The Humanitarian Aid Blockchain Summit, a mix of breakout sessions and presentations that was sponsored by Fordham’s International Institute of Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA), took place at the Lincoln Center campus on Dec. 7.

In an opening address, Giulio Coppi, IIHA humanitarian innovation fellow and digital specialist for the Norwegian Refugee Council, said organizers had learned from the first conference, which was held last November, that Blockchain is a particularly expansive topic, given its newness. Therefore, organizers were determined this year to stay focused on specific, concrete efforts under development.

Thinking Practically on a Large Scale

“For the tech people, listen to what aid actors have to say, because these problems are not something that can be tackled in a pilot or in a small-scale project. We’re talking about enormously complex situations and challenges,” he said.

“At at the same time, try to take this as an opportunity for you to design in a different way, to design for hardship, and not for normal urban life; to design to go global, not to get stuck at the first obstacle once you go to scale.”

He also implored aid workers not to shy away from asking hard questions about the functionality of systems being presented to them.

“The same technology can be used in a ton of different ways. Talk about the technology and how it can be applied in different ways and different situations,” he said.

Sending Aid Dollars Securely

Because Blockchain is an open system that cannot be altered without alerting everyone involved to the changes, one of the most promising areas where it is being applied is the distribution of funds. If money can be securely sent from a donor directly to a person in distress, the logic goes, the possibility of those funds being siphoned away by corrupt middlemen is lessened.

The day’s third plenary session addressed this idea in a conversation between moderator Laura Walker McDonald, director of innovation at the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation; Aradhana Gurung, lead manager of World Vision International’s Nepal Innovation Lab; and Gustav Stromfelt, new venture consultant and project manager at World Food Programme.

Gurung talked about SIKKA, a blockchain-based digital assets transfer platform designed for financial inclusion that her group has been using to help residents affected by the 7.8 earthquake that hit Nepal in 2015. Stromfelt discussed Building Blocks, a similar system that his organization has started using for digital identity and cash transfers in Pakistan and Jordan.

Proof is in the Small Success Stories

Among the details they discussed was how to convince donors to accept Blockchain data for the purposes of auditing their relief efforts. Stromfelt said small successes have begun to assuage concerns donors may have had. Their first test was with just 100 beneficiaries in Pakistan, and that success enabled them to try a larger pilot in a refugee camp Jordan. A “triangulation database” allows administrators to securely track data from all the entities involved, such as banks and supermarkets.

“The reporting that we’re pushing back up to our donors in Jordan is bar none some of the best. I think right now it’s the best you could possibly get, to the point where we’re accessing funds that we would not have accessed previously from very, very large donors,” he said.

Designing with the Culture in Mind

Design was a large part of the discussion as well. Gurung noted that SIKKA was designed to work via text messages, and there are no plans to design anything more complex, such as a smart phone app. In Nepal, flip phones outnumber smartphones, and text messages are a widely understood and accepted form of communication.

“There’s so much we can do in terms of what the technology can do, but then we always have to remember what is our core mandate to the country that we’re in,” she said.

The complexity of Blockchain may be the biggest impediment to getting large organizations to accept systems like SIKKA, she said.

“Messaging is so complicated. We use so many terms that sometimes even I get lost and have to go back to my team and be like, what does that mean again, what does that token do?” she said.

 Kamea Aloha Jr., aka CrytoCoinKid, exemplifies how one can best explain it, she said. Aloha Jr., an eight-year-old Youtube vlogger from Hawaii who covers subjects such as cryptocurrency and coding, makes complex subjects easy to understand.

“If you can explain what you’re trying to do to a 6-year-old kid, you’re on the right path.”

‘Society 5.0’

In a closing speech, Ambassador Toshiya Hoshino, Ph.D., Permanent Mission of Japan to the United Nations, said he was optimistic that attendees will help the UN achieve its sustainable development goals, which were adopted in 2015. He said there is a widespread acknowledgment that today’s problems can’t just be solved by governments alone.

“The United Nations is different from the United Nations 10 years ago. This is a place where all are invited to discuss issues with business representatives, academics, scientists, innovators, and to use our ideas and strengths to make a better world possible,” he said.

