Update 2/1/12: It was a great day! Check out our photos here: http://bit.ly/wJl35R 

“From Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, technology has played an important role in shaping contemporary resistance and the representation of these events in the media. What new tools of protest and occupation have emerged over the past year? How does their use help to shape tomorrow’s democracies?” — Eyebeam

We’ll be joining 15 other projects and organizations, presenting on how we’ve used tech to help activism.

Eyebeam is located at 540 W 21st St. New York, NY 10011 (map).

See you there!

Today we announce the launch of the only phone-based emergency response system dedicated to rape and sexual assault in Haiti. Together with our partners at  KOFAVIV, the Commission for Women Victims for Victims, we at Dd have designed, launched and tested the Call Center that is helping bring emergency care to victims in Port-Au-Prince. The KOFAVIV Call Center is supported by mobile-service providers Digicel and Voila, major phone providers in Haiti, where there is no 911 or similar system for reporting emergencies. Now, free calls to the number “572” connect victims to critical emergency care including medical, psychological and legal support.

The Call Center is one of four components of the Dd commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) to use technology to address rape and gender-based violence (sGBV) with women in Haiti. Dd and KOFAVIV are seeking $150,000 to support the Call Center and expand its reach throughout Port-Au-Prince, announced Dd at the CGI Annual meeting today.

“When we first started working with Haitian women leaders, there was no accurate information on the increasing rates of sexual violence in the tent-camps,” explains Emily Jacobi, our Executive Director. “The Call Center is a key component of an information management system we built with KOFAVIV to accurately capture data on the real scope of the problem, and get urgent preventative care to the most vulnerable cases.”

A recent report from Human Rights Watch observes that earthquake recovery has largely failed Haitian women and girls, noting, “Emergency contraception and other post-rape care is available in some health facilities, but many rape victims don’t have access to this care for the same reasons that women and girls have difficulty accessing other health services: they lack basic information about what is available and where, or they have difficulty paying for transportation to reach the services.”

Our partnership with KOFAVIV directly addresses this lack of information. Women who contact the Call Center receive urgent personal care, but the information collected also contributes to the macro-solutions for the problem. KOFAVIV collects data on cases and uses a system built by Dd to generate monthly reports, maps and data visualization to share with government and international bodies that provide critical security and lighting.

“The technology trainings that began in 2010 have brought about a major change in the capacity of grassroots women, particularly us, the women of KOFAVIV,” say Malya Appolon and Eramithe Delva, co-founders of KOFAVIV. “They have given us more confidence in ourselves, and have given us tools to help more people understand the reality of those living in the camps, a reality that gets harder everyday.”

KOFAVIV and Dd first partnered in April 2010, building a comprehensive system that uses technology to improve the fight against sGBV in Haiti. The partnership is the cornerstone of Dd’s commitment to CGI, promising to provide Haitian women’s groups the technical tools and training needed in their work to create a comprehensive approach to prevent rape in Haiti with a coalition of lawyers, health and psychosocial service providers, and strong networks of Haitian women and girls.

KOFAVIV & Digital Democracy Database System

“572 not only provides support to victims, it represents urgent medical care. When a woman calls our number within 72 hours of an incident, we ensure she gets the medical care she needs to prevent transmission of disease, HIV/AIDS and unwanted pregnancy,” says Jocie Philistin, a Project Coordinator for KOFAVIV. “Medical support is the first step to receiving ongoing legal and psychological support.”

Through the first month of testing, the Call Center was promoted in 24 tent camps and communities by KOFAVIV’s network of 65 Community Outreach Agents, some police precincts and the General Hospital. Ready to accept calls from throughout Port-Au-Prince, the Call Center needs financial support to spread awareness across the city.

The Abundance Foundation, United States Institutes for Peace (USIP), the Channel Foundation, USAID/OTI and individual donors have supported Dd’s work in Haiti to date.

Press Release: Dd & KOFAVIV Launch Only Emergency Response System Dedicated to Rape and Sexual Violence in …

Techcamp was a fantastic experience, bringing together 18 facilitators & experts from around the digital space (Twitter, Facebook, VOA, NGOs) & activists and NGOs from the Russian speaking world (70+ organizations from 15 countries). I was the only facilitator translating for myself, thanks to my Russian upbringing. and so of course I cracked jokes & bonded over stories about the unique qualities of different parts of the region.

