Opening keynote at #HumTech2016 conference

1. DISRUPTING
HUMANITARIAN
RESPONSE
GISLI RAFN OLAFSSON
HUMANITARIAN ADVISOR – NETHOPE
PARTNER & CEO USA – BERINGER FINANCE

2. My background
• NetHope – Emergency Response
Director 2011-2015
• ICE-SAR – Former team leader
Icelandic USARTEAM
• UNDAC – Member since 2005
• Author –The Crisis Leader
• 25+ years in Disaster Management
• 35+ years in ICT
• Trusted advisor to governments in
use of ICT in disaster response

3. Changes observed over the past decade
• Improvements in field based connectivity
• Move away from paper based data collection
• Maps are no longer rough sketch on a piece of paper
• Social media – a tool for awareness building and response
• The rise of digital volunteers
• Humanitarian hackathons
• Increased interest by academia in humanitarian response

4. Challenges observed over the past decade
• Better field based connectivity led to centralization of response
• A myriad of mobile data collection system with no standards in place
• Humanitarian responders don’t know how to ask for actionable maps
• Awareness building through social media eating up bandwidth
• We have no clue how to listen to what affected people are saying on social
media
• Only a handful of response organizations know how to leverage digital
volunteers effectively and digital volunteers still creating datasets that
nobody asked for
• Humanitarian hackathons leave everyone feeling like they did some good,
but very few solutions come out of them.
• Lack of practical academic research in this space.

5. DISRUPTION
The Need for Change

7. Disruption is happening already
• Explosive growth in mobile
phone ownership
• Resilience of mobile networks
• Social networks
• Occupy movement
• Social entrepreneurship
• Impact Investment

8. DISRUPTION
IS HAPPENING
But not for us…

9. Wikinomics (2006)
• With the costs of
communicating dramatically
dropping, firms who do not
change their current structures
will perish.
• Companies who utilize mass
collaboration will dominate
their respective markets.
• We cannot solve the problems
of the information age using
institutions of the industrial age

10. Philanthropy
• A century old mechanism for
sharing your wealth with those
in need
• Non-sustainable model
• Demand grossly out ways the
availability
• High administrative cost
associated with grant writing,
M&E, and fundraising

11. International Humanitarian Response
• Built around the concept of lack
of local capacity to respond
• Built around a top-down
approach to response
• Distribution of material and
resources from donor countries
• Highly political system where
competition is fierce and
collaboration is scarce
• Annual $16B-24B market

12. Change is hard when…
• …your own role/power is affected by it
• …money is involved
• …you have a hard time thinking outside the box
• …bureaucracy is stronger than progress
• …you realize you are an outdated dinosaur fighting to stay in power
• …your idea of innovation simply leads to pilotitis

13. We need to think outside the box
• How do we truly empower affected communities to self-organize?
• How do we leverage digital aid to address most of the need?
• How do we perform needs assessment bottom up, not top down?
• How do we supplement and strengthen local capacity instead of
bulldozing over it?
• How do we harness the passion within companies, movements,
individuals to solve problems?
• How do we move from an unsustainable, non-scalable approaches
towards self-sustainable, replicable, and truly scalable models?

14. New premises to work from
• We will soon be able to restore mobile connectivity in <24 hours
• Large portion of the population worldwide will soon have
smartphones
• Disaster prone countries will continue to build up their own national
capacity to respond
• Over 80% of current aid will become digital in nature – driven by
mobile money becoming available worldwide
• Government and philanthropical funding will reduce in size due to
politics and new ways of thinking by millennial generation

16. Learning from disruption in other fields
• We need to focus on innovation
that leads to disruption
• We need to provide funding
models that are tolerant to
failure
• We need to built an ecosystem
that supports entrepreneurial
thinking in the humanitarian
space
• We need to focus on
sustainable business models

17. This is why I moved to Silicon Valley…
• To learn about disruption in the
hub of innovation
• To build up the networks
required to drive disruption into
the humanitarian space
• To understand how we can
adapt the venture capital model
of financing to humanitarian
response
• To build up an army of
disrupters

18. What have I learned so far…
• EvenVCs are interested in seeing
disruption in this space
• SiliconValley is built on the
concept of giving back
• True innovation comes when you
understand the fundamental
problem that the user needs to
resolve
• Solutions we create for
humanitarian response must have
daily use cases for them to truly be
used in times of need

19. Do you have
WiFi?
Information as a life line

20. ROGER von OECH

21. QUESTIONS?
GISLI.OLAFSSON@NETHOPE.ORG - @GISLIO
WWW.NETHOPE.ORG