Download Free Technology For Humanitarian Action Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Technology For Humanitarian Action and write the review.

Humanitarian workers around the world struggle under dangerous conditions. Yet many do not have the technological tools readily available elsewhere to help them realize their mission to provide essential services and save lives. This book, the fruit of a historic conference, is a practical guide to current technologies that can help relief and humanitarian aid workers succeed. Designed to facilitate needed technology transfer to the humanitarian sector, the essays focus on areas where technology is underused and predict where new technological advances may be applied to relief efforts. The essays cover essential areas: communications technology and infrastructure support and security. They describe how such technologies as personal identification and tagging systems, software radios, wireless networks, and computer-aided language translation can promote safety and manage large groups of people. Other essays outline new technological solutions to such challenges as mine removal, water purification, and energy generation. The contributors are: Kevin M. Cahill, Frank Fernandez, C. Kumar Patel, Paul J. Kolodzy, Joseph Mitola III, Victor Zue, Jaime G. Carbonell, Stephen Squires, Joseph V. Braddock, Arthur L. Lerner-Lam, Ralph James, William L. Warren, and Regina E. Dugan.
The overflow of information generated during disasters can be as paralyzing to humanitarian response as the lack of information. This flash flood of information‘social media, satellite imagery and more is often referred to as Big Data. Making sense of this data deluge during disasters is proving an impossible challenge for traditional humanitarian
This book offers a detailed exploration of three examples of humanitarian uses of new technology, employing key theoretical insights from Foucault. We are currently seeing a humanitarian turn to new digital technologies, such as biometrics, remote sensing, and surveillance drones. However, such humanitarian uses of new technology have not always produced beneficial results for those at the receiving end and have sometimes exposed the subjects of assistance to additional risks and insecurities. Engaging with key insights from the work of Foucault combined with selected concepts from the Science and Technology Studies literature, this book produces an analytical framework that opens up the analysis to details of power and control at the level of materiality that are often ignored in liberal histories of war and modernity. Whereas Foucault details the design of prisons, factories, schools, etc., this book is original in its use of his work, in that it uses these key insights about the details of power embedded in material design, but shifts the attention to the technologies and attending forms of power that have been experimented with in the three humanitarian endeavours presented in the book. In doing so, the book provides new information about aspects of liberal humanitarianism that contemporary critical analyses have largely neglected. This book will be of interest to students of humanitarian studies, peace and conflict studies, critical security studies, and IR in general.
This open access book presents 18 case studies that explore current scientific and technological efforts to address global development issues, such as poverty, from a holistic and interdisciplinary point of view, putting actual impacts at the centre of its analysis. It illustrates the use of technologies for development in various fields of research, such as humanitarian action, medical and information and communication technology, disaster risk-reduction technologies, habitat and sustainable access to energy. The authors discuss how innovative technologies, such as unmanned aerial vehicles for disaster risk reduction, crowdsourcing humanitarian data, online education and ICT-based medical technologies can have significant social impact. The book brings together the best papers of the 2016 International Conference on Technologies for Development at EPFL, Switzerland. The book explores how the gap between innovation in the global South and actual social impact can be bridged. It fosters exchange between engineers, other scientists, practitioners and policy makers active at the interface of innovation and technology and human, social, and economic development. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.
What is Non-Traditional Security? How have our understandings of security changed over the past decade? What are the dominant non-traditional security challenges we face in the world today?The concept of national security remains contested but our understanding of it continues to evolve as it is shaped by the world around us. From a globally dominant 'traditional' understanding of security during the Cold War characterised by a focus on countries and their militaries protecting their sovereignty to today, where non-military threats such as global pandemics, climate change, energy, to disasters threaten the wellbeing and livelihoods of people, communities, and the environment that form the backbone of society.The global dial has shifted towards a more comprehensive understanding of security that recognises these non-traditional security threats moving the focus away from solely the survival of the state to the empowerment and protection of people and the environment. This shift highlights the experiences of different individuals and communities, from civilians affected by war to irregular migrants moving from one place to the next, and what the world witnesses as efforts to empower and protect people and the environment.Indeed, comprehensive security has a long history in the post-colonial Asia-Pacific. Non-Traditional Security emerged after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. It emerged as a way to recalibrate the ways governments engaged people and communities and developed pathways for countries in the region to cooperate.Non-Traditional Security in the Asia-Pacific: A Decade of Perspectives, an interdisciplinary collection, is essential reading for anyone interested in the developments of security with a focus on the dominant non-traditional security threats in the Asia-Pacific over the last decade — from advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and scholars, to policymakers at the local, national, regional, and international levels.