Secretary Clinton and Alec Ross speak at Techcamp Vilnius

A lot of why I do the work I do at Digital Democracy is because I see technology transcending the opposition politics that people know all too well in the post-Soviet. People feel exploited by their leaders and lied to by their journalists. But this is a unique time where citizens can speak to citizens, based on a new era of transparency. There was a palpable energy as people tried to strategize on what this might look like in their country.

Much of the conversation was centered around the fact that governments are cracking down on protesters, using tools like Twitter and Facebook, to identify and stop them. It seems they’re learning the lessons of Egypt & Tunisia, and using the tools that were popularized in the media as fostering dissent.

Yet there was a lack of understanding how tools beyond social media can be harnessed to educate citizens and get them to participate in new ways. I showed a local transparency initiative from Georgia and spoke about a corruption monitoring system we’re developing in Macedonia. There was a lot of excitement.

My focus was discussing the future of mobiles and how the proliferation of them means exciting opportunities to engage. From FrontlineSMS to Geochat and more, getting messages into people’s pockets and purses never seems to stimulate people’s imagination.

“Democracy” is still often seen as protests and elections. It’s an exciting time to expand these definitions and stimulate the creativity of fantastic local NGOs to do so.

At the same time, it’s dangerous and complicated. 20 colleagues who were visiting from Belarus were detained at the border when they tried to reenter their home country. Literacy doesn’t exist in a void of safety.

TechCamp Vilnius is one of a series of TechCamps being held around the world. Check it out and see if one is coming your way.

As a trainer, my goal was to unpack this conversation, understand local perspectives on it and get everyone registered for the different free and open source tools that have the most relevance. To aggregate the information, we used the tag #ukrainetech and pinned the central point of the conversation to ukrainetech.wordpress.com. Through interactive exercises trainees would come away with tangible experience and an open online conversation about library tech upon which to build in the future through social media.

The trainings were initiated by the IREX Global Libraries Program, a great project using libraries as catalysts for best serving communities’ changing needs. We started with a series of discussions around what types of technologies are currently being used in Ukraine and Romania, as it is important to identify the difference between the perceptions and realities on the ground. For example, its often interpreted in the USA that MySpace is a “dead” social network while in fact it has millions of users that are from marginalized communities. With social network analysis we found that Romania has approximately 2,045,700 users on Facebook out of a country of 22,000,000 (about 9%) while Ukraine has only 800,000 users out of a population of about 46,000,000 (about 2%). We were even able to drill down into the demographics of those users to map out methods of future outreach.

Mapping the physical infrastructure of the libraries and their connections is important in addition to the virtual. Location-based information is becoming increasingly important online, and certainly for libraries that want to emphasize where they are located in their communities. Natalia Martian, Media Coordinator, presented a case study on Ushahidi for outreach for the library program in Romania, based on a training I had done with Anca Rapeanu in Iraq. I also profiled how the tool was used in the emergency during the earthquakes in Haiti, the needs, the ability to work with volunteers, and the successes.

Digital Democracy’s “Jumpstarter” was a key new tool that we’ve been using in our trainings. Due to slow download speeds in many countries, it is an easy way to distribute free tools in a secure way. Often time is wasted downloading tools or worse, computers are corrupted with hacks and viruses as information is freely exchanged. The Jumpstarters have proven to be solid alternatives, and ones that include presentations, training materials and episodes of our interactive DDTV internet television show.

The trip was especially interesting for me, being that my family came from the region. In Soviet times, libraries were thriving institutions and received much support. Often, they were even part of community centers that also included movie theaters, a stage, and the post office. Now, as so many of those institutions were part of the past, it’s harder to conceptualize what the future will hold. But it’s exciting to consider how to reorganize these systems to be the fastest, most cost effective and still social methods of organizing. I look forward to future projects on the subject.

Special thanks to friend of Digital Democracy and library future Joe Murphy for additional help on this project. Also check out these additional resources:

• Тернопільська обласна бібліотека для молоді
• Української бібліотечної
• библиотека без барьеров
• Бібліотечний гопак
• Бібліотека ім. В. Маяковського

It was fascinating to be there at a time when the economy made us trillionaires. We found that despite the hardships, including a cholera outbreak, people were still using technology as a means of figuring out new ways to relate to one another. To read about our research and findings, please view and download our report below.

