Once again eastern Congo is being torn apart by armed conflict—and
once again, we have at best a partial and fragmentary sense of what’s going on. To the extent
that international attention is being paid, most of it is focused on the
depredations of a rebel group called the M23, a Rwandaphone militia which fell
out with the Congolese government in April over terms of their incorporation
into the national army. While evidence of their brutality--and their links to Rwanda--continue to pile up,
other militia are also on the rampage, including a group called Nyatura and another called Raia Mutomboki (more here); altogether,
the latest violence is estimated to have displaced more than 300,000 people.
Yet we have only the most partial understanding of who is
fighting whom and why. A few researchers and journalists are bravely venturing
out to remote villages to chase down the latest developments.[i] But
their reports are flashlights of information on a vast and dark plain. It is almost
impossible to know what is happening from day to day outside of the major
towns. NGOs and the UN are hard-pressed to respond in a timely way when it can take days or weeks for news about mass killings or rapes in remote areas to reach them. At a policy level, I
suspect part of the reason that the international community pays so little
attention to the region—despite it being home to the deadliest conflict since
World War II—is that we remain woefully ignorant about the ongoing details of the
conflict.
That is why I was particularly impressed by a recent paper
written by Peter van der Windt and Macartan Humphreys at Columbia University.
Building on der Windt’s 18-month experience directing Voix des Kivu (VdK), a USAID
funded project in eastern Congo, the paper shows how feasible it is to set up a
regional information network with a little training and such readily available
tools as phones, sms tabulation software, and cheap solar generators.
The results were impressive. During the life of the project, Van der Windt’s village-based collaborators sent thousands of pre-coded and text messages on events
that affected their daily lives, from disease outbreaks and crop failures to
population movements and conflict incidents. More than that, the project gave
local communities a system for communicating with the rest of the world.
Previous efforts to map developments in the Congo have not
been especially successful.[ii]
In 2008, Ushahidi itself tried to map the conflicts in eastern Congo. But the
coders never generated the response rate they had achieved in Kenya, and
eventually abandoned the effort. A volunteer-led program to map electoral problems during the 2011 presidential election foundered in part due to inadequate
preparation but mostly because Kabila ordered the telephone companies to cut SMS messaging in the
country during the critical period. The impression I got during my last trip to
Bukavu (July 2011) was that the UN and most NGOs were in need of greater data and a
platform by which to share it, yet lacked the time and technical expertise to
properly develop the system themselves.
The desire for more comprehensive reporting is clearly
there. Various organizations—most notably the Belgian International Peace
Information Service (IPIS)—have conducted some excellent one-time surveys of
the territory. Dodd-Frank 1502, the so-called Conflict Mineral legislation,
calls for the State Department to produce a map of the region’s “mineral-rich
zones, trade routes, and areas under the control of armed groups” every six
months. To date, the department has produced three such maps, most recently this one.
Unfortunately, the department has been unable or unwilling to conduct
its own on-the-ground research and has instead relied on the now-dated IPIS
maps and supplementary information from the UN peacekeeping force, Monusco. (Although I have heard rumors that IPIS will be working with the Congolese government on developing more robust and current maps in the future.)
So Van der Windt’s achievement is especially remarkable. In my
reading, there were three keys to its success. The first is the astonishing
spread of mobile telephone coverage, which in the last few years has reached
into villages in eastern Congo that still take days to get to overland. Equally
important were two of Van der Windt’s own innovations. Instead of trying to “crowd
source” the information, Van der Windt went
out to villages and provided training and phones to three people in each: a
traditional chief, the head of a women’s group, and a third person elected by
the village itself. Then he provided each person with a small weekly allowance
to make the calls. (Later on, he realized that villagers had trouble recharging
their phones because the villages often lacked electricity, so he gave each
village a $25 solar-powered charger) [iii] He calls this process "crowd-seeding," in contrast to crowdsourcing.
