Blog Posts

Less than a week has passed since Hurricane Sandy passed over the Caribbean and the US East Coast, leaving a trail of destruction and death behind. Only seven years have passed since Hurricane Katrina, one of the costliest disasters of all times left a similar trail of destruction on the Gulf Coast. Thankfully a lot Read more

Today we at NetHope, CrisisCommons and GeeksWithoutBounds are proud to announce, in partnership with Microsoft and DotNetRocks the launch of the Humanitarian Toolbox. The Humanitarian Toolbox is an initiative intended to help bring the expertise and good will of the software development community to the humanitarian world. Ever since the devastating images of the East Asia Tsunami in 2004, have developers around the world helped humanitarian organizations Read more

The world we live in is certainly not a perfect place. There are a number of things that need to be done to improve it. Sometimes governments set out on improving it, sometimes non-profit organizations set out on improving it and sometimes concerned citizens set out on improving it. Each of these stakeholders has their Read more

This blog post originally appeared as a Vision for the Future position paper for the Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management policy roundtable organized by the Woodrow Wilson Center Commons Lab. ABSTRACT The current humanitarian response system is based on institutions created during the Industrial Age. It was built when connectivity was a very scarce resource and information sharing Read more

“There comes a time in your life when your focus shifts from success to significance”– Edward G. Happ (Chairman NetHope, CIO IFRC) Throughout my close to twenty years of volunteering and working for non-profit organizations, I have had the honor of leading some great teams of people who all shared the common goal of doing something good for others. Read more

In my last blog post I discussed the importance of getting the disaster affected community involved the humanitarian response. I wanted to follow up on that discussion with a more detailed post that would discuss the different levels of Community Based Humanitarian Response. To do so, I will utilize one of the classical writings about Read more

Today, August 19th, is World Humanitarian Day. On this day we remember humanitarian workers who have died while helping others in need. This day was carefully selected, because on this day back in 2003, twenty-two humanitarians died in Bagdad, Iraq during a bombing of the UN compound. In a fantastic social networking experiment, UN OCHA, humanitarians, Read more

Last year was the costliest year in natural disasters that the world has ever seen. According to a report issued by global reinsurance firm Munich Re, world disasters in 2011 caused damages exceeding more than a third of a trillion dollars. And, experts at The World Bank predict that natural disasters will only get worse in the future, Read more

Visiting refugee “camps” is always a life changing experience.  In September my work with NetHope took me to the Dadaab refugee camp in northeast Kenya. Over 200,000 refugees (mostly from Somalia) have lived in Dadaab camp since the early 1990’s.  In the last year, the camp size has grown to almost 500,000 refugees as the Read more