Thanks to the Arca Foundation and our individual donors who helped make the trip possible, and to all those on the ground who helped us during our travels, who aren’t mentioned here for their safety.

Digital Democracy Zimbabwe Research

Article on DDOS attacks in Myanmar newspaper

The tripʼs goals were to conduct research through data mapping, perform trainings, and create media profiles and organizations. Dd visited Mandalay Division, Rakhine/Arakan State and Yangon/Rangoon Division. Digital Democracy has previously conducted research with Burmese groups in Thailand, Bangladesh India and China, creating a comprehensive study on information in and around the county.

In the lead up to elections in the country, information access is becoming more suspect. Arbor Networks points out that the county once again fell off the Internet. Over the course of the past several days, their main Internet service provider, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunication suffered a large, sustained DDoS attack disrupting most network traffic in and out of the country. The other ISP, Redlink is reporting similar data loss.

We’re proud to be launching our report on the state of ICT in the country to help contribute to the often misunderstood reality on the ground. Despite the growing and lively sectors, there are still major limitations and room for improvement. Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments.

Digital Democracy Burma Report

Still reeling from the earthquake nine months ago and with elections later this month, what do Haitians living in the camps think about voting and the opportunities for changing their country? Last week, my colleagues Emily Jacobi, Emilie Reiser (aka “les deux Emilies”), and I traveled there to find out. Conducting a week-long training with our partners resulted in another profound week of learning, sharing, and exchange.

With the support of the U.S. Institute for Peace (USIP), Dd came to Haiti to help some 50 women representing grassroots women’s groups in Port Au Prince work more effectively for greater political and social rights in the lead up to national elections on November 28th. This training followed up on two previous trainings this year, in April and July respectively, during which Dd staff worked with Haitian women to use mobile phones, video, and photography to increase their access to political power and rights.  The focus of Dd’s work in Haiti has been to expand on the women’s understanding of and ability to use new communications and digital media tools to share their voice and report on their realities, this time, with a particular focus on Haitian democracy and the upcoming elections. As a part of this work, we sought to identify early warning indicators of election-related violence and how to report these findings to those who need to know.  Women from the camps – the women we are working with – have the most incentive to combat violence and protect themselves and their loved ones. Women are the most attuned to, most affected by, and most motivated to stop violence in their communities. They also possess critical and unique information that can save lives.

As a lawyer from our partner organization, the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (BAI) commented during a meeting this week: “Haiti is a country built on social exclusion.” No group knows this more than Haitian women, who represent a mere 4% of seats in their parliament and only 10% of land-owners. When we asked the women participants about democracy, they eloquently explained how it is a concept foreign to their daily reality.  To put it in their words:

We don’t have democracy.

We vote for leaders who don’t protect us, who commit violence against us and our children, and use us to deepen their pockets.

We have no food, no water, no homes, no education, no security, and no respect for our rights.

Animals live better than we do.

They are spending money to get elected, and we still live in tents.

The training began with a group exercise in which women formed small groups and drew maps of their communities.  In total, eight maps of different parts of Port Au Prince were drawn and presented to the room by each group.  All eight maps contained some of the same information, despite having been developed separately by each group.  Most depicted garbage, latrines, and violence in the camps.  One group, with four of the youngest participants, drew the route from their home to KOFAVIV’s office – where we held the trainings. The map began with a school and when asked why the school was the largest object drawn, they responded that it was the “most important” and the thing “we want the most, so we drew it that way.”

Community Maps drawn by the women

After each group presented, I presented a map of my home: New York.  I drew the five boroughs, the East River and the Hudson, and the airport in Queens. I shared where Dd staff lives, where the Dd office is, and other information about NYC. Needless to say, my map differed significantly from the others taped to the wall. The women’s questions were illuminating: they asked me “are the rivers dangerous?”  “Is there violence in New York like there is in Haiti?”  One can only imagine the impossibility of fathoming a place like NYC, a place so unlike anything or anywhere they know.

Abby presents map of New York City

Following the mapping exercise, we switched modes to political participation, exploring their definitions of democracy and their views on the upcoming elections. Less than a month away from Haiti’s highly contentious elections, we did not know exactly what to expect in terms of views on this election and Haitian democracy in general, but anticipated great skepticism.  Haiti has struggled since it became a “democracy” more than 20 years ago to respond to the needs of its people.  Furthermore, the one time Haitians came out in droves to elect a representative leader, he was soon ousted by a military coup that left the country torn apart and people feeling disillusioned and powerless.  But regardless of whether Haiti can be called a “democracy” in reality, as well as name, we knew that women’s voices matter, their opinions are a necessary part of the overall dialogue, about this election, and all of the decisions affecting their lives.

