Food, Water, Wifi: Is This The Future Of Humanitarian Aid?
Source: The Guardian, Jean-Martin Bauer
Photo: Marcelo Hernandez/Getty Images
Working in food aid delivery, I have seen the benefits of embracing new technologies. But some problems need to be solved between humans
The Pouncer was designed to be the world’s first edible drone. The drone would fly one-way into dangerous, conflict-affected communities, where starving civilians would take it apart, and then cook and eat its components. The snub-nosed, delta-shaped aircraft with a wingspan of nine feet was designed to deliver a payload of 50kg of food – enough to feed 100 people for a day. Each one would cost $300.
Designed in 2014, the Pouncer was the brainchild of Nigel Gifford, a British entrepreneur and adventurer who resolved to use drones to fly aid to dangerous places. In a 2017 interview with the Financial Times, Gifford explained that he was considering using honeycomb, a structurally robust material, to build the Pouncer. He mused that the landing gear could be made of salami, which has excellent tensile strength (but might not be part of the diets of some of those the drone was meant to feed). The Pouncer’s plywood frame could be used for kindling. “Our food technologist guys [are] thinking of wrapping the electronics in bouillon cubes,” he added.
I first heard about the Pouncer at a gathering of humanitarian innovation experts in Italy. A drone expert told us the Pouncer could be the solution to the challenge posed by the need for food deliveries to war-torn northern Syria. Immediately, hands shot up. We knew the area was bristling with air defences that had already made airdrops of food all but impossible, and that would be sure to fire at the drones. How would flight authorisations be obtained? How would civilians tell the difference between a military drone that could kill, of which there were many in the skies of Syria, and its edible humanitarian counterpart? There were no obvious answers to these important questions, and the Pouncer left us all decidedly sceptical.
As of 2023, the Pouncer hadn’t taken off. It seems destined for the graveyard of well-intentioned but unrealised humanitarian innovation projects. Gifford’s invention was, to say the least, controversial. In fact, many in the broader community were openly hostile to the Pouncer. Kevin Watkins, then chief executive officer for Save the Children UK, said in an interview: “This is someone who’s come up with a crackpot idea based on the assumption that technology can solve all problems.” Drones are “good at killing people and blowing things up. They are absolutely irrelevant for resolving acute hunger.”
While the potential of new technology in humanitarian settings is undeniable, its role in highly complex and fragile situations is never simple and is always fraught – not so much for the promoters of tech taking on financial risk, but for the people on the receiving end of the innovation, whose very lives may be put at risk.
Humanitarians work with some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. As technological innovation changes the lives of people around the world, those of us working with these communities need to ask ourselves how we can make use of new tech while upholding our foundational principle to “do no harm”. How are we to separate the wheat, the innovations that actually help, from the chaff? And how can we design technology with the communities we aim to serve rather than pushing ready-made Silicon Valley tech that’s wildly out of touch?
Technology is changing how the world is fed, and how the fight against global hunger is being waged. In 2016, the German economist Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, wrote of a “fourth Industrial Revolution” that was set to transform society. (The previous three involved steam power, electricity and computing.) According to Schwab, the fourth Industrial Revolution will involve advances in biology and computer hardware and software and combine them with connectivity to the internet. There will be breakthroughs in robotics (including drones), artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and many other fields. The fourth Industrial Revolution, which is transforming the manufacturing and service economies, is already changing the way food is produced, processed and sold, and the way humanitarian aid is provided.
Technology is reconfiguring food supply chains across the world. In the past two decades, mobile phone towers have popped up all over the world, connecting billions of people. When mobile phone towers were built in Niger, the market for millet was transformed – wholesalers had often played on information asymmetries to sell millet for a high price. With mobile phones, anyone could call a friend or relative and learn what millet prices were in the next town rather than taking a wholesaler’s word for it.
