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Connecting the ‘first mile’ through humanitarian action

Equipping local communities and humanitarian organizations with the right data and digital tools can make a life-saving difference to people at risk around the world.

Equipping local communities and humanitarian organizations with the right data and digital tools can make a life-saving difference to people at risk around the world. Image: REUTERS/Susana Vera

Nena Stoiljkovic
Undersecretary-General for Global Relations, Humanitarian Diplomacy and Digitalization, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)

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  • Disasters and crises cause devastation and death, and they erode the growth and development of people, communities and countries alike.
  • Local communities are the first link in the chain of response — never the last.
  • Equipping local communities and humanitarian organizations with the right data and digital tools can make a life-saving difference to people at risk around the world.

Humanitarians often talk about reaching the ‘last mile.’ Yet it’s often the first mile that is most important to us and those that need our help.

Real estate services like Zillow calculate WalkScores to show how accessible neighbourhoods are to local services, and insurance companies often calculate the distance to the closest fire station. This is how we should look at humanitarian services.

Local responders are always first on the scene during an emergency. And, as we saw in the response to the devastating earthquake in Türkiye earlier this year, local responders and community members are often the only ones on the scene for the first few days.

Local communities are often the first link in the chain of response — and never the last. They are also at the heart of all successful efforts to build resilience and reduce disaster risks.

In this context, equipping local volunteers and humanitarian organizations with the right data and digital tools can make a life-saving difference to people at risk around the world.

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Equipping local communities with the tools to respond

Efforts are already underway to make better use of location data and to measure humanitarian needs from the perspective of the people who are affected, not just from the supply side where services are made available.

In health, the Professional Health Services Mapping project, which the IFRC is helping to lead, and studies like the Global maps of travel time to healthcare facilities are ensuring that community health facilities around the world are on the map and that humanitarians have the right tools to, for example, measure the distance from vulnerable communities to the nearest health facility or other service centres.

These types of studies can also help provide relevant information to include in OpenStreetMap, Google Maps and other multi-purpose data sets, ensuring that the data is available for a wide variety of both humanitarian and daily needs. This information is vital to understanding community access to healthcare, for example.

Global map of optimal travel time to healthcare with access to motorised transport.
Global map of optimal travel time to healthcare with access to motorised transport Image: D.J. Weiss, Andy Nelson, C. A. Vargas-Ruiz, Kristina Gligoric
Walking-only map of travel time to healthcare without access to motorised transport.
Walking-only map of travel time to healthcare without access to motorised transport. Image: D.J. Weiss, Andy Nelson, C. A. Vargas-Ruiz, Kristina Gligoric

This is too many miles — especially for people in remote locations, in marginalised communities or without any access to transport.

Community-based services can bridge these gaps, but the world needs many more of them. And the volunteers and staff need to be trained, equipped and connected – as do the communities themselves.

How the IFRC is taking action

The IFRC is involved in several ground-breaking collaborations with this goal in mind. These include:

  • Scaling up the REACH initiative in collaboration with Africa Center for Disease Control and the African Union, to recruit and train 2 million community health workers, equipped with digital tools for community-based health surveillance and reporting, and the knowledge and support to extend community health delivery.
  • Creating a Digital Engagement Hub. This facilitates the integration of three-way communication (communication back-and-forth with communities, but also promoting peer-to-peer sharing within communities) through a common messaging hub, helping us to engage in a more relevant, purposeful and scalable way with people where they are. It also improves and extends our humanitarian services. The hub has been developed in partnership with the Norwegian Refugee Council, Netherlands Red Cross, IFRC, Twilio, Zing, TeleRivet and Innovation Norway. The concept was originally developed by the Norwegian Refugee Council and is now being picked up the IFRC to advance and scale it further.
  • Developing a remote, self-registration approach for providing cash assistance to people displaced from Ukraine to other countries in Europe through a partnership of the IFRC with RedRose and MoneyGram. The app is now being expanded to provide access to a variety of services to meet the whole spectrum of humanitarian needs, including essential support provided by National Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies and other humanitarian partners.
  • Developing tools for impact-based forecasting to guide Early Warning and Anticipatory Action in local communities. These tools include the Impact-based Forecasting portal of the 510 data centre of the Netherlands Red Cross, the WhatNow service developed by the Global Disaster Preparedness Center with Google and a new Risk Module being incorporated into the IFRC’s GO Platform with support from USAID and other partners.

These digital tools will put more power in the hands of local communities to find and access humanitarian services and support — no matter their location, the time of day they are available or their preferred language.

With its network of more than 16 million community-based volunteers and more than 197,000 Red Cross and Red Crescent local units across 192 countries, the IFRC has the largest humanitarian footprint in the world.

But we still have some distance to travel if these life-saving services are to be placed within reach of every person who needs them. And to do this, we will need partners for the journey — not for the last mile, but for the first.

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