a number of applications that will support child health service delivery in The Gambia.

For research involving youth, we not only address young people's experiences, but we incorporate the fast-moving technology platforms they live by.

In addition, by enhancing its technology infrastructure, the Red Cross will now be able to assist up to 100,000 families a day within 10 days of a catastrophic event.

The growing recognition that some weapons and technologies have unacceptable humanitarian consequences has reinvigorated the nuclear weapons discourse as well.

It uses the cellphone – the most widely used communications technology in Malawi – to connect people living in isolated, rural areas to health professionals who would otherwise be unreachable. It's not an understatement to say the technology is having a transformative impact in the districts where it has been piloted.

The technological revolution represents "skill-biased technical change": the idea that the net effect of new technologies is to decrease demand for less skilled workers while increasing demand for skilled labour.

It is important, however, not to overestimate the impact of newer communications technologies. Although the Internet is considered a global communications medium, access is still limited in many locations. Accurately measuring the Internet's level of influence is difficult.

The chart below represents the distribution of technology between 2005 and 2019 in terms of the number of occurrences and relative frequency of occurrences. It also allows you to view the distribution across Regions, Organisations and Document types.

• access to technology (i.e., the digital divide)

  • for women, the developing world, affected populations, humanitarians

  • with questions of who controls new technology

  • requiring training, digital inclusion to be meaningful

• effectiveness of technology

  • for human development, agriculture, humanitarians

  • with differing utility by event type (slow- vs fast-onset events)

  • having a learning curve

• implementation of technology

  • for remote areas, practitioners, humanitarian technology market, local actors

  • requiring funding, trained staff, adequate skills, appropriate use

• technology transfer

  • for humanitarians and local actors

• misuse of technology

  • by authoritarians, military

  • in medicine (sex selection)

The type and effectiveness of agricultural technologies are highly debated, and the debates are often polarized. Technology options are many, but transparent evidence-based information has been inconclusive or scarce.

New technologies should only be introduced after a disaster if they have previously been tested in the local area and are known to be adapted and acceptable to beneficiaries. When introduced, new technologies should be accompanied by appropriate community consultations, provision of information, training and other relevant support. Wherever possible this should be done in coordination with private and public extension providers and input suppliers to ensure ongoing support and accessibility to the technology in the future and, critically, commercial viability.

Using even simple technologies is a challenge. With limited internet access and low bandwidth, transferring data between agencies can be difficult. In an attempt to resolve some of these problems, REACH has developed an offline version of the interactive webmap that can be used without internet access. While this has been effective, providing regular access to data remains a challenge. REACH currently has a team in the field helping aid actors to adapt and customise their own databases to make them compatible with the REACH database.

The use of drones, especially in conflict settings, has raised particular concerns regarding privacy and neutrality during data collection, and the related need for transparency and informed consent for the communities drones are observing.13 The rise of humanitarian technology is also propelled by the defence and intelligence surveillance industries' search for new markets and the legitimacy provided by partnerships with humanitarian actors.

• positive potential / needs

  • as a priority for RC & disaster management

  • improve gender equality, empowerment of women

  • increase worker efficiency, well-being

  • improve data management, reduce data gaps

  • improve sanitation

• negative potential / risks

  • increase abusive behaviour, gender inequality

  • challenge IHL (new weapons)

  • increase vulnerability (due to relying on tech infrastructure)

  • require data anonymisation and increased costs

  • reduce employment, automate jobs

  • increase medicine costs

• other potential changes

  • challenge the status and work of researchers

  • speed up events, responses, effects

Conclusion The link between technology and the agility of aid is therefore not so obvious and raises questions about our practices. Do we really need real-time data at headquarters or regional levels in order to make decisions? This is not really so obvious if the decisions themselves are not made in the right place and the technology appears to only be legitimising this illusion of knowledge and control. Do information systems necessarily produce reliable data? This needs to be qualified in the light of the frequent methodological weaknesses of data collection in the field. Basing our analyses purely on data, without experience or knowledge of the context, is often useless, and the technological veneer can even sometimes legitimise inappropriate data. Finally, are aid actors really capable of adapting their responses due to feedback from IT tools such as crowdsourcing? Numerous structural weaknesses remain and technology will not be able to solve all of these. It may even continue to mask them if the current trend continues without any serious questioning of approaches and practices.

Today, we still produce books and research reports, and proudly manage two refereed journals, Development Policy Review and Disasters. But the internet has changed the way we communicate, and the proliferation of media outlets has changed the way we engage with audiences. We have found we need to be brief and much, much faster. The two-page opinion or the five-paragraph blog, turned around in just a few hours, is an essential vehicle for policy influence. In the future, technology is likely to challenge even further the expert status of the researcher. It will require us to assume a different kind of role in facilitating new knowledge networks. These challenges are more acute in a think tank like ODI than they might be in a traditional university department or research institute.

Technology transfers from the North require costly adaptation due to differences in absorptive capacity, but technological transfers within the South are more likely to need little adaptation and to involve more-appropriate technologies and products.

The view from below: issues for potential users In the future humanitarian organisations will increasingly engage in discussions about the politics and logistics of procuring drones. As 'humanitarian technology' has become a more commercially interesting field, the humanitarian enterprise needs to get better at dealing with the vendors of these products. However, the use of 'humanitarian drones' also raises important ethical and legal issues, which will need to be fleshed out and discussed.

While it has the potential to empower local actors, ‘leave-behind’ technology too often places a significant burden on organizations and communities, which find it difficult or impossible to assimilate, maintain and thus sustain its functionality. For some organizations, it may end up threatening their ability to perform their core activities [....]

Experience shows that organizations and communities are more likely to be successful in assimilating leave-behind technology, when the technology is known and when it directly supports an existing activity. The size of the project is also a factor. Larger technology projects have a significantly bigger risk of failing. The biggest risk of failure to implement technology in organizations is the lack of plan- ning and poor project management [....]

A study of 5,400 large-scale technology projects (projects with initial budgets greater than US$ 15 million) in commercial companies finds that persisting problems are usually in project management. Among the key findings quoted from the report (Bloch, Blumberg and Laartz, 2012):

• 17 per cent of large technology projects go so badly that they can threaten the very existence of the company.

• On average, large technology projects run 45 per cent over budget and 7 per cent over time, while delivering 56 per cent less value than predicted.

There is no evidence to show that this should be different in humanitarian organizations or local communities.

Even though the project supported core Haiti Red Cross activities, it failed because the technology introduced was unfamiliar to the organization, because too few staff and volunteers were trained and because they were trained to an insufficient level. Since their early involvement was very limited, neither senior management nor staff and volunteers felt any sense of ownership.

A simple leave-behind technology checklist

• Relevance: When seen from the local actor’s perspective, is the technology clearly relevant to their work and will it support an existing activity or an upcoming new activity? Will the technology in fact just add layers of maintenance and operational costs without adding operational value? Engage in dialogue before considering technology projects. Technology should not decide organizational priorities, but organizational priorities should always decide technology choices.

• Maturity level of actors or organizations: Is the local actor ready to adopt the technology? Even the most advanced organization will have trouble adopting technology ahead of its time. Does the organization have the necessary skills and resources to support and maintain the technology and to replace broken-down equipment?

• Project management: Are project managers available? Technology projects are by definition development projects and should be treated as such – even when the technology is donated. Ownership at all levels of the organization is crucial for the project to become a success.

• Exit strategy: How will the organization evolve from the donated technology platform to an upgraded platform in a few years? Is it plausible? Is funding available to sustain the technology and, if not, what happens when the funding disappears? n Electronic waste: Will the technology in time pose an environmental problem for the organization or community that received it?