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UN Global Pulse: Digital Smoke Signals (data analysis to detect on-coming crisis)
Organization: Online Resource Volunteer OpportunitiesFacility Type: Info/Hotline
Status: Open
Address:
, WW 00000
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Website: http://www.unglobalpulse.org/taxonomy/term/820
This organization provides Temporary or Permanent Service? Temporary
Notes:
from the website:
Harnessing Innovation to Protect the Vulnerable
The Challenge
Relentless waves of compound global shocks – food, fuel, and financial – have revealed a wide information gap between the onset of a global crisis and the availability of actionable information for decision makers working to protect the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations. Traditional monitoring systems have been effective in tracking medium to longer-term development trends. Yet they were not designed to generate the type of real-time information decision makers need in developing timely actions to help vulnerable populations cope with fast-hitting, inter-connected crises. Much of the household-level data used to track progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), for example, dates back to 2008 or earlier – before the onset of the current economic crisis.
The recent series of crises has also shown that there is a real danger of losing hard-won development gains within a fraction of the time it took to achieve them. Finding out today how a community began coping with a crisis two years ago may be too late to prevent irreversible damage. The price a country pays for not knowing how its population is coping with shocks is increasing as the resilience of families is eroded, causing millions of households to lose ground in their struggle to escape poverty and driving many of those who had escaped back into destitution. In a climate of fiscal austerity, development investments need to be targeted where they are most needed and where they are likely to achieve the highest returns. While the private sector has been using real-time data to drive investment decisions for many years, development resources continue to be invested based on information that is often at least two years out of date. Decision makers at every level in both donor and developing countries need high-quality, actionable information and hard evidence to protect vulnerable populations.
An Opportunity
Yet even as the impacts of crises have reverberated around the world, our lives have changed in other ways as well. We live in a new information age, where the pace of technological innovation is accelerating at a breathtaking pace. As communities in the developing world increasingly adopt and use these technologies, they are beginning to generate ambient data as by-products of their everyday activities. This “information exhaust” may hold an important key to detecting early signals of emerging vulnerabilities or incipient harm. Mobile phones are now playing a critical role in global development and crisis response. Collaboration tools allow distributed teams to design, develop and share innovative solutions to problems from anywhere in the world. Social networking technologies offer the promise of new and agile forms of collective action. The explosion in the volume and diversity of data has been met by advances in methodologies to help make sense of it all, and new tools now exist to collect, filter, integrate, fuse, analyze, map and visualize information. These emerging technologies represent an extraordinary opportunity to close the information gap, to ensure that technology reaches the bottom of the pyramid, and to provide decision makers with new kinds of real-time information to protect the world’s poorest and most vulnerable during global crises.
UN Global Pulse
Recognizing both the urgent need for more timely and actionable information and the unparalleled opportunities, the Secretary-General called on the UN system in April 2009 to establish a monitoring system (Global Pulse) to better track the impact of compound crises on vulnerable populations. He asked the Deputy Secretary-General to lead this effort and establish a small Team in his office to spearhead the project.
World leaders – from both developing and developed countries – have expressed their strong support for the Secretary-General’s initiative. At the G20 Sum- mit in London last year, the heads of twenty of the most powerful economies re-affirmed the UN system’s central role in tracking the wellbeing of vulnerable populations, calling on the United Nations “to establish an effective mechanism to monitor the impact of the crisis on the poorest and most vulnerable.” The Global Pulse initiative is included in the UN Chief Executives Board’s nine joint crisis initiatives, and forms part of the UN system’s concerted effort to address the global economic crisis.
What will it do?
The Global Pulse initiative will work closely with Member States and other development partners to improve evidence-based decision-making and close the information gap between the onset of a global crisis and the availability of actionable information to protect the vulnerable. In doing so, the project will respond – at the highest strategic level – to two value propositions:
* Protecting countries against development reversals: In an age of increasing global volatility, hard-won develop- ment gains are in danger of being eroded much faster than in the past. Real time actionable information generated by Global Pulse will help the international community to detect the impacts of a crisis on vulner- able populations early on when there is still time to prevent irreversible harm.
* Targeting development resources more effectively: In a climate of increasing fiscal austerity, decision mak- ers at every level face pressures on limited resources. Global Pulse will allow leaders to better plan and target interventions in times of crisis to ensure that those populations most at risk are the first to receive support.
Project Outcomes
At the project level, the Global Pulse initiative has been designed to contribute to four overall develop- ment outcomes:
* More timely and actionable hard evidence for global advocacy on the plight of the most vulnerable;
* Better global data to inform the design of more robust and agile safety nets for the world’s most vulnerable populations;
* Strengthened regional networks for cross-border col- laboration and better understanding of shared regional risks and vulnerabilities;
* Strengthened national capacities to track population vulnerabilities to specific shocks and design targeted and timely policies to improve crisis resilience.
Project Outputs
Short-term
* Strong Global Pulse network built by linking together existing early warning systems and databases (Note: UN system alone runs over 39 early warning systems);
* Use of previously untapped, non-traditional data to detect anomalous behaviors that may indicate that a population is beginning to feel the impacts of a crisis or has exhausted its coping capacity;
* Reference architecture will allow the Global Pulse technology platform to plug into existing rapid data collection, analysis and collaboration tools;
* A global open-source volunteer community built (through innovation camps, competitions and on-line collaboration) to be able to constantly refine and further develop the Global Pulse technology;
* Five Pulse Labs established by the end of 2012 to build national capacities to leverage technology innovation to test new approaches to monitoring vulnerability at the country level.
Medium-to-long-term
* Reduction by order of magnitude in delay of availability of actionable information on household-level impacts and vulnerabilities;
* Free and open source technology platform for collaborative analysis and decision support;
* Strengthened national capacity for targeted policy interventions that leverage improved understanding of how specific populations cope with shocks;
* Strengthened national capacity to gather real-time information from areas that are traditionally difficult to capture, such as the informal sector.
* Thriving local communities of practice established around Pulse Labs where local technologists and social entrepreneurs collaborate with the public sector to create technology solutions for development;
* Development of an effective, efficient, rapid, scalable and sustainable model for catalyzing grassroots innova- tion for sustainable resilience to global crises.
How is Global Pulse funded?
Global Pulse is entirely funded through voluntary contributions from individual UN Member States and private philanthropic organizations. In particular, we would like to thank the UK and Swedish Governments for their financial support and the Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund for hosting Global Pulse events at their thought-inspiring conference venues in Bellagio (Italy) and Pocantico Hills (USA). Global Pulse has also benefited from many hours of expertise generously invested in the project by many of its UN system partners, and UNDP, WFP, UNICEF and the UN's Department for Public Information (DPI) have seconded full-time staff members to the Global Pulse team. Given that Global Pulse is a multi-year project, we will continue to raise voluntary funding from a broad range of stakeholders over the coming months and years. We would welcome any expression of interest from donors interested in supporting the Global Pulse initiative.
See the roadmap at the website. Or go here: http://www.unglobalpulse.org/strategy-and-roadmap
Info Source/Changes:Created At: Sun Apr 24 20:12:32 +0000 2011
Updated At: Sun Apr 24 20:16:32 +0000 2011
Updated By: tfri
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