The Challenge

The ETC provides common information and communications technology (ICT) services to the humanitarian community in emergency operations. ETC projects and services are contingent upon effective assessments carried out to determine needs in operational areas. While the ETC has an existing Excel-based assessment tool, this has not been fully utilized and optimized. Also, many humanitarian organizations conduct rapid and in-depth ICT assessments using their own in-house built tools and guidelines. As such, there is no common ICT assessment tool used among aid organisations.

This lack of consistency results in a number of challenges:

• Tools used are not automated resulting in delays and inaccuracy of data due to manual processes;
• Often the assessments are uncoordinated resulting in duplication of effort;
• Assessment data is insufficiently shared;
• Data sets from different assessments are incomparable;
• Disparate information management systems are used.

This makes it difficult to establish a common operational picture for ICT, determine critical priorities, and ultimately hampers ability to put in place ICT systems that would support and enable aid workers save more lives and restore more people's livelihoods.

Objectives

• Improve the timeliness, quality and accuracy of ETC assessments through automated, intuitive and easy to use mobile data collection solution.
• Encourage coordinated ICT assessments through use of shared ETC assessment tool and information management platform, hence reduce duplication of effort.
• Promote a shared ICT operational picture of humanitarian needs and priorities, through validation, aggregation, analysis and visual display of assessment information.

Proposed Solution

There is a need for a solution to address the challenges outlined above. This requires an adaptive mobile data collection application that should be designed and developed to enable initial, rapid and in-depth ETC assessments by participating organisations. The core application will be capable of loading various assessment templates (e.g. ETC Rapid Assessment, ETC In-Depth Assessment) as required. ICT responders can save time by loading or customizing existing forms from the library or creating new forms for use with the app. The solution will work both offline and online depending on connectivity. It will enable real-time data collection, analysis and presentation.

The application will be integrated with the ICT Emergency website where data from various assessments can be aggregated, analyzed and visually displayed, to authorized personnel, for faster and better decision making. The application will be developed for commonly used mobile platforms (e.g. Android, iOS, Windows Phone).In the longer term, the aim is also to have the local ICT community to use the tool in non-emergency situations for day to day data sharing and as a preparedness activity for future emergencies. Such information would be very valuable for a future emergency response.

For more information, contact: Global.ETC@wfp.org