Humanity has entered “Society 5.0,” having passed through the first four variations of hunter, agrarian, industrial, and information society, he said. Science and technology, including Blockchain, will be the centerpiece of the next phase.

“There are issues of scalability, including the enormous amount of energy it consumes, and longer response times for verification when more users incur transactions,” he said. “But Blockchain has great potential for its resilience, high security, and immutability.”

Q: This is not your first go-around with the IIHA, correct?

A: I taught in the Institute during its first couple of years. I knew Dr. Cahill, because I had been in international work my entire career. From time to time I had visited him for my own illnesses, which were usually parasitic in nature.

Q: What have you been doing recently?

I’ve been working as an independent consultant since 2009. Prior to that, I worked for organizations such as CARE International, the International Rescue Committee, Academy for Educational Development, the United States Agency for International Development, the UN World Food Program, UNICEF, and the UN Development Programme, UNDP among others. I’ve done a lot of work looking at gender-based violence. Most of the countries that I’ve worked in have been either in conflict or post-conflict.

Q: What will you be doing for IIHA?

{I’ll be} participating in the development, management, and implementation of the Institute’s academic and training programs, along with responsibilities for teaching and coordinating the academic aspects of the Institute’s undergraduate and graduate curricula at Fordham. I’m making sure that our courses are meeting the students’ needs in this area, and also that there’s a compatibility with other programs. For our new graduate program, which we’ll be launching in the fall, I’m ensuring that we have course descriptions and professors identified to teach the courses. I’m also teaching humanitarian affairs, which is a prerequisite for some of the more advanced courses. I love to see the excitement and enthusiasm among students; they’re hungry for information.

Q: Tell us about your hands-on experience.

A:  I lived for a year and a half in a refugee camp in Western Tanzania. People were fleeing genocide in Rwanda resulting in a massive movement of people into Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was a director of a HIV AIDS and reproductive health program that was funded by USAID. I lived in the camps, supervised, hired, and trained outreach educators who moved through the camps to train and educate refugees about HIV AIDS prevention. The camps kept expanding and expanding, until there were nearly 500,000 people. I originally agreed to stay for six months, but ended up remaining for a year and a half. It was quite challenging.

Q: What is the most pressing problem facing the humanitarian assistance community?

A: I’d have to say lack of sufficient funds to do what we need to do. It has also become increasingly insecure for people working in this field. I have a number of friends who have been killed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Then there is a growing number of refugees who are internally displaced within their own borders. Their situations were initially meant to be temporary, but for some of them, the displacements have lasted for many, many years. That was certainly the case with the Afghan refugees who were settled in Pakistan. Multiple generations grew up as refugees. There’s a frustration and hopelessness among the young people in these camps.

Q: What draws you to this work?

A: I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. It seems natural to want to make a tiny bit of difference. I’m not going to change the world, but if I can make the lives of other people just a little better, that’s inspiring.

What happens when a global health crisis leaves the Western media spotlight?

As he watched a patient he’d grown close to die at one of Mother Teresa’s homes for the terminally ill in Kolkata, Joseph Woodring, DO, FCRH ’98, felt overwhelmed by his inability to help the man—and he had an epiphany. “I’d been holding his hand, watching his chest rise and fall,” said Woodring, who first visited India in 1995 as an undergraduate in Fordham’s Global Outreach program. On that trip, he learned to connect with suffering and honor the human dignity of sick and impoverished people. But now, a few years out of college, he wanted to examine the bigger picture. “If I don’t get upstream and learn what these guys have,” he thought, “I’m not fixing anything. I want to be able to actually treat people.” 

Last year, during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, Woodring deployed to Liberia as an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His job was to trace the spread of the virus and work with local people to arrest the contagion. By showing respect for the dignity and self-determination of people in the villages, he said, he was able to convince communities to adopt practices that stopped the spread of Ebola.

That kind of community-minded approach is still needed to fuel social and economic recovery in the Ebola zone and prepare for the next disaster, said Ellie Frazier, GSAS ’15. A recent graduate of Fordham’s master’s degree program in international political economy and development, Frazier was in Sierra Leone in June 2014, studying the role paralegals play in knitting the nation back together after its civil war, when Ebola emerged as a major problem.