Voice and text were just the beginning. Now that internet access is widespread, e-commerce platforms are allowing family farmers and food processors everywhere to sell their produce directly to consumers, bypassing layers of middlemen. This is the case with a host of new online services that allow people to order food from farmers to be delivered to their doorstep: these include Farm to Home in Pakistan, Twiga Foods in Kenya and Waruwa in Latin America. Twiga serves 10,000 customers a day. Its Nigerian counterpart, FarmCrowdy, collects food from 25,000 individual farmers to sell in Lagos.
By making digital payments instantaneous, mobile money – a currency that’s managed by mobile phone operators, not traditional banks – has enabled the rise of agricultural e-commerce and access to financial services for billions of people without bank accounts. Mobile money is now in widespread use in east Africa, where opening a mobile money account is as straightforward as buying a sim card, and paying for a cab or a meal is as simple as sending a text message. The mobile industry estimated that in 2023 more than 1.6 billion people worldwide had access to mobile money services. Mobile money is often available where access to traditional financial services is limited, and its use is rising sharply in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia.
Mobile money is a first step. Many other digitally enabled payment systems are still emerging. Blockchains are open, decentralised digital ledgers that combine the reach of the internet and the power of cryptography. They could – in theory, at least – democratise banking and trade. Blockchain technology promises to bring transparency to opaque food supply chains, whose workings tend to be obscured by backroom deals.
Believe it or not, for a moment at the turn of the millennium, it seemed the world was winning the battle against hunger. Famines had been virtually eliminated. As technology advanced, and as government programmes reached more people than ever, deaths from starvation fell sharply in the second half of the 20th century. Trends were so encouraging that in 2015, the world’s governments publicly committed to eliminating hunger by 2030. But instead of being eradicated, hunger has surged because of escalating global food prices, even as conflict and climate breakdown continue to decimate livelihoods. Experts estimated that in 2023, more than 250 million people would be facing acute hunger – double the number in 2020.
What was long regarded as a problem facing only the poorest nations is now pressing in on the US, where 17 million households – one in every eight – are food insecure. During the early months of the pandemic, even generous government aid was not enough to stop hunger from rising among minority groups in the US – a fact that reminds us that, all over the world, hunger is the outcome of deep-rooted social inequality.
There is plenty of food in the world to feed everyone. And yet even in a country like the US, endowed with abundant food supplies, people don’t have enough food to eat. This paradox can be explained only by US society’s deep structural inequalities and the shortcomings of its systems of production and distribution. In other parts of the world, conflict and corruption are added to the mix. But if, as has been said, hunger is a political condition, then it is, like all political conditions, something we can change.
Political systems can exacerbate or drive hunger by disenfranchising a society’s most vulnerable groups. And when a food crisis strikes, the population at large also suffers. Nobel economist Amartya Sen argued that the most extreme food shortages have almost always been the result of rulers’ neglect and indifference to the plight of their people. “No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” he wrote in 1999.
The current crisis should motivate us to reassess our food production and distribution systems, as well as our social safety net. To staunch hunger’s worldwide resurgence, we need to think big, and think differently, about the causes of hunger and famine and how to combat them more effectively. Those of us working in the humanitarian space can improve aid delivery by, for example, embracing emerging technologies – digital payments, robotics, advanced analytics and artificial intelligence – and other developments that promise to produce more food with less waste and enable food deliveries in high-risk settings. Technology, as we know, is a double-edged sword, and our use of these systems will require care, but their potential is undeniable.
As the fourth Industrial Revolution takes root in the world’s most hunger-prone and vulnerable communities, a generation is finding increasing benefits from life online. Many of the refugees or displaced people I have met use Facebook, WhatsApp and other apps to stay in touch with loved ones, make money, find the assistance they need and express their opinions. Savvy social media users, they also value the anonymity the internet offers. A Syrian refugee in Jordan’s sprawling Zaatari camp asked me with a wry smile: “Do you want my Facebook name, or my real name?” Access to wifi is such an essential service that humanitarian agencies now provide connectivity for affected populations. In fact, Syrian refugees arriving in Greece have been known to ask for the wifi hotspot before food or water.