We followed this up with a discussion of other ways to leverage power and push for changes. We discussed who funds the Haitian elections  – foreign countries including the U.S., EU and Japan – and how if the Haitian government doesn’t respond to the needs of Haitian women, their voices can still help to convince those supporting the process to take a different approach and/or pressure the Haitian government to make changes to better ensure the rights of its citizens in the democratic process. This led into a presentation of citizen reporting on elections in various countries around the world and how technology has enabled citizens to have a greater voice, and thus greater power, in affecting national politics and policies.

Another topic of discussion was barriers for women to meaningful participation in these elections, which turned into a series of group presentations on “reasons why we are not going to vote.” These reasons included, but were not limited to: still living in tents while politicians are “getting out the vote,” never having seen change by leaders they have voted for in the past, and most pervasive, concerns about security.

The women are asked if they have ID

One woman told us the story of having gone out to march to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of her organization, KONAMAVID, which was broadcast this fall on national television.  She said that since that day, she hasn’t slept in the same place two nights in a row because she has been receiving calls threatening her life.  If she received death threats for expressing her views and celebrating the work of her organization that day, one could only imagine the fear this woman and her colleagues feel when standing up for their rights publicly. We responded by talking about how technology can enable women to “march” virtually, anonymously, and more securely.

To this end, we brought together the discussions of democracy and meaningful participation in the political process with technology and the various mapping exercises we began our week with.  We introduced the ways in which citizens have used communications tools such as video, photography, phone calls, sms, and the internet to report on elections around the world and increase transparency and knowledge of realities on the ground.  We invited colleagues from Solutions, a Haitian technology company that oversees the noula.ht platform for mapping citizen reports in Haiti, to present the platform and how women can use it to safely report on violence and other injustices in their communities.  One of the presenters, Naomi, who is an operator who receives calls for Noula engaged the women by telling stories of threats she’s received, and doing mock calls with participants to orient them to how to report an incident by calling the 177 shortcode in Haiti.

Emily works with one of the smaller groups

We ended the training on Thursday with a day of smaller meetings with groups formed by dividing Port-au-Prince geographically into five loose neighborhoods where the women live. Each group took out a camera on Wednesday afternoon to aid their documentation, and on Thursday each individual reported on their homework – a case of injustice as well as a piece of news about the elections. While some cases were more general, many women came back with specific cases that had happened to their neighbors, families or themselves, such as the woman who had been beaten for her mobile phone, or a pregnant woman who was being refuges treatment. In reporting on injustice, one women from Cité-Soleil (a slum area of Port-au-Prince) had witnessed three cases of rape Wednesday night, and her colleague, also from Cité-Soleil, reported on election-related intimidation & harassment she had seen in her neighborhood that very morning, when a man had threatened to rip a candidate’s shirt off of a woman because he supported another candidate, who paid for his allegiance.

Last week, women participants of our training signed up to be “community agents” – a title they chose – who will come to the KOFAVIV office each week and work with Digital Democracy to report on early warning indicators of election violence as well as other problems facing their communities.  Dd’s Emilie Reiser will be staying on the ground and working with our partners to provide ongoing support over the next five weeks. She will be sharing regular updates on our findings and joint work and supporting the women’s ability to share their own reports as well as video and photographs.  Stay tuned…

For more images from last week’s training, please visit Dd’s Flickr page.

You can support Digital Democracy’s work in Haiti helping women to report gender-based violence, by visiting our site.

The themes of the conference centered around how the internet can be used to advance human freedom at a time of great uncertainty about the future. After Secretary Clinton’s Internet freedom speech last January, this has become a more participatory conversation, used to hammer out solutions with government actors, people who are interested in upholding human rights, those putting out the examples of their actions, and additional companies that have remained silent on the issues regarding the rights of their users.

