NGO Networks In Haiti Cause Problems For ISPs 108
angry tapir sends in an article from GoodGear Guide that begins: "While the communications networks that aid groups set up quickly following the earthquake in Haiti were surely critical to rescue efforts, the new networks have had some negative effects on the local ISP community. More than a month after the earthquake devastated the island nation, local ISPs are starting to grumble about being left out of business opportunities and about how some of the temporary equipment — using spectrum without proper authorization — is interfering with their own expensive networks, causing a degradation of their services."
Re:Flawed system. (Score:5, Insightful)
There's some fundamental flaw in the system if giving people free stuff is bad for them...
It creates dependency. My wife hand feeds our seven year old son. Now when he wants something done he goes to her and takes up her time. Additionally he doesn't learn how to do things himself.
Dead Aid (Score:2, Insightful)
I read an interesting book on the subject, by an African woman with first hand experience with aid (Dambisa Moyo: Dead Aid - Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa). It explains with how sending aid to poor countries often causes more problems then it solves. If you give something for free, you ruin the part of economy that provided the same thing for money. Then when the aid stops, there are no local producers to replace it. The countries become dependent on aid.
Of course this does not apply to emergency situations like the one in Haiti, where there was no local producer to produce enough food, shelter, water... But if there are local ISPs capable of providing internet access, then the NGOs should definitely use them, and not compete with them by maintaining their own network. That would give work to the local people, which in turn helps a bit in re-establishing the Haitian economy.
Re:Flawed system. (Score:5, Insightful)
The aid groups are not 'donating internets' as a relief measure, they just need the networks to be up to run their operation.
The networks are temporary and it doesn't sound like the NGOs have a problem working with local ISPs so no big deal.
I guess the story is about greedy ISPs but hey, these guys have been through hell too and they have a right to want things to get back to normal.
Re:Flawed system. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the fundamental reason why we don't dump all of our uneaten food into starving countries. Doing so strongly devalues the local farmer's products and makes it difficult for them to buy seed and fertilizer for the next year.
It's extremely difficult to compete with free or very, very cheap. In the corporate world, if this is done it's called 'dumping'. In the world food aid world, it's only done if the demand for food far outstrips supplies and doing so would not impact food prices significantly.
Thus, why the west can live in food glut conditions while many africans are malnourished. Suddenly feeding them all for free would collapse the mainstay of their internal economy.
Tricky, isn't it?
Re:Dead Aid (Score:3, Insightful)
If this is a give a fish/teach to fish case wouldn't the best thing for the Haitian people be to instruct them how to connect without ISPs? That way they would be free from both NGO dependence and protected from profiteers.
Capitalism, Baby! (Score:1, Insightful)
There is never a disaster big enough to stop capitalist exploitation.
Re:Flawed system. (Score:5, Insightful)
What's greedy about it? A fundamental principle of international aid (and given that within the past six weeks I've been in the Solomon Islands, and on stand-by to go to Haiti, the Cook Islands and Tonga, to help with disaster relief I think I've got some clue on the topic) is that you try and spend aid money in the affected community. The people who live there and the businesses that operate there must remain viable once the relief effort is over, and that means keeping businesses alive until the locals are in a position to earn and spend money themselves.
Donating services is nice if the locals cannot immediately furnish your requirements, but as soon as there's local capability available for utilisation it is a failure of the aid system if that capability goes unused. It is not a good use of aid money to use donated services in place of local ones when carrying out relief work.
Now all Haiti needs is 100,000 Mexican workers. (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh... Sorry... That was Katrina/New Orleans.
-Todd
Re:No good deed..... (Score:4, Insightful)
like, for example, hire the local ISPs for connectivity. I'm sure they can use the business, and their employees families too.
Re:Haw (Score:1, Insightful)
Do we really need legs, in this day and age? Aren't there enough wheelchairs, especially in North America?
The earth-based repeater can be operated independently by the locals without reliance on the benevolence of/ability to pay money to/guarantee of friendly relations with the government of some offshore corporation. Similarly, the emergency mobile telephone infrastructure relies on the temporary benevolence of the Scandinavians, followed by global business as usual.
The popular Internet is under two decades old, the popular mobile phone network of similar age, yet people assume it will remain available and free (as in speech) to the end of time. This is daft. It is imperative that people retain the knowledge and the means to implement independent communications systems which do not require transnational corporation and government support and stability in order to continue existing.
