Harnessing Innovation to Protect the Vulnerable

The Information Gap

In 2009, in the midst of the global economic crisis, world leader called upon the Secretary-General to establish an effective mechanism to monitor the impact of the crisis on the poorest and most vulnerable. The relentless waves of compound global shocks  -- food, fuel, and financial -- had revealed a wide information gap between the onset of a global crisis and the availability of actionable information for decision-makers to protect the world’s poorest and most vulnerable populations. Traditional monitoring systems that had proven effective in tracking medium to longer-term development trends were of little use, as they were not designed to generate the type of real-time information needed to understand how populations were being impacted by the crisis and respond with agility.

This information gap presents a formidable a challenge to the global community.  Much of the data used to track progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), for example, dates back to 2008 or earlier – before the onset of the economic crisis. The price a country pays for not knowing how its population is coping with shocks is increasing as the resilience of families is eroded, causing millions of households to lose ground in their struggle to escape poverty and driving many of those who had made it back into destitution. Finding out today how a community began coping with a crisis two years ago may be too late to prevent irreversible damage. For many of the world’s vulnerable communities, global crises quickly become development crises: setbacks in areas like health and education have effects that may be felt for generations and threaten both to reverse gains towards achieving the MDGs and increase the disparity between those who have the resources to maintain their basic livelihoods and those who do not.  

An Opportunity 

Yet even as the impacts of crises have reverberated around the world, our lives have changed in other ways as well.   We live in a new information age, where the pace of technological innovation is accelerating at a breathtaking pace. Mobile phones are now playing a critical role in global development and crisis response. Collaboration tools allow distributed teams to design, develop and share innovative solutions to problems from anywhere in the world. Social networking technologies offer the promise of new and agile forms of collective action.   We have witnessed an explosion in the number of tools available to collect, filter, integrate, fuse, analyze, map and visualize information. These emerging technologies represent an extraordinary opportunity to close the information gap, to ensure that technology reaches the bottom of the pyramid, and to provide decision makers with new kinds of real-time information to protect the world’s poorest and most vulnerable during global crises.

UN Global Pulse

The Secretary-General has responded to calls from world leaders by launching the Global Pulse initiative. Global Pulse will take advantage of the opportunities presented by harnessing new sources of real-time information, innovative approaches, and emerging technologies to close the information gap.  It will bring together the analytical resources and expertise of the UN and its partners to provide high quality, actionable information for the global community. It will design and manage a sustainable open source technology platform to bring together tools, people and information for agile, evidence-based decision-making.  It will stand up a network of capacity-building Pulse Labs in developing countries to harness grassroots innovation and build sustainable resilience to crises from the ground up.

What will it do?

Global Pulse will help governments to develop policies and use their resources efficiently and effectively to protect their most vulnerable populations from shocks.   Global Pulse will generate timely and accurate information to understand the risks vulnerable populations face, how these populations are coping with the effects of a crisis, and how well their interventions are working.  Through a combination of expert analysis, technology innovation and local capacity building, Global Pulse will provide policy makers with:

• Historical information on the context and impacts of past crises on specific population groups and tools for retrospective analysis
  
• Real-time information on the early impacts of global crises on vulnerable populations and tools to select, refine and evaluate policy responses
• Predictive analysis of emerging vulnerabilities of specific population groups and tools to improve their resilience to future shocks

Key Outputs

Global:

• Generate evidence for advocacy on the plight of the vulnerable
• Inform the design of more robust financial safety nets
• Increase the efficacy of development assistance

Regional:

• Strengthen networks for cooperation and information sharing
• Enhance understanding of shared risks, common indicators and best practices

National:

• Allow leaders to respond rapidly with agile, targeted policy interventions
• Provide real-time, actionable information on how vulnerable populations are coping

Local:

• Improve information flow between government and vulnerable communities
• Build capacity to harness grassroots innovation for sustainable resilience

How will Global Pulse be different?

Over the past decade, the international community has put in place a plethora of sector-specific early warning and monitoring mechanisms, ranging from systems that track disease outbreaks and natural disasters to mechanisms that amplify the faint, early signals of poverty, drought, and famines. Global Pulse will add value to existing monitoring efforts by providing quick-time and real-time actionable information on how vulnerable populations are affected by global compound shocks. It will focus on cross-sectoral vulnerability analysis and early impact detection and will promote collaboration across disciplines, regions, and organizations. The system will improve the flow of information already available, build on networks that already exist, and integrate technologies already in use around the world.

How is Global Pulse funded?

Global Pulse is entirely funded through voluntary contributions from individual UN Member States and private philanthropic organizations. In particular, we would like to thank the UK and Swedish Governments for their financial support and the Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund for hosting Global Pulse events at their thought-inspiring conference venues in Bellagio (Italy) and Pocantico Hills (USA). Global Pulse has also benefited from many hours of expertise generously invested in the project by many of its UN system partners, and UNDP, WFP, UNICEF and the UN's Department for Public Information (DPI) have seconded full-time staff members to the Global Pulse team. Given that Global Pulse is a multi-year project, we will continue to raise voluntary funding from a broad range of stakeholders over the coming months and years. We would welcome any expression of interest from donors interested in supporting the Global Pulse initiative.

For information on Global Pulse, see our Roadmap.