The anniversary seminar of the non-profit organisation Crisis Management Initiative (CMI) chaired by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ahtisaari took place yesterday at the Finnish National Theatre. M4ID and MA course students from Aalto University joined NGOs, business leaders, politicians and Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in discussing peace mediation and the work of CMI. The seminar was the first of many events taking place during the ‘Ahtisaari Days’, which are aimed at making Finnish mediation work more widely known, with a particular emphasis on the importance of education, information and communications.
We were very pleased to have had the chance to present two new conflict resolution/peace mediation concepts at the event. One concept, the ‘Peace Pack’, enables the collection/management/archiving of uniting stories (through social media/mobiles).. the other concept is designed to visualize the peace process and supporting activities, focusing on positive/agreed on issues. We’ll post packages of both here soon. Below are some rather fuzzy photos of the presentation!
We’re excited that our global immunization information concept has been short listed by the Innovation Working Group (IWG) under the UN Secretary General’s implementation of the Global Strategy for Women’s and Children’s Health. The social media and mobile driven advocacy concept is one of 50 great projects, of which 10-15 will be presented and discussed in Norway end of April. Hopefully our idea will be among these finalists.
M4ID has been supporting WHO South-East Asia in a regional campaign to raise public awareness and push governments to take concrete actions in making hospitals safe from disasters. In brief this means building them to withstand natural disasters, having emergency plans in place, training staff to respond and continue to provide services post-disaster. We built a reaction tester on Facebook and have some 60,000 supporters, in addition to high-profile champions like Jet Li. The public show of support has been used by WHO at various regional Ministerial meetings and in country to get decision-makers on board, and several countries have taken action as a result (Nepal, Indonesia, India, Bhutan). We also look to have a World Health Assembly resolution on this in May, which is very exciting.
The next phase is now focused on gaining greater awareness/support and also pushing hospitals to stand up and say what they have done to make their hospital safe from disasters.. we are hence building a Google maps component where hospitals can be recorded and can list their actions, as well as a game-oriented application on Facebook through which people are sensitized to the issue and can check out their hospital etc, the game will enable the supporter to compete against public personas known for their speed (the theme of the campaign continues to be ‘disasters strike in seconds, WHO needs you to react fast). We look to launch this next phase in late April.
We’ve finalized the design stage of our Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) project. The overall goal of the project is to improve maternal health care in humanitarian settings through changing the behaviour of health practitioners. To support that, we’re building a professional community of practice and tools provided that will help members prioritize and adopt key maternal health interventions at the field level.
Guided by WRC’s research, we’ve used mobile and Facebook as the key platforms. We’ve designed a range of applications to support the community, among others:
A ’share your practices’ survey application to capture and enable monitoring of skills/practices
A ‘lives saved counter’ to show the impact of the collective (as many work in isolation and do not feel their work is recognized) and to monitor clinical interventions used in the field
A multimedia ‘best practices and lessons learnt’ application to share and build the knowledge of the community
A mobile SMS ’stay in touch’ application, and
A rewarding system for activities undertaken by the community
Can’t wait for the launch and for the tools to be put use!
Tomorrow we start a new MA course over at Aalto University exploring new media concepts for conflict resolution. The course, called ‘Crisis Management and Interactive Dialogue Environments’, is a continuation of the successful collaboration between WHO, M4ID and Aalto, which resulted in 3 new social media prototypes for WHO’s Health Action in Crises. Read more about those here.
The 2011 study project partner is the Crisis Management Initiative (CMI), a non-profit organization headed by Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Martti Ahtisaari. CMI works to resolve conflict and to build sustainable peace internationally. The organization is now seeking to utilize more new media and social media tools in their work. The solutions resulting from the course will most likely be in the area of new media tools supporting multi-stakeholder dialogue in conflict environments, systems and processes utilizing audio-visual communications, data-visualization techniques or social media applications. Will post about progress, and you can also follow the course blog if interested in this area.
M4ID is thrilled to, together with our partner Family, be designing a new global maternal health focused campaign for the Women’s Refugee Commission. The aim of the campaign is to engage and support a community of experts working on maternal health issues in humanitarian settings. Building on extensive research, we’re developing a REEAN (reach, entice, engage, activate, nurture) communications strategy, the overall campaign creative and the social media/mobile tools to support the members. The development of the tools are especially exciting, as the brief allows us to really innovate and bring together different channels to best serve people working in very difficult, diverse environments. Here’s a picture of part of the team at work!
Jet Li has joined our WHO campaign for safe hospitals is disasters and has urged his 4.1 million Facebook followers to do the same. As an tsunami survivor and an ardent supporter of disaster preparedness, he is a very fitting spokesperson for this Asian-focused campaign. We are really grateful for his endorsement and look forward to continued cooperation.
We’re also excited about an innovative partnership with JamiiX and MxIT, which will bring the campaign message and emergency preparedness information, through the mobile, to 3.5 million Indonesians. This, a first for WHO, will be launched next week and seeks to showcase the effectiveness of new approaches in health outreach.
Ten days ago, WHO South East Asia launched their first social media outreach effort (designed by us!), aiming to engage people in the issue of hospitals safe in disasters. This new approach is part of their ongoing work to make South-East Asia more disaster prepared. The initiative is spearheaded by a Facebook reaction test application and a simple message: disasters destroy in seconds – WHO needs you to react fast. The app invites people to test how quickly they can respond and to challenge friends to beat their time. Each reaction counts towards building the wave of public support WHO now needs to push decision-makers (who committed to this issue last year) in to making hospitals safe. This is also a first step towards a longer term social media approach to emergency response communication.
More than 25,000 people responded in first days, medical bloggers and media covered the campaign and new partners, like SlideShare, have come on board. We’ll continue to help WHO reach out to new audiences and partners over the next months!
Hillary Clinton, joined by Cherie Blair, yesterday launched the new mWomen initiative, which aims to bridge the mobile phone gender gap identified in a recent GSMA study. The study found that in total, 300 million fewer women than men in developing countries owned a mobile. The initiative’s goal is to reduce this by 50% in the next three years. Several mobile networks in developing countries, including Vodaphone, Telefonica, Roshan, and Mobitel, have pledged significant support for mWomen. Concrete pledges include, among others, working to increase women’s access by developing apps designed for women, instating tariffs created especially for women as well as the development of a female-specific handset (!). mWomen will also create projects to educate men about the positive aspects of women owning a mobile phone. Check out the launch event video:
