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Students Map Humanitarian Needs Amid Pakistan's Floods
A SIPA student group, the New Media Task Force, is helping relief workers meet humanitarian needs in flood-affected areas of Pakistan by mapping the disaster online.
The flooding began in July and has affected more than 20 million people in Pakistan, according to United Nations estimates.
Student volunteers gather firsthand reports that people in the disaster area post to social media websites or send via text messages from their phones. The students then identify the affected community's GPS coordinates and plot its location, along with the original report, to a map for relief workers at pakreport.org.
SIPA students began participating in crisis mapping in the wake of the February earthquake in Chile. They formed the New Media Task Force, whose mission is to facilitate opportunities for students to learn about information and communication technologies. In recent weeks, the task force has conducted several training sessions on crisis mapping for the situation in Pakistan.
"It's rare to have an opportunity to actually help from a distance in a tangible way, and SIPA students love this kind of stuff," said Sawako Sonoyama, the group's co-director.
The crisis mapping software was invented in Kenya during the violence that followed disputed elections in late 2007. Called Ushahidi, a Swahili word meaning "testimony" or "witness," it allowed Kenyans to collaboratively map the crisis as it unfolded. Since then, the Ushahidi platform has become a valuable tool in humanitarian crises, with support from volunteers around the world.
Participating students have been able to identify places of urgent need, according to Dean Zambrano, the task force's director of crisis mapping.
"We've had incidents (of) people who've been trapped under rubble, people who are in need of water and food, people who need help to get out of the area," Zambrano said. "We've reported those incidents."
Tim Shenk, 10/07/2010