The Chatham House Rule was enacted at the Conference, meaning that no one could be photographed or quoted without permission. I appreciate that Google made this simple but important gesture, given that many people were endangering their own lives to attend this conference and to be a part of these conversations. I’m often upset with the lack of caution taken when people take photos of friends who are dissidents in foreign countries. It’s frightening what a little social network analysis can reveal for interested authorities. And it’s a tool that is becoming less and less complicated and out of reach for some of the World’s most repressive regimes.

Google vs Facebook was a sight to be seen. Google has planted it’s feet firmly in the ground that information is a human right and they appear to be doing everything possible to lead by positive example. Facebook on the other is frequently beaten up by bloggers offended by their policies and more recently by mothers upset by their censorship.

Google’s approach to dealing with governments has been to respect the privacy and security of its users without offending the governments with which they operate. Tangibly, this has meant censoring locally where “necessary” without giving up the identity of it’s users, unlike groups like Yahoo! that have given information to Chinese authorities, which has led to subsequent arrests. Their goal is to refuse removing any information from the Internet but rather making it a 2-step process to get to when deemed inappropriate by a government. They might remove content from the local domain, say Google.th in Thailand, but users can still get to google.com in just 2 clicks, to get the content they desire. They’re decentralized in that way, and it’s working for them.

Facebook cannot employ this same “top level domain filter”.  Facebook users don’t have the ability see a different version of my profile, depending on what country from where they are viewing it. Instead, Facebook makes a “value judgment.” Having been to their offices, I believe that this means that a space of 500 million people is ruled by the values of sandal-wearing twenty-somethings in California. People with no accountability. The greatest audience outrage I’ve seen recently is the breast-feeding mothers campaign that launched in response to censorship caused by violating these “values”. Ironically, Sunil Abraham tweeted an outlandishly false statistic that in the USA 12,000 women are actually arrested for breast-feeding per year. This falsity became the most popular message to surround the ial2010 hashtag on Twitter. But the real issue is that Facebook hasn’t provided due process. Like when malls became places for free speech and arbiters of that speech, now Facebook is the intermediary. There is a need for procedure enabling people to appeal. One idea suggested was a community of governance for the site, where users can decide upon the values therein. A shocking proposal to make the site democratic, rather than the benevolent dictatorship it currently resembles.

It’ll be interesting to see how other sites deal with this issue, particularly ones with geopolitical implications like OpenStreetMap. Already there have been arguments over the the names of geographical locations, such as the area in Southwest Asia known most commonly as the “Persian Gulf”, which Iraqis refuse to call it, and over military areas in Russia. Will the site be blocked in certain countries and will they choose to alter content in order to ensure that the service is available to all users around the world, even of slightly modified?

Sami Ben Gharbia of Global Voices framed a lot of the discussion at the conference with his article “The Internet Freedom Fallacy and the Arab Digital Activism“. According to him, the US should never have gotten into the conversation about the Internet in the first place, because now it is a more dangerous place for the Arab bloggers that used to experience it as a free space devoid of political meaning. I take a firm stance that someone needs to defend those freedoms, and the more countries that stand to defend article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulating information as a human right, the better.

The themes and fears spoken about during the conference played out directly afterward. When I arrived to NYC, I got word that my friend and conference-mate Jiew was arrested upon her re-entry to Thailand. While Sami theorized that it was her attendance at the conference that led to the arrest, it was actually due to a two-year old charge under Les Majeste, for comments posted on the independent news website Prachatai, which she manages. Our team quickly launched a campaign to set her free by raising the money for her bail, and through outreach online, pressuring authorities to change their policy. The State Department stood back, Google offered help if necessary and her network of friends and colleagues were able to bail her out of jail within 24 hours of the arrest. Had it escalated further, and it will soon, as she’s scheduled to go to court in February, it’ll be curious to see how the different actors from the conference will help her cause. Already, EFF has issued a statement.

In the wake of the Haystack debacle (again, open source FTW) and the Wikileaks Afghan maps controversy, it’s important to be mindful of the fact that governments are starting to increasingly clamp down on the crucial tools that protect and preserve individual freedoms because they don’t have examples to the contrary to work with. I’m still hoping that Handheld Human Rights can serve as this tool, showing that circumvention and security tools are helping people and governments based on the UDHR alike. The national security conversation at the conference framed where these future discussions are going to go.