These changes brought on by technology have meant that humanitarian agencies have had to adapt our operating models to keep up with the digital world. In the 2010s, the aid sector was facing what seemed to be insurmountable funding deficits, and donors pushed humanitarian organisations to unleash technology and innovate. Striving for efficiency in an era of tight budgets is common sense. But money alone is an insufficient metric when the goal is to protect and save lives. Before we jump headlong into the dream of a humanitarian techno-utopia, we must remember who it is we’re serving and what is at stake.
For all the enthusiasm of experts like Klaus Schwab, the means of bringing the fourth Industrial Revolution to the humanitarian frontline are anything but obvious. I saw this first-hand when the UN World Food Programme (WFP) tried to set up a digital payment system in central Africa, where refugees rely on humanitarian assistance to survive.
Bétou is a forlorn frontier town deep in the rainforest in the Republic of the Congo’s north, only 30 miles from the border of the troubled Central African Republic. The ramshackle settlement sprang up around an Italian-owned lumber mill on the Ubangi River; timber is sent down the river to Brazzaville by barge. The town’s main drag, a wide, dark, muddy track, leads straight to the mill. The population around Bétou is so sparse that people from all over west Africa come to work at the facility. On the riverfront, a few Mauritanian Arabs sell food out of shabby storefronts. A decrepit Catholic mission, its concrete walls stained dark green by the humidity, stands next to the river.
When I first visited Bétou, a few thousand refugees had been living in a camp that had been around for years. Many of them were Muslims who had fled from violence in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, in 2013, and had built shacks on an undeveloped patch of land. Since refugees were not allowed to acquire land where they could grow their own crops, the refugees relied on food from WFP. I recall that one in 10 refugee children were acutely malnourished, a rate that never seemed to drop. And it seemed that every time UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, planned to help the refugees go back home, another round of fighting would break out in Bangui, postponing yet again their longed-for return.
For more than three years, WFP had been providing the refugee community with food rations, but we had recently started mobile money transfers instead. We moved from providing bags of food to giving “digital food” – in the form of a mobile money transfer people could use to buy food. WFP’s introduction of cash transfers in this remote area was part of a global trend in the humanitarian community to provide more assistance through cash or vouchers. The hope was that people would have more choice in the items they buy with cash, and that local economies would benefit from the cash injection. Humanitarian cash transfers were virtually nonexistent in the early 2000s, but reached $5.6bn in 2019.
Bétou was one of many places going through a transition in assistance, from food to cash. The refugees were given a mobile phone chip. Once a month, they would receive a mobile money payment equivalent to $20 per person, which they could use to buy food at the Mauritanian shops in town. The digital payment system also brought a level of transparency that helped keep our donors on board, because it allowed them to see the money going directly to food purchases.
So what did the refugees think of the new system? One day, four leaders of the community came to the WFP meeting room to talk to my colleagues and me. The men, clean-shaven and in their best clothes, entered rather shyly and sat down. We exchanged prolonged greetings. When it was time to talk about substantive matters, they looked uneasy, shifting in their chairs, their eyes cast down. Abdou, a slim man of perhaps 40 in a threadbare yellow shirt, took the bull by the horns and explained what was on their minds.
“For years, you gave us bags of rice,” he began. “But a few months ago you began giving us mobile money to pay for our food.” There was an awkward pause. Abdou inhaled, and then continued: “Do you think we could go back to the old system, where we used to get the rice?”
This is what a humanitarian never wants to hear – that a new, creative programme isn’t working. I knew there had been issues with the first mobile money distributions, but I wasn’t expecting outright rejection from the people who were receiving them. After all, we had been cautious and had only introduced the technology after months of debate, studies and consultations.
Abdou explained that for his community, mobile money payments had been a headache. The chips we had provided were too easily blocked; after three failed attempts to enter a pin, the chip needed to be reset, leaving its owner unable to buy food. Sometimes chips were lost, or there were errors in the amount of credit transferred. When these inevitable problems arose, they took too long to resolve with the mobile phone company. To make matters worse, there had recently been a prolonged network outage, rendering all mobile money transactions temporarily impossible. “Could we not go back to the old way of doing things?” he repeated.
