Authors: Daniel Stauffacher and Sanjana Hattotuwa

Originally written for UN Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN GAID)

Disaster management is an imperfect science. It is impossible to accurately predict when and where a disaster will occur. Yet efforts towards drawing up national and regional disaster risk management strategies have encountered significant challenges. Studies show that the problem lies not with the use and adoption of technology per se, but with the more entrenched culture of institutional and individual resistance to information sharing in an open, timely and sustainable manner. Governments as well as local and transnational non-governmental institutions are both victims to and perpetrators of this culture of secrecy. In controlling the flow of information – what gets out where, to whom, how and when – these stakeholders directly influence disaster management planning and action.  With little or no incentive to change their ham-fisted approach to information sharing and its twin corollaries - collaboration and coordination - key stakeholders including non-governmental agencies are culpable for significant lapses in information flows. Lessons identified have not been learnt. These gaps have cost lives.

This brief paper is an attempt to map how ICTs can and have helped in disaster management even in least developed countries in the Asia Pacific region and suggests that though key stakeholders may (today) be averse to the accountability and transparency that ICTs bring to disaster management frameworks, their increasing use by citizens are a compelling argument to fully integrate them into all aspects of disaster early warning, management, mitigation and response.

Download the full paper here.