Displacement's Call for Crowdsourcing

The increasing severity of global displacement creates the need for a responsive use of the world's advancing digital technologies. The tangle of humanitarian crisis might be severely truncated if crowdsourcing, like that of Ushahidi, which developers created in the immediate wake of 2008's Kenyan electoral crisis, were strategically employed by the communities and cultures victimized by forced scattering. What Ushahidi did for Kenya was provide an anonymous module of user documentation of violence and displacement via SMS, or text message.

Colombia has one of the largest populations of IDPs (internally displaced people) in the world: the government states that since 1997, 3.2 million Colombians have been driven from their homes, though CODHES–the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement in Bogota–contends this figure is closer to 4.2 million. The massive discrepancy speaks to the complexity of the crisis that's burdened the country since the 1960s. This gulf presents a massive problem for both the government and NGOs to dismantle.

Much of what has caused Colombia's mass migration to its overcrowded urban centers has been violence in and around rural communities, which are caught in the crossfire between FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) members and the Colombian government. Additionally, criminal gangs seeking reign of the massive cocaine trade  force civilians near coca production from their homes. Also—and embarrassingly—the US government’s war on drugs contributes to displacement with its approval of spraying the coca farmers’ land to quell the trade, a tactic that crushes livelihoods, and is no doubt also ecologically damaging. (Some would contend these individuals aren't IDPs, but rather ethnic migrants.)

With a program like Ushahidi, anyone with access to a mobile phone could contribute, the results of which shine tremendous light on how to advance the accountability of events otherwise unavailable to or neglected by the media. After all, the mass migration of Colombia's past is gone; most civilians today are fleeing in groups of often only 50 people.

At the core of Colombia’s most severe social crisis is land reform and political corruption. In addition to those displaced, the country has lost nearly three to four million migrating citizens to neighboring Venezuela, most of whom have relocated for economic purposes. This is odd for a country that showed a 5.3 percent annual economic gain from 2002-2008; what’s not odd is that the trickle of this growth is not reaching the working class, much of this migrating population. Furthermore, those coming to Venezuela as refugees are at greater risk due to bubbling conflict between the neighbors.

Despite rising global poverty rates, more and more people are being connected through mobile phones. Whether persons are displaced or migrate with ‘free will,' the myriad factors at play make documentation of incidents and movement a challenging, but necessary, humanitarian task. Mobile phones can help this happen.

There shouldn’t be a six month lag for what little humanitarian aid actually sees distribution in Colombia. And there shouldn’t be a million unaccounted citizens forced from their homes without adequate structural government and NGO response.

With crowd-sourcing like that of Ushahidi comes accountability: cause and effect. With accountability comes involvement from NGOs, who are often forced to withhold much needed resources when their allocation isn't clearly demonstrable. The advancement in human rights by way of crowdsourcing can be substantial; when it augers NGOs, education, media awareness, and job creation improves. Take Action Learn more about the Colombian refugee crisis from the UNHCR.