Now back in New York, Frazier, an adjunct instructor at Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs, stresses that recovering from the outbreak will require sustained international attention and sincere collaboration with affected communities. Emergency Ebola treatment centers are being turned into permanent clinics. That’s good, Frazier said, but villages will also have to reintegrate stigmatized Ebola survivors, negotiate what to do with the land of families wiped out by Ebola, find a way to care for and pay school fees for orphaned children, and address other consequences not yet identified.

“The immediate emergency seems to have subsided, but now what? The tendency with media and some humanitarians is OK, done. But for there to be full-on economic recovery, it is going to take a lot of time,” she said, and “it needs to be bottom up.”

More than 11,000 people died. For eight months, the response was left to just two international charities: Doctors Without Borders and Samaritan’s Purse. While they did heroic frontline medical work, they and later arrivals were ill-equipped to halt the spread of the disease. They had a hard time convincing people to stop kissing or shaking hands, and to suspend traditional burial practices that involve washing and caressing the body—expressions of deeply held spiritual beliefs but also certain methods for communicating the disease.

Medical response teams full of foreigners wrapped in bright yellow plastic suits with shields over their faces arrived on trucks in remote villages to remove the bodies of the dead. They were met with resistance and fear. People hid their sick relatives and buried the dead secretly, allowing the disease to blossom. 

When he arrived in Liberia in October, Woodring realized a different approach would be necessary. He focused on communicating with people who could effect change. “It’s the village elders that made the impact,” he said, by enforcing quarantines and maintaining the 21-day observation of anyone directly exposed to the disease. “The village elders were at the apex of those societies, and [people]were roaring in and stripping them of their traditional role. We had to go to the elders and work with them. You’d inform traditional healers and give them due deference and tell them, look, this practice is very dangerous.” 

Collaborating with local social systems is key, experts say, both for effective containment of diseases and to lay the groundwork for recovery. Thousands of foreign nurses, doctors, and aid workers, among them several Fordham alumni and staff, aided their West African counterparts during the Ebola outbreak. A year later, the disease is nearly abated, and Western media, which fueled hysteria and panic in the United States during the outbreak, has shifted to other crises. But the affected countries are still struggling to recover, and humanitarian experts are studying the Ebola outbreak to learn how the world can respond sooner and better—and even prevent the next disaster.

The solutions are straightforward but terribly difficult to achieve, according to Alexander van Tulleken, MD, senior fellow at Fordham’s Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs. “The next pandemic is prevented by building a world where people are given the opportunity to get educated and thrive,” he said. It might sound trite, but he’s serious. A strong healthcare system, access to education, and a stable civil society are what ultimately protect against disease. 

The reason Ebola was so deadly and persistent in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, while cases elsewhere were more quickly contained, has everything to do with the destabilizing effects of war and extreme poverty. “Diseases are opportunists,” Van Tulleken said. “They only thrive in certain climates. Like criminals and terrorists, they look for places where rule of law is broken down.” 

With national infrastructure—not just roads but electrical systems, healthcare, communication, and trust in government—broken apart by years of armed conflict and underinvestment, fighting Ebola was especially difficult, said Melissa Labonte, PhD, an associate professor of political science at Fordham, who has studied the region extensively. She said doctors focused on a medical and technical response, but social wounds allowed Ebola to fester, so a social response was also needed to beat it back. 

“You can’t go in and just do things. The imperative is to respond, I know, but you have to know what you are doing before you start acting,” Labonte said. “Local knowledge matters. It was undervalued. Once we started to listen to it and value it, things changed for the better.”

Because the virus is strongest at and even after death, people who care for the sick and prepare the deceased for burial are at highest risk for contracting the disease. One sick person could infect dozens of others, as Woodring learned when he traced the root of 65 cases in one rural county to a man who had cared for his Ebola-stricken brother in Monrovia. That man returned home, got sick, and went to a bare-bones clinic. A grandmother from another village cared for him, wiping up vomit and comforting the man as he died overnight. The grandmother returned home and grew ill. Because she was a central and beloved figure in her community, dozens of people attended her funeral, caressing her body, kissing her—and contracting Ebola. Forty-seven of the infected people died, a 72 percent fatality rate.