A technologist helping to bring wikileaks legal protections in Iceland explained that “Iceland has no national security laws because it has no army.” It was broken down further, described as a “A cayman island for data centers” an analogy to the financial industry. “Like libel tourism in UK” noted one of the Conference’s panel hosts. A concern was raised that similar to tax-havens, there will still be international pressure on small countries by bigger ones to give up the protections they claim to uphold. Governments are certainly gong to be looking to that kind of “front door” method, while also exploring back-door techniques, getting companies like RIM to give law enforcement a special key to data.

Another attendee related these theories to the realities of his own work. He explained that there are not only ethical considerations, but also technical ones. Sharing information opens ones ability to get hacked. “Once a week I call a company and ask if they want their secret stuff back” on the internet, it’s not only opening data to those one thinks they are.

An outspoken citizen rights activist from Vietnam brought it down to the ground, arguing that national security used to silence people in countries like hers. However, this is not usually done within an international legal framework of “security” as outlined in the Johannesburg Principle. Countries can’t invoke national security without specifics that are enforced through UN mechanisms. A problem is that violations of these standards are addressed “eventually.” The panel host shot back, asking whether that is “good enough for the people of Afghanistan.”

Tor, no stranger to this conversation, especially as one of it’s employees can’t currently travel, complained that there isn’t yet a digital due process that is noticeable to citizens. Can they “knock on the door before entering”? Because currently we don’t do that with data. But at the same time, we currently rent, and give the landlord the ability to open the door.

The architecture and control of the Internet is still far away from most citizens and governments alike. In the corporate infrastructure of wires and bytes its obvious that we all have to play nice, but the solutions are still a long way off. Perhaps we need to look to the past and look into the development of deeds. In addition, right now, there is an exciting development, those looking at the governance of international waterways and other shared bodies to learn lessons for the shared network of the net. Or maybe netizens will rise and plant the flag of the Internet firmly at United Nations Plaza. First, the world will have to agree on the design.

In 2009, I made several trips back to Armenia. I compiled the research I did into a report. Please find that below and let me know what you think. I hope that in the future I will be able to continue working with my friends and colleagues on the ground in exploring and implementing radical new opportunities to engage people throughout the country in political life, facilitated through technology.

Digital Democracy Armenia Report 2009

Just a few days later we were in the air and then suddenly on the ground in the midst of the rubble and rebuilding efforts under way. Our first engagement, after a brief meeting with our host, was a security briefing with MINUSTAH – the UN security detail operating in Haiti for the better part of the past decade. We then attended a brief coordination meeting at which we heard the organizer asking for suggestions of more realistic and concrete items they could request from donors in the US, who most recently had supplied a number of gas guzzling SUV’s to this country – where gas is in short supply if available at all.

Abby at BAI office

Port-Au-Prince is a city of contradictions, at once completely devastated, at once filled with hope for a different kind of future for Haiti. One week later, after meeting with thirteen local women leaders  from five different organizations, teaching and actually learning far more in the process, we are back in New York. This post includes some early reflections and learning that resulted from our time in Haiti.

Why Haiti’s Women?
Digital Democracy has been working in Haiti since before the earthquake, and we worked to support the tech community’s response in helping to save lives in the early weeks following the disaster. In March, at the Commission on the Status of Women, I attended a panel at which women leaders from Haiti spoke about their reality – pre and post earthquake – and I realized that like in conflict and post-conflict settings where there are opportunities for creating vast structural change in favor of equality, natural disasters provide a similar opportunity. Women in Haiti have always been excluded from decision-making and formal governance processes throughout Haiti’s history, but the more I read and heard from Haiti’s women, the more I learned about the vast legal and cultural discrimination that has led to decades of violence targeting women and their relative poverty and suffering among Haiti’s already poor population. In the 1990s, after the military coup, political rapes became a cause around which many of the leading women’s organizations today were founded. Nonetheless, while community organizations have developed to fill the vacuum of formal responses, women’s access to proper medical, psychosocial, and legal attention is barely existent. The earthquake worsened the lot of these women, but it is also an opportunity for rallying behind them to ensure their access to aid, and ultimately, a greater share of decision-making power. These are just a few of the facts I learned that led me to dedicate my energies to working with women of Haiti:

Approximately one third of Haiti’s population was directly affected by the earthquake. Many of the people we met on the trip lost an immediate member of their family, and amputees and others who were injured by the earthquake are visible everywhere in Port Au Prince. The disaster, and the subsequent humanitarian response, is unprecedented. Similarly, distrust of governing powers by a large swatch of Haiti’s civil society and thus, the strong community organizations that have sprouted up to serve the needs in the governance vacuum cause unique challenges for aid workers and Haitian society as a whole as it faces a prolonged recovery and rebuilding.