Van der Windt is a doctoral student in political science, so a
lot of his paper deals with the robustness of the data and the possible
academic uses to which it can be put. For non-academics, the main lesson is
that it provides a proof-of-concept. As Van der Windt writes, “obtaining verifiable, high-quality data in real-time from
these hard-to-reach areas is not only possible, but needs much less expense and
oversight than previously thought.” In short, we now know that it is
possible to develop a comprehensive information network across vast reaches of
eastern Congo,[iv]
and that we can do so cheaply, reliably, and safely.[v]
If a scaled-up version of this project ever gets funded, I
would suggest adding three elements. First, I would uplink the data to a
mapping program such as Ushahidi. Van der Windt used a free program from the American
NGO Frontline SMS to auto-generate reports, graphs and tables, which he then distributed
to relevant organizations. I suspect, however, that layering the data onto maps
would provide the intelligence in a more actionable-ready format. Elsewhere in
Africa, mapping reports have shown where and how crop diseases are spreading, revealed
the paths taken by rampaging militia, and helped improve the overall situational
awareness of humanitarian organizations.[vi]
Second, I would do more to make sure that the information
flow is bi-directional, and that it is both embedded in and eventually owned by the Congolese. If it’s important for the UN and humanitarian
organizations operating out of provincial capitals to learn which way a militia
group is moving—and it is—then certainly it’s even more important for local radio
stations to have this information, because they can get the word out to affected
populations. The Humanitarian Innovation Fund has recently introduced a crisis
mapping project for the Central African Republic.
While the project has only been operational for a few months, its emphasis on sharing
data with local journalists and the communities they serve strikes me as a logical
and commendable extension of the Van der Windt's work.
Third, I would hope that the project gets greater buy-in and
use from the relevant actors, including humanitarian organizations and the UN
peacekeeping force. Van der Windt acknowledges that the project elicited more
curiosity than action from the relevant actors: “At the scale in which we have
been operating many organizations expressed great curiosity in the concept and
the data; but we do not know of any serious reactions from international actors
to the messages coming in, including real time reports of attacks and abuses.
Phone holders have continued to engage with the system despite the poverty of
reactions, but we cannot expect that to continue forever.” I think that’s exactly
right. At some point, if the exercise is not going to be solely academic, the information
it gathers can and should be used in real time by a variety of actors,
including Western NGOs and the UN peacekeeping force, to develop strategies,
plan operations, and assess and reconfigure missions.
[i] Among them: Simone Schlindwein, of the German newspaper TAZ (Tageszeitung);
Jason Stearns, of the Rift Valley Institute; and freelancers Melanie Gouby and
Christophe Ethuin.
[ii]
I have been calling for a real-time mapping project on the conflicts in eastern
Congo since 2003, when I worked with a couple of internationally recognized
Congolese journalists on a proposal to map the presence of armed actors and
incidents of violence (including rape and pillage), against mining sites and
arms deliveries in the region. Needless to say, we got nowhere. 'Who cares about nobodies in a place nobody gives a shit about?' was the attitude we generally encountered, its millions dead notwithstanding. Do I send cynical? Angry? Shucks.
[iii] Van der Windt writes: “Crowdseeding has three main advantages for data quality: 1.
The data is received from a representative set of areas; 2. All senders are
known to the system and are in a long term relationship with the Voix des
Kivus program; 3. Because more than one holder is selected in each village
“internal validation” is also possible.” It also overcomes the main problem with crowdsourcing: the weak supply incentive.
[iv]
An area larger than the United Kingdom, but with fewer kilometers of paved
roads than Oxford.
[v]
The safety of his collaborators was a paramount priority for Van der Windt, and he took
several measures to minimize the possibility that they might suffer reprisals for reporting
sensitive data. None did, but he warns that the risks might increase if the
program is ever scaled up and used to plan or design counter-operations.
[vi]
Police departments in this country began using mapping programs in the 1990s to
track crime and plan counter-measures; many criminologists say that crime’s sharp
decline in that decade is to some significant extent attributable to those real-time tools. This suggestion is far from my area of expertise, but I would think peacekeepers could use real-time maps to similar effect.
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