“Honestly, all our efforts were for naught if we couldn’t control the burial system,” Woodring said. “Even though there is a huge science to Ebola, if you didn’t get people’s respect from the beginning—by offering it—you were just another white guy coming in telling them what to do.” He hopes national governments can harness the training and funding that followed the Ebola crisis to build sustained healthcare systems in the affected countries.

It’s an approach Elin Gursky, GSAS ’13, considers essential. In April, when United Nations Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon named a high-level panel to study the global response to health crises and present a report by the end of the year, Gursky was appointed to the resource group of experts supporting the panel. Broad and deep international cooperation and political will to invest more money in strong public health systems are what’s needed to prevent and counter future disease outbreaks, she said. 

“You can bring in experts and surge capacities, but it needs to support, not supplant, local systems,” Gursky said. “It needs to start at the community level.” 

When Laura Sida, a pediatric cancer nurse and a graduate student in Fordham’s master’s degree program in humanitarian affairs, arrived in Sierra Leone last spring, she thought she’d be part of a treatment clinic. But the work quickly shifted to disaster recovery. After six months spent helping ministry of health workers improve clinic management and supervising psychological and social support teams for Ebola survivors, Sida said recovering after the disaster is just as crucial for long-term health as responding to the crisis itself. She’s found her master’s thesis topic: the challenges of rebuilding after a disaster.

A particular difficulty in the aftermath of Ebola is that the disease attacks precisely the people who might be relied on to lead a social recovery, she said. “It kills the caretakers, the people who are the most caring and compassionate. So who is left? Ebola clears the household.”  

How the countries build back, from the most immediate relationships in villages to the strength of national health systems—and what the international community learns from Ebola—will determine how the next global health crisis plays out. The world isn’t getting any less connected, as the few Ebola cases that emerged in the United States show, and there will inevitably be a next time, Van Tulleken said. “We need to understand that my life and the life of the poorest person in Africa are intimately linked.”

—Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, is the author of a biography of Maura Clarke, one of the U.S. nuns killed in El Salvador in 1980, to be published next year by Nation Books.

The team of faculty from Fordham, Fairfield University, and Georgetown University published the results of a three-year study, “Collaborative Learning and Innovative Assessment in Humanitarian Studies,” in the journal International Studies Perspectives, and shared the assessment resources with the 28 members of the Jesuit Universities Humanitarian Action Network.

Melissa Labonte, PhD, associate professor of political science at Fordham, said the goal of the study, which was funded by the Teagle Foundation, was to measure the effectiveness of current teaching and to provide guidance for those launching new programs, such as Fordham’s major in humanitarian studies.

“We wanted to improve assessment and understand whether what we think we’re teaching students is reaching them in the ways that we anticipate,” she said.

“At the same time, we want to enhance a networking approach to student learning through a common set of learning objectives.”

One of the assessment tools that the team found encouraging was the vignette, which Labonte said taps into affective learning, centered on feelings.

“It’s not just about learning the ABCs and the 123s of humanitarianism. It’s about attitudinal and affective learning as well. What are your attitudes, and how do they change over time about a particular aspect of humanitarianism?” she said.

This is key, she said, as humanitarian studies is a complex enterprise involving vulnerable populations, and students have to be comfortable “getting into the weeds” of ambiguity and tragedy while also mastering particular skillsets.

“You can’t just go into a humanitarian crisis with a bunch of tents and food and medicine and say you’ve saved people. It’s not enough,” she said.

“You have to start to understand and develop useful affective tools and skills as a student as much as you have to develop your cognitive skills to really become someone who’s a learned and effective practitioner in the field of humanitarianism.”

One vignette that Labonte shared in her own class on conflict analysis and resolution was the story of how humanitarian aid workers in West Africa exploited beneficiaries of aid. Labonte said it’s important to understand that aid supplies help people in conflicts, but they can also be used in ways that hurt people, too.