Abdou and the others had a point. But the old way of bringing food aid to their isolated community also had problems, and could be extraordinarily slow. First, food grown in the US midwest was barged down the Mississippi to a port on the Gulf. From there, a vessel loaded it up to cross the Atlantic, delivering the containers to Pointe Noire, Congo’s deepwater port. After clearing customs, the food was hoisted on to trucks for a 300-mile road journey to Brazzaville. At Brazzaville, the containers were lifted on to river barges, which a diesel-powered pusher boat slowly nudged up the Congo and Ubangi Rivers until they reached the camp in Bétou a week or two later. All going well, the entire process took at least five months. If we missed the high-water season on the Ubangi, we’d have to wait until the river rose again.
Of course, the food was a lifeline for the refugees, but the process was complex and time-consuming. And it wasn’t just in Congo: all over the world, food aid programmes have traditionally relied on transcontinental shipments of bulk commodities. This is because purchasing food in a donor country is good politics: it helps support farmers, a powerful voting bloc.
With mobile money, we could load cash on to the refugees’ phones within days of it arriving in our own account. We could instruct the mobile money operator to “push” credit to their numbers; as soon as the credit hit their phones, refugees could pick out and buy the foods they needed from local retailers. But something had gone wrong, and now we risked losing the trust of the community.
The person managing the mobile money transfers for WFP was a man named Nasser, an aid worker from Niger in west Africa. In Congo, people like Nasser were a group set apart because of their Muslim religion and their willingness to work as traders and farmers – occupations that the local elite considered low status. This prejudice didn’t rattle Nasser, who’d seen it all before. He had studied in Tunisia, where some local Arabs treated Black African students like him as curiosities. He had spent years working with Oxfam and Catholic Relief Services in Africa’s toughest humanitarian crises, including Mali, Niger and Central African Republic. He joined WFP soon after my discussion with the leaders of the Central African community in Bétou about the mobile money project. He was the person who could get the project back on track.
Fuelled by gallons of lukewarm drip coffee, Nasser spent many days and sleepless nights at work, figuring out how the tech could work better for the refugees. He’d be on the phone for hours with our partners to check that every detail was in order before the mobile money was credited to accounts. He routinely called me on weekends or late at night to ask me to approve payments, so that people would not wait a minute more than necessary for their food. Nasser was known to write furious emails upbraiding his colleagues for not working fast enough and holding up the distributions: you’re sitting in the comfort of your air-conditioned office while the beneficiaries are waiting in the sun. Nasser could be pushy, but always for the right reasons.
We made important modifications to our system: if people had technical issues with sim cards, they could call a hotline. WFP required the mobile company to deploy a team to Bétou so the host of problems that occurred on distribution days could be resolved on the spot. And the refugees themselves became more familiar with the technology. Though it took more time and effort than we had anticipated, the mobile money transfers began to work, and the refugees from the CAR in Bétou changed their minds about the programme. We’d fallen prey to the comforting illusion that shiny new technology would solve everything. But technology does not work on its own; it needs attendants, people like Abdou, Nasser and all those who worked to get things right for the refugees in Bétou.
Mobile money transfers proved to be an effective solution to a humanitarian supply-chain issue. Still, there was a larger problem left unsolved: the community was still unable to feed itself without aid. Working with UNHCR, WFP advocated with authorities to allow the Central Africans to obtain the land they needed to farm. The Congolese had given the refugees protected status, but they still refused to let them acquire farmland.
Ultimately, an agreement was reached that allowed refugees to lease farmland from locals for three to five years – enough time to give them some security, and to plant food crops for themselves and sell the surplus. Soon enough, the Central Africans began growing cabbage and tomatoes, which they sold at Bétou’s riverside market. Technology had streamlined one aspect of food delivery, but the larger issue of access to land, and a sustainable future for the refugees, could only be resolved through negotiations between human beings.
This is an edited extract from The New Breadline: Hunger and Hope in the 21st Century, published by Profile Books on 1 August and available at guardianbookshop.com.