Supply Chain Management for Humanitarians provides an in-depth insight into the management of supply chains in the context of humanitarian logistics. This accessible and practical book considers humanitarian logistics from a strategic and operational perspective. The overarching theme is collaboration and coordination, one of the biggest challenges in the humanitarian community. Supply Chain Management for Humanitarians takes a problem-based learning approach, featuring real cases and examples from leading organizations including Oxfam, Unicef, and The Red Cross. Each chapter is self-standing, relating the content in each chapter to the supply chain as a whole. This enables the reader to easily dip into different sections. At the end of each chapter, there is a case study written by a leading practitioner currently working in the humanitarian field. Supply Chain Management for Humanitarians fills a much needed gap in the market and is essential reading for humanitarians worldwide.
This book investigates the digital transformation of aid as a form of humanitarian extractivism. It focuses on how practices of data extraction shift power towards states, the private sector and humanitarians. Digital initiatives aimed towards ‘fixing’ the humanitarian system, making it better and more secure, also create risk and harm for vulnerable individuals and communities. Central to the digital transformation of aid is the digital body – with digital identities becoming a prerequisite for receiving aid and protection – and the centralisation of vulnerability arising from enormous databases holding ever more humanitarian data. Cyber-attacks, human error and technological problems generate risks for humanitarians, but also mean that humanitarians themselves can put populations in need at risk. The book explores new humanitarian spaces and practices such as the humanitarian drone airspace, wearable innovation challenges and ethics in global disaster innovation labs.
Humanitarian Logistics takes a comprehensive look at the issues surrounding humanitarian logistics through the life-cycle of the disaster spanning three stages of operations: preparation, disaster response, and humanitarian relief.
Humanitarian Engineering reviews the development of engineering as a distinct profession and of the humanitarian movement as a special socio-political practice. Having noted that the two developments were situated in the same geographical and historical space -- that is, in Europe and North America beginning in the 1700s -- the book argues for a mutual influence and synthesis that has previously been lacking. In this spirit, the first of two central chapters describes humanitarian engineering as the artful drawing on science to direct the resources of nature with active compassion to meet the basic needs of all -- especially the powerless, poor, or otherwise marginalized. A second central chapter then considers strategies for education in humanitarian engineering so conceived. Two final chapters consider challenges and implications. Table of Contents: Engineering / Humanitarianism / Humanitarian Engineering / Humanitarian Engineering Education / Challenges / Conclusion: Humanizing Technology
Throughout history, humanity has been plagued by a myriad of humanitarian crises that seemingly take the form of perpetual human suffering. Today, approximately 125,000,000 people require humanitarian assistance as the result of famine, war, geopolitical conflict, and natural disasters. A core component of this suffering is afflictions related to human health, where disturbances strain or overwhelm the existing healthcare infrastructure to create the conditions for an increase in morbidities and co-morbidities. One of the more startling elements is the loss of life to preventable medical conditions that were not properly treated or even diagnosed in the field, and is often due to the limited interventional capacity that medical teams and humanitarian practitioners have in these scenarios. These individuals are often hindered by medical equipment deficiencies or devices not meant to function in austere conditions. The development of highly versatile, feasible, and cost-effective medical devices and technologies that can be deployed in the field is essential to enhancing medical care in unconventional settings. In this book we examine the nature of the creative problem-solving paradigm, and dissect the intersection of frugal, disruptive, open, and reverse innovation processes in advancing humanitarian medicine. Specifically, we examine the feasible deployment of these devices and technologies in unconventional environments not only by humanitarian aid and disaster relief agencies, but also by crisis-affected communities themselves. The challenge is complex, but the financial support and technical development of innovative solutions for the delivery of humanitarian aid is a process in which everyone is a stakeholder.