For the study, the team conducted a content analysis of students’ answers to questions about the story. In her own class, she found that although most of the victims in the vignette were women and children, and she had assigned a number of gender readings to students, they didn’t quite understand the gendered dimensions of the story.

“When we looked at the ways to counter the kinds of things that can go wrong in a humanitarian crisis—like sexual exploitation and gender-based violence—I thought it would be a straight arrow, point A to point B, and students would have a good handle on this,” she said.

But she said she was surprised that students did not always pick up on the nuances of the gendered dimensions of humanitarianism.

The field of humanitarian work is growing by 6 percent annually, thanks to the increasingly professional nature of the work and greater global attention to those in need. Labonte said there has been a trickle-down effect, as donors increase their demands for better-equipped aid workers.

The expertise and experience of the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs (IIHA) makes Fordham a valuable resource for the field as a whole, she said.

“Fordham is actually riding the crest of what is a much bigger wave,” she said.

“We’re one of the first institutions in the United States to pay attention to this in a way that I think reflects well on our mission and responds to what are real needs facing the humanitarian profession.”

The aim of this radical policy change, the president said, is to “cut loose the shackles of the past” and “unleash the potential of 11 million Cubans.”

Next week, Fordham University will host a panel discussion exploring the impact that the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations will have on the empowerment of Cubans and on our humanitarian assistance to the island.

“Empowerment, Humanitarian Aid, and the Normalization of U.S.-Cuba Relations”
Thursday, Feb. 26
12:30 to 2:30 p.m.
Bateman Room | Fordham Law School | 2nd Floor
150 West 62nd Street, NYC

The panel will feature renowned Cuba scholars and humanitarian aid activists:

• Margaret Crahan, Ph.D., director of the Cuba Program at the Institute for Latin American Studies at Columbia University
• Sujatha Fernandes, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology at Queens College, CUNY and author of Cuba Represent!: Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (Duke University Press Books, 2006)
• Alberto R. Tornés, director of economic empowerment at Raíces de Esperanza

The panel, which is sponsored by Fordham’s Latin American and Latino Studies Institute, is a precursor to an undergraduate study tour of Havana that will be led over the spring break by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Ph.D., professor of Spanish and comparative literature.

The course, Contemporary Cuban Culture, will explore the renewed importance of Havana as a vibrant contemporary cultural scene. Students will be exposed to the music, art, dance, literature, and film that have emerged amidst Cuba’s economic transition to a globalized world market.

“It’s very hard to catch this virus,” he says of Ebola, of which there is no cure, and causes hemorrhagic fever that kills at least 60 percent of the people it infects in Africa. Ebola spreads through close contact with bodily fluids and blood, meaning it is not spread as easily as airborne influenza or the common cold.

In this interview with New York’s Fox 5, he discussed the Ebola vaccine currently in trials, and also explained that the virus has been in the country for some time with the Center for Disease Control’s research. Watch here:

In this segment with MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, van Tulleken says that rather than worrying about a vaccine, “what we need to be doing is containing this epidemic in West Africa.” He also says prevention is always underfunded. “What we’re seeing is a failure of the international system to respond to this virus, and this is a virus we should care about for humanitarian reasons. These countries are really neglected, and that’s why it’s spreading.”

Image via NBC News

Watch both MSNBC segments below, and visit our YouTube page for more media appearances by van Tulleken and other Fordham faculty.

-Gina Vergel

Gerald Martone, speaking to students in Fordham’s International Diploma in Humanitarian Assistance program, said that past mistakes are being repeated.

“You would expect—with Haiti being so close to a large western country that has an abundance of finances—that the aid effort would be pretty good,” he said. “But for state-of-the-art disaster relief, it’s not something to be proud of.”

Martone, the director of humanitarian affairs at the International Rescue Committee (IRC), detailed the findings of a recent evaluation of the relief efforts. They include:

• a lack of senior leadership in the disaster area within the first 24 hours;
• poor consultation with the local population;
• inefficient logistical operations;
• marginalization of local authorities; and
• poor disaster preparedness.

On the last point, Martone noted that Haiti was widely understood to be disaster-prone even before a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed roughly 230,000 people on Jan. 12.

