NGO Networks In Haiti Cause Problems For ISPs

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."

Comments

No good deed.....

[Dthief]

goes un-complained about

Re:No good deed.....

[BlueTrin]

I hear you, however this era of 'altruism' may feel like we are patronizing the Haitians. It is true that giving food and temporary shelters is great and will save some lifes, but you cannot just rebuild a country by doing this.

But, in order to rebuild a country, you need more than just throwing food at refugees. This article is interesting as it brings Katrina experience to help Haiti. It seems the best results happen when the locals are involved. There are many reports of this in Thailand after the tsunami.

There is nothing wrong with helping but helping without asking the opinion of the locals and keeping out of the loop will never give good results, it will leave the impression that you treat them like children and infantilize them. Now that the local ISPs have voiced their opinion, we should listen to their proposals and try to formulate a plan.

Re:No good deed.....

[cHALiTO]

like, for example, hire the local ISPs for connectivity. I'm sure they can use the business, and their employees families too.

Re:No good deed.....

[demonlapin]

A really good deed that would have helped the country out would be for the NGO's to hire local ISPs for their connection. Restarts the local economy while taking advantage of people who've already solved most of the same problems you're going to have.

Re:No good deed.....

[segedunum]

It's not exactly a good deed. The good deed would have been to help the existing infrastructure. I always get cynical about these disasters and the appeals that inevitably follow, because with all of that cash sloshing around it's a nice big target for unscrupulous people and organisations to walk in and start taking a chunk of the pie.

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!

Re:Haw

[zappepcs]

There is a larger problem to this. Those same local ISP and service providers operate on a shoestring budget for the most part, and even in the USA operators will cut back on operating costs to keep a profit. The trouble this brings is that they are not equipped to fully integrated to emergency situations. Recent hurricanes and non-natural disasters in the USA led to regulations that are simply expensive to comply with in order to be compliant with state of emergency situations. It's expensive enough to pay for 4 hour response times to outages, but pay for 24-72 hour battery backup at every remote site, and longer at key sites and the cost is nearly unrecoverable.

When huge cash injections come for emergency aid, it DOES leave the businesses out of the loop. IMO, it's the fault of the government for not stating up front that local ISP/providers will eventually benefit from the cash and infrastructure injection as part of building future emergency response preparedness.

Yes, there are of course arguments on both sides, but I'm just saying they do have a real and rational point.

Flawed system.

[migla]

I didn't rtfa, so I don't know if this is analogous to donating clothes to poor countries, but in that case, the free clothes have devastated local clothes industry. There's some fundamental flaw in the system if giving people free stuff is bad for them...

Re:Flawed system.

[MichaelSmith]

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.

Re:Flawed system.

[outsider007]

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.

[FishTankX]

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:Flawed system.

[oldhack]

Tell that no-good bum to get a job.

Re:Flawed system.

[sn00ker]

I guess the story is about greedy ISPs

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.

Re:Flawed system.

[Shinobi]

Indeed. SIDA, the Swedish government organization handling aid etc has operated like that since the 70's. Instead of directly bringing children's teachers, they train adults to become teachers. Sanitation engineers are sent out as tutors, taking on apprentices sort of, that sort of thing.

SIDA has repeatedly come under fire however, both domestically and internationally, for their approach, especially from religiously influenced charities, for their method of not donating stuff directly, main accusation being that it's "not compassionate enough".

There are some exceptions, such as in critical emergencies, but that's common sense really. Some other exceptions are where the Swedish military is involved. For example, in Sierra Leone, the small swedish contingent there had 2 containerized water purification plants, and helped purify water for the local medical facilities etc, helping to build local report.

Re:Flawed system.

[stdarg]

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?

Dead Aid

[matushorvath]

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:Dead Aid

[EzInKy]

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.

No it isn't...

[denzacar]

Nothing is being "donated to the country". At least regarding "the internets".

NGOs that are there to provide aid got their own satellite and wireless links because none of the local IPSs were operational at the moment. Nothing is being donated (to Haiti) - it is for their own operational and personal use.
Later, since Haitian internet backbone is operational, the backhaul bandwidth was donated (to the NGOs) by two local ISPs - AccessHaiti and MultiLink.

So in fact, Haitian companies are donating the bandwidth to NGOs who are donating the humanitarian aid and services to Haiti.

But, now that the local small ISPs are coming back online, they (local ISPs) find that the NGOs are quite happy with their current setup and don't really need the local wireless services - but are willing to switch, they just need more time.
They are kinda busy doing something a little more important at the moment.

Being practically the only game in town (read: the only paying customers) - local ISPs would really like to sell them their services.
But, on top of that, the wireless relays the NGOs have set up for themselves are drowning out the wireless signal of the local ISPs.

So, basically...
1 - Local ISP companies are providing the bandwidth to the relief workers for free. Which will probably change in the future.
2 - NGOs have their own equipment for the use and distributing of that bandwidth - and they are providing the humanitarian aid for free. They are willing to pay for the bandwidth but are asking for more time to switch to the local providers as they are rather busy at the moment.
3 - Local small ISPs would like to sell THEIR bandwidth (that they will buy from the ISPs mentioned under 1) to the NGOs - but they lack the capacity to do that as their wireless networks are being drowned out by the signal of the NGO's equipment.

So... it is not the case of donated food drowning out the local production.
But it is going to be, one way or the other, for a while at least. Because the local ISPs want it that way.
Cause it will take time for the local customers to be able to match the NGO's ability to buy the services of the local ISPs.
Who will then fix their prices to match the paying capabilities of the NGOs - NOT the local population.
So... in the long run, the locals will have to pay more for less longer - because NGOs can pay more and thereby they set the prices.

But in the LONGER run, when NGOs leave, locals will be left with a working ISP structure, and some money will flow into the community.
So, not quite like donating food. Or clothes.

Now all Haiti needs is 100,000 Mexican workers.

[bezenek]

Now we can ship 100,000 Mexican workers to Haiti to rebuild everything. They will earn US government-subsidized wages while the Haitians--who need the money/work--relax and watch!

Oh... Sorry... That was Katrina/New Orleans.

-Todd

as someone who actually has people down there...

[pointbeing]

...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.

We did (and do) dump food.

[SuperBanana]

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.