Women’s status in Haiti before the earthquake was already dismal. Now, it is significantly worse. Gender Based violence was a major concern for national security pre-earthquake and women are at significantly increased risk and have reported growing incidence of sexual violence.

• Less than 4% representation of women in parliament – by far the lowest in the Hemisphere.
• Women have no land rights.
• Haitian women have not been part of Post Disaster Needs Assessment or any formal response after quake or recovery decision-making – no voice, access or visibility.
• Rape was only codified as a crime in 2005 – it remains a “crime of honor” meaning that punishment is contingent on the virginity of the woman and mitigated sentencing is available for marrying their victim.
• Four of the most important women leaders behind the women’s movement died in quake. It is hard to assess the impact of the quake on the network long term but for now, there has been a loss leadership and many members are homeless and displaced.
• The Women’s Ministry has scant resources. Formal responses to the problem are limited and the UN and NGO community still has not found an effective solution to streamline protection and reporting mechanisms for addressing this growing humanitarian crisis.

While this history is the reason we went to work with Haitian women, we departed for Haiti with two primary goals. First, we wanted to solidify relationships with actors on the ground and learn more about the use of technology—including mobile phones and mapping software—to streamline and more effectively address sexual violence and child protection in the aftermath of the earthquake. We met with the amazing folks at OCHA and other UN agencies including UNIFEM, UNICEF and the UN Special Envoy for Haiti on Gender; NGO partners including the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux (International Lawyer’s Bureau), Parnters in Health, the Institut Interuniversitaire de Recherche et Developpment (Interuniversity institute for Research and Development),  and community based groups including KOFAVIV, FAVILEK, CONAMSI, and other women’s community organizations. We learned so much from them all.

Second, we wanted to do what we could in just a short week to give tools to women leaders that would enable them to have greater voice, visibility, access, and impact in the rebuilding effort. To this end, we lead a two-day photo and media training and left cameras and other equipment behind so that they can continue to hone their skills, document their work, and be empowered by technology.

What we learned

• There is an urgent and critical window of opportunity right now in the aftermath of the unprecedented disaster in Haiti to support the women who are disproportionately affected and lacking access to official channels of aid and reconstruction decision-making. Now is the time to create important precedent for women and disaster risk/response/empowerment in Haiti that can have broad implications for countries around the world susceptible to natural disasters.
• Over the course of close to a dozen meetings with many of the major players at the UN, NGOs, and among community groups working on gender based violence and with Haitian women – we received consistent validation and support for our work and the important value it can add to efforts on the ground to support women and to address growing violence targeting them.
• Mobile access is higher in Haiti than most other places in the world – even in camps – and almost equal access for men and women.
• One of the greatest satisfactions of the trip was learning that some of the women’s organizations we worked with had been paying for photographers to document their work, in part to seek funding and visibility. Now they can do this themselves.
• The women’s organizations have little recognition outside of their communities. Organizations have no websites and hard to find.
• There is a role to be played by agile, small NGOs and other “disruptive” forces – like Digital Democracy – to build bridges between various UN agencies and their respective “mandates”, community based groups, and international NGOs.
• The UN and all international actors must do a better job of finding ways to work with the local community in partnership. Haitian community groups are strong and effective, but lack resources and more importantly, access to the meetings where their voices and perspective must be heard.  For example, during one meeting we attended, one Haitian community organizer came to participate but was only able to gain entry to the meeting during the second half after being stopped at the gate to the base and needing someone from the meeting to retrieve him to be able to enter and contribute his perspective. No other representatives from local community groups were present at that meeting.

We remain grateful to everyone who helped us to make this trip possible and for the contributions that enabled us to bring digital cameras to leave with the women leaders we worked with last weekend.  Their photos are incredible – the next post will share more in detail.

What you can do
Our pilot media workshop made clear the need for trainings that support women’s organizations – by contributing to our work, you can help us return to Haiti to further support these women.

Please help us to support Haitian women’s protection and security by viewing a short film produced by our partners at the New Media Advocacy Project, the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and Partners in Health on sexual violence in the camps following the January earthquake.