Students Use Texting Technology to Save Thousands in the Aftermath of the Haitian Earthquake

In the aftermath of a huge natural disaster, such as the recent earthquake in Haiti, disaster-relief workers have labored to rescue and aid as many people as possible. However, in several cases they are just not able to get there in time. The searching process requires them to comb the country piece by piece searching for survivors. This means that sometimes they spend valuable time searching in the wrong places. This has always been a sad but understood fact. Imagine if there was a way for survivors to communicate with the disaster-relief workers and feed them their location in real time. If, instead of systematically searching the area, rescuers could have a list of locations where people needed aid and they could find them within a matter of hours. If a person trapped under a building could send a request for help and receive a response letting them know that help was on the way and not to give up hope. Imagine how many more lives could be saved if such a thing was possible. Well, now it is.

In the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti, thousands of volunteers from around the world rushed to the small island nation to lend their support to the relief efforts. Combing the country for survivors, digging men, women and children out of the rubble of buildings, providing medical assistance, food, water and shelter; these men and women worked tirelessly around the clock to find and rescue as many people as possible. At the same time, thousands of miles away, in a tiny basement of the Fletcher School at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, four students began to work on a project that could change the face of humanitarian aid as we know it.

These students began to use a new technology called Ushahidi to map the information coming in from Haiti. Ushahidi is a crowd-sourcing platform that allows users to take information from text message, Facebook, Twitter and email and use it to get a clear idea of a situation on the ground in any given area. Named after the Swahili word for witness, Ushahidi was initially used to create a picture of the violence after the 2008 elections in Kenya.

The team originally planned to simply to give the public an intimate picture of what the Haitian survivors were going through. Within hours, the students working on the project began to receive calls and emails from the disaster relief workers on the ground in Haiti asking them to feed them actionable requests. A couple of days later, a text message short-code was released. The Haitian people could now text requests for help to 4636, a short-code routed directly to the team at Fletcher. Within days the team of four students had expanded to a group of hundreds of volunteers. They set up their initial base in the situation room at Tufts University in Boston. Soon there were similar situation rooms set up in Washington DC, London, Geneva, and Portland and project Ushahidi-Haiti became a vital and integral part of the disaster relief efforts.

So how does it work? A volunteer will log in to the database and began sorting through thousands of messages to find the ones that are actionable. Some messages will be a request to locate a missing friend or family member, some will be asking for food or water, some will be to alert them to a new aftershock or a building left standing that could be used for shelter, many will be desperate pleas for help from people trapped under buildings, severely injured, or stranded with small children, some will simply be a request to let their family members know they are alive. The volunteer will begin to sift through the messages and sort them based on the type of request and urgency of the situation. They will then use the information contained in the message to geo-locate the sender. Once the message has been sorted and the position located, the core team will map it directly to the website for the workers on the ground to act on.

Sometimes a volunteer will be unable to locate the sender based on the information contained in the message. They are then able to use the Ushahidi platform to send the sender a reply text, thanking them for their information and asking for more details. Once the information becomes actionable, they send it on.

The Ushahidi-Haiti site is organized in such a way that a disaster-relief worker can customize the type of alerts they receive so that they are only getting requests they are able to respond to. Some of the organizations that have worked with the teams are: Red Cross, Plan International, USAID, FEMA, World Food Program, US Coast Guard Task Force, Charity Water and the International Medical Corps. These organizations have been able to use the Ushahidi platform to respond to the immediate needs of the disaster affected community within hours of the initial request for aid. They have been able to utilize this tool to save the lives of thousands of people who otherwise might have died while waiting for help to arrive.

Despite the overwhelming success of the efforts of the Ushahidi-Haiti team, the project was not without it’s difficulties. One of the initial problems the team had to overcome was the language barrier. The volunteers spoke mostly English and some French, however, the messages they were receiving were written in the traditional Haitian Creole. How was a group of hundreds of English-speaking volunteers going to be able to translate the messages from the original Creole to English without wasting precious time sorting through dictionaries and leaving a large margin for error?

The team reached out to members of the Haitian Diaspora. Soon hundreds of Creole speaking volunteers were logging on to the website and translating messages from Creole to English for the teams around the globe. Men and women with full time jobs and busy lives of their own dropped everything to aid their fellow countrymen back home. Shortly afterward men and women still in Haiti began to work with the website as well. People who were still reeling from the impact of the disaster turned their focus off of themselves and worked around the clock to help save as many people as they possibly could. The Ushahidi-Haiti team was thrilled. They had overcome the language barrier and gained hundreds of valuable allies.

It has been over two months now since the Earthquake hit. The original emergency relief efforts are, for the most part, over. However, the situation in Haiti is still extremely fragile. The Haitian people are now faced with the overwhelming task of rebuilding their country. The rainy season is about to set in and thousands of people are without shelter. There is still a desperate need for food, water, tents, and medical assistance. Faced with seemingly insurmountable odds, the people of Haiti are laboring to reclaim what they have lost.

The team at the Fletcher School at Tufts University is still doing everything they can to help. They are working with the Haitian Government, the Haitian Diaspora, and local Civil Society Groups who are using the Ushahidi platform to aid in the post-disaster reconstruction and development efforts. They are working with Samasource and Crowdflower to create jobs for the people of Haiti by hiring them as translators. Finally, they are training these people in the use of the platform so that one day the Haitian people can take over the project themselves.

The students at the Fletcher School were able to combine new technology with ingenuity and a selfless desire to help their fellow man and created something that will surely change the face of Disaster-relief as we know it. Since its conception in the basement at Tufts, this particular iteration of the Ushahidi project has also been used successfully to aid disaster-relief and reconstruction efforts following the earthquake in Chile. The Ushahidi team is now working with software developers to create a program that will take over much of the sorting and geo-locating processes. That way next time there is an emergency like these, they will be able to use the platform to save even more lives. The hundreds of people who volunteered on this project are the unsung heroes of the Haitian relief effort and the platform itself is a truly exciting development in the future of Humanitarian Aid.

More on Chilean and Haitian Disaster Response and Relief:

Chilean Relief Efforts

Cuban Contributions: Medics or Military

Haiti and the Question of God