Liesbeth Renders
Liesbeth is AlertNet's map officer, and gets deployed around the world by MapAction to help map emergencies and train colleagues in how to use GIS & GPS.
Food agency cuts paperwork in the bush
A small palm-held computer is transforming life in a displacement camp in Goma town, northeast Congo. The crucial task of finding out what people need in this fast-changing environment - where surges in the local fighting can displace thousands at a time - is being computerised for the first time. The World Food Programme is trialling so-called personal digital assistants (PDA's), to replace the laborious process of collecting the data needed to plan and predict how much food is required in the camp. ...
Mobile phones trump hospital beds in developing-world healthcare
The U.N. Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have ambitious targets for reducing child mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters worldwide by 2015. But a shortage of healthcare workers and other economic and environmental trends make boosting life expectancy rates a tough challenge. To help tackle this problem, three of the world's biggest philanthropic foundations - the Rockefeller Foundation,the United Nations Foundation and the Vodafone Foundation - have come together in a partnership to improve healthcare through mobile technologies. ...
Peace game to help train disaster responders
Video game technologies have long been used in simulation-based training for military operations, but thanks to researchers at Duke University they could soon come in handy in the world of disaster response. In collaboration with Virtual Heroes, a U.S.-based game developer, the team has developed 'Virtual Peace', a simulation game to train the next generation of emergency response and international negotiators. Tim Lenoir initiated the project after becoming intrigued by the idea of using the same technology that encourages cooperation in resolving conflict. The end result is the award-winning project 'Virtual Peace', a simulation game based on the real-life emergency that followed Hurricane Mitch in 1998, one of the most powerful and deadliest Atlantic hurricanes on record which devastated Honduras and Nicaragua. ...
Satmaps said to show ethnic violence in South Ossetia
Satellite images have long been useful to aid workers and governments in planning humanitarian assistance. But the increase in availability of high-resolution commercial imagery taken from the heavens is now helping human rights workers document abuses on the ground. UNOSAT, a U.N. programme set up to put satellite imagery at the disposal of the relief and reconstruction community, has been using commercial satellites to hone in on the conflict between Georgia and Russia in South Ossetia. Analysis by UNOSAT experts shows patterns of destruction that may be consistent with evidence of ethnic attacks gathered by Human Rights Watch researchers working in the region. ...
Searching in Angola for the hidden enemy - landmines
The dusty, potholed road is scattered with the remains of ambushed vehicles, interspersed by the occasional tank, stark reminders of 27 years of conflict in Angola. In 2002 the government and UNITA rebels signed a peace agreement which ended the combat but left a hidden enemy - landmines. Angola is one of the most densely mined countries in the world. Away from Luanda and the shiny office buildings of oil and diamond companies lie thousands of kilometres of uncleared land, despite international and government operators working alongside each other for several years. ...
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