Re:No good deed..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No good deed..... (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, it's why I only give to local charities I know and then work outwards. That might seem harsh, but I want to know that my money has actually gone somewhere and with stuff like this I don't know if it would. I saw hotels getting rebuilt pretty quickly and ordinary people being left with nothing when it came to the tsunami in Asia. I simply see charities as businesses who get tax-free and other breaks.
I also hate the dependencies that charities seem to create in third-world countries that don't help them and destroy any local industries. Cynically, I can see it as nothing other than a ploy for charities to hang around for years collecting money without any real solution to the problem - because if there was a solution they wouldn't exist!
as someone who actually has people down there... (Score:3, Insightful)
...we showed up with a pair of satellite dishes but all our network connections are wired. Additionally, we didn't feel we could or should rely on local ISPs for communications since we need those communications to be reliable and secure and sending a buncha people down there with no way to talk across the pond to home station didn't seem like the smartest move I've heard of.
So now the ISPs want the NGOs to shut off all the expensive hardware folks shipped down there and use local resources?
In the interest of full disclosure we do work for a GO, just not the one in Haiti.
Re:Flawed system. (Score:3, Insightful)
What's greedy about it?
What's greedy about it is that there's a massive international relief effort going on and rather than being part of it the local ISPs want to profit from it. Look at the wording in the article, they feel left out of "business opportunities."
A fundamental principle of international aid (and given that within the past six weeks I've been in the Solomon Islands, and on stand-by to go to Haiti, the Cook Islands and Tonga, to help with disaster relief I think I've got some clue on the topic) is that you try and spend aid money in the affected community.
I understand that you know a lot about this, but that doesn't make it correct in every situation. International aid is pretty inefficient in places like Africa, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan where spending locally means a big chunk of the money disappears to corruption, bribery, "security," etc. That's why there's a call from many for organizations to donate goods and services and not just cash.
Sometimes spending locally makes economic sense (to the NGO). For instance, getting a local translator is cheaper than flying in a translator, that's obvious. In this case, the cost of setting up the NGO network has already been incurred since the local ISPs were not functioning soon enough after the earthquake, so from an economic perspective it doesn't make much sense to now start paying local ISPs.
From an aid perspective, you're right of course, it helps Haitians if we donate money to their ISPs (that's what this is since there's no economic motivation for doing it) but you need to show why it makes more sense to donate to their ISPs and not, say, to a restaurant whose kitchen needs to be refurnished.
The ISPs apparently have fully functional networks again, they obviously don't need much help. They're just missing out on some profits that wouldn't be there anyway without the earthquake. It's not like their customers are canceling accounts and switching over to the free NGO network.
But the restaurant needs money to reopen and be part of the community again. Which one does the most good for the limited aid money?
Re:No good deed..... (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh god, no, never.The aid agencies will have their systems ready and tested, good to go. The local ISPs will not be tailored for their needs and plenty of man-hours would be lost in pointless busywork ironing out interoperability problems.
We did (and do) dump food. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is the fundamental reason why we don't dump all of our uneaten food into starving countries. Doing so strongly devalues the local farmer's products and makes it difficult for them to buy seed and fertilizer for the next year.
We do dump food.
In the 80's, Regan re-instituted all the price controls and tariffs on sugar. Poorer countries which relied on the US for sugar sales suddenly found a giant chunk of their exports gone, and farmers switched to growing different crops.
What did we do then? Provided "assistance" food to those countries- the same crops that farmers were growing.
I'm not sure that we still "provide" food "assistance", but I know the sugar tariff remains (which protects around a thousand corporate sugar cane growers), as do hundreds of other tariffs that protect very small farming interests and hurt worldwide access to our markets.
Guess how High Fructose Corn Syrup became the predominant sweetener, by the way? Yep, the price controls from the 80's made it a much cheaper alternative because the government wasn't artificially propping up the price. Our national diet, fucked for the sake of ~1000 sugarcane farmers.
Re:Flawed system. (Score:1, Insightful)
call shenanigans. Modern life without data access is extremely difficult. cellular network have the most penetration in the 3rd world. by jamming the cellular networks, the charities are screwing over the communications networks that people rely on.
contrary to popular belief, the developing world is not all starvation and huts