As the country recovers, a busy hurricane season is threatening to inflict more misery. Martone noted that four hurricanes battered the country over a 30-day span in 1998, wiping out 60 percent of its agriculture.

“Every two or three years, Haiti suffers a major catastrophe. We know this. Why aren’t there greater efforts at preparedness?” he asked.

He suggested that more attention should be paid to places such as Katmandu in Nepal, which—like Haiti’s Port-au-Prince—is near a major fault line. He also suggested that the 200,000 aid workers around the world might benefit from a central authority that could impart lessons learned from past aid operations.

Another aspect of the Haitian relief effort that Martone criticized was the distribution of aid from the backs of trucks, a practice known as “truck and chuck.” This happened mostly after the arrival of roughly 10,000 United States military personnel.

“This is a terrible practice,” he said. “The ones with the biggest elbows are going to get the most food. So the people we most want to target—vulnerable people like women and children—are not going to get the supplies. Strong young men are.”

One consequence of not working closely with local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has been delays caused by accreditation requirements.

For example, the IRC brought 18 new Toyota Hilux pickup trucks to Haiti, but has been unable to use the vehicles because it cannot secure license plates. Instead, the group is spending $60,000 monthly to rent poorly maintained cars in Port-au-Prince.

One of the unforeseeable effects, he said, is that while 1.3 million people were displaced directly after the earthquake, three months later, that number had increased to 2 million. The lure of free food, water and shelter has proven too great a lure for Haitians living outside the hardest-hit areas.

“People are moving out of the slums, abandoning their standing structures, pitching a tent in a refugee camp and getting a ration card,” he said. “This is one of the consequences of us coming in with a refugee-camp model. We should be putting water pumps in those communities instead of camps.

The best approach for aid workers, Martone said, was to think of themselves as midwives working with the local population.

“You just need to promote a process that happens naturally,” he said.

The symposium opened with an examination of religious philosophies on humanitarian aid from Catholic, Jewish and Islamic perspectives. The three speakers Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Rabbi Harlan J. Wechsler and Mustapha Tlili, Ph.D., who delivered a paper by H.R.H. Prince Hassan Bin Talal of Jordan agreed that while religion is sometimes used as a motivation for hate, the three faiths express the common themes of human dignity, respect for diversity and doctrines of peace. These themes are often lost as evidenced by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. The Rev. Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J., University president, who spoke about the role of academia, said universities must be a forum for diverse thought and shared culture, as education is key in defeating hate. It is this “cultural rage” that surfaced with the attacks on the World Trade Center that poses a greater threat to the United States than the Cold War, said NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw, who offered insight into the media’s role in this struggle. With the advent of the Internet and the plethora of cable news programs, the media can help build bridges between cultures, Brokaw said.

“The Internet is so vast in its reach that we have yet to full appreciate it,” he said. “There is wealth of information that can help advance understanding.” However, the war on terrorism is already threatening the freedoms that Americans enjoy and the liberty that so many immigrants pursue in the United States, said John Feerick, the Manning Professor at Fordham’s School of Law, who discussed civil liberties and personal freedoms post Sept. 11. As evidence, he pointed to the use of closed immigration hearings, the unfettered detention of immigrants and the suggestion of military tribunals. It has also made life more difficult for many immigrants and people seeking asylum in this country, said Kathleen Newland, the director of the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.,who noted that of the 70,000 immigrants seeking entrance through the Refugee Resettlement Program, only 27,000 were admitted. The shifting political tide has also created a greater market for human trafficking and gender exploitation, as many of the world’s poorest women and children are forced into lives of slavery after fleeing desperate conditions in their home countries.

One of the day’s final speakers, Peter Tarnoff, a director at the Center for International Health and Cooperation (CIHC), urged the audience to stay well informed about the government’s action, to bring a diversity of ideas and action to Capital Hill and to make elected officials accountable for their actions. The event received support from the CICH and The William Donner Foundation. The proceedings of the event will be published in 2003 as the third volume in a series being printed by Fordham University Press. The first book in the series, “Basics of Humanitarian Action,” will be released in December.