We take our phone lines and internet connection for granted, many of us can barely remember what it was like to use dial-up speed. But after a disaster, these lines of communication are often cut. In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, it was no different. As Christopher Rhoads of the Wall Street Journal points out: “The improvement in Haiti's communications in recent years suffered a severe blow from the earthquake, complicating relief efforts”.
In 2006, Bahamas Telecommunications built an undersea internet cable, connecting Haiti to the U.S. via the Bahamas. Prior to this, “just 11% of Haitians [had] Internet access, compared with more than 31% of the inhabitants in neighboring Dominican Republic and 12% in Cuba”.
Rhoads notes that, “In recent years, more Haitians became connected, primarily through mobile phones. Today, about 35% of the nine million people living in
Information and Communications Technology (ICT) plays an important role in helping NGOs, government and other agencies communicate with one another, indentifying and tackling the problems in the field.
At the moment, there are several organizations that are on the ground connecting NGOs to the internet and allowing them to make calls. One of those organizations is Telecoms sans frontieres. They work with large NGOs and are part of the UN’s Emergency Telecommunications Cluster (ETC). This particular cluster is led by the World Food Program.
Tonight’s guest is Paul Margie. He is the
Below, I’ve listed several other organizations that do similar work. Some of them focus on emergency ITC work, others have both emergency and long-term development projects. Overall, these organizations work in the Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) field:
ICT4D companies that are in Haiti:
- Inveneo
- Net Hope
- InSTEDD
Some informational and crowdsourcing websites relating to Haiti are:
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