Stakeholder Democracy Network's latest digital mapping project provides the Nigerian Government regulator with a state-of-the art web-based tool to manage data on oil spills.
Our Port Harcourt office, with its sister team in London, has
been working in the Niger Delta for the past 10 years making sense of
and dealing with the social and environmental fallout from 60 years of
oil extraction and associated pollution.
This article charts SDN's journey from mapping the oil spill
crisis in the Niger Delta to using open-data mapping for oil spill
prevention.
The early days of crisis mapping in SDN - USHAHIDI in the Niger Delta
During early 2010 SDN launched its Niger Delta Watch website to map
and track a number of environmental, conflict and human rights issues in
the Niger Delta.
Niger Delta Watch was a deployment of the USHAHIDI platform, an
online crisis-mapping system that had been developed in Africa to help
civil society and relief agencies deal quickly with crises such as
conflict, natural disasters and health emergencies.
USHAHIDI's innovative tool was designed to merge the prevalence of
mobile phones in developing countries with online GIS mapping. With
USHAHIDI, information is crowd-sourced via mobile phones from those at
the front-line of the emergency at hand. This crowd-sourced information
is then located and placed on an online map to be used by central
coordinating hubs who quickly build up a detailed picture of events on
the ground and can get resources where they were needed fast.
During its early years USHAHIDI proved itself again and again and was
downloaded and used hundreds of times. It was used to monitor the
violence surrounding the Kenyan elections of 2009, to help relief
agencies deal with the Haiti earthquake, to monitor low-intensity
violence in Nepal and to assist in the distribution of medicines in
rural South Africa. USHAHIDI proved there was a huge demand for
quick-deployment Civil Society communications tools for
crisis-management and for crowd-sourced reporting and are still the
leaders in this field.
We used USHAHIDI (in the form of Niger Delta Watch) to publish
maintream news and to help Civil Society organisations in the Niger
Delta to tell their ongoing story of oil spills, environmental calamity,
human rights abuses and corrupt officialdom to the world.
The
Niger Delta Watch project
taught SDN many things but most of all it taught us, when covering
low-intensity emergencies over longer time periods, that the human
networks on the ground are the most vital piece of the puzzle.
But it wasn't until the 2011 elections that Niger Delta Watch really
came into its own when Chris Newsom and the SDN team in Port Harcourt
set up an election monitoring hub. They trained and equipped scores of
citizen election monitors to send in reports on election day. The result
was hundreds of reports sent in from dispersed teams of election
monitors (http://www.nigerdeltawatch.org/reports?c=20).
The 2011 election monitoring was a success for SDN as it rallied the
population around an immediate and pressing cause, but what of the
longer term issues such as the oil spills that have poisoned and plagued
the Niger Delta for so long? We found that sustaining long term
interest and engagement in low-intensity crisis issues was far more
difficult.
The Niger Delta Watch project taught SDN many things but most of all
it taught us, when covering low-intensity emergencies over longer time
periods, that the human networks on the ground are the most vital piece
of the puzzle. It taught us that without a sustained effort to
encourage, train and facilitate people to submit reports that these
ongoing initiatives will fall by the wayside. The most important thing
it taught us was that technology without the motivated human network is
never going to really get off the ground.
Some interesting questions were also raised on these longer-term,
low-intensity crises: What is the value to affected communities of
consistently complaining about an issue if nothing ever seems to change?
How can local populations be encouraged and rewarded for their
information and made more likely to contribute reports? For a local,
what does 'doing something' about long-standing and insurmountable
issues like repeated devastating oil spills look like in a world of
instant, responsive, mobile-friendly web tools?
The Gas ALERT Network in the Niger Delta. Note
no western techies involved in this home-grown project. Local
motivation, social recognition and reward mechanisms that mean something
to those affected are vital in sustaining these initiatives on the
ground.
SDN has been working with local citizen groups who are working on their own reporting and mapping:
Oil Spill Witness,
Environmental Rights Action and
GASIN's Gas Monitoring System.
It is these home-grown initiatives that need to be funded, facilitated
and supported to carry out monitoring and reporting work within the
local context, culture and more importantly local social recognition and
reward mechanisms.
We realised that external interventions imposed from well meaning
techies from abroad are just not going to hit the mark on their own. We
also realised that constantly reinforcing the message that there is a
serious problem does not help come up with a constructive solution.
Oilspillmonitor.ng – SDN's work with the Nigerian Government oil spill regulators
So in January 2012 SDN's Director Joseph Hurst-Croft attended a
meeting of oil company, civil society, and government regulator
representatives in Abuja. All present agreed that the oil spill
situation was in nobody's interest. The environment is ruined, people
are up in arms, billions are lost each year to theft, the government is
losing revenue, and oil companies are operating in an increasingly
hostile and destabilised region.
In response to this SDN embarked on a two year project working with
the Nigerian Government Regulator NOSDRA (National Oil Spill Detection
and Response Agency) on improving their capacity to monitor and track
the oil spills in the region and gain strategic insight from the data
they had been gathering since 2007.
The result is the
Nigerian Oil Spill Monitor
which has been live since January 2014. The system helps to answer
questions like: How many spills are caused by sabotage? Which companies
are not engaged with the regulator? How much oil is spilled each year?
Where are the oil theft hot spots? Where is illegal refining occurring?
Technical details of the Oil Spill Monitor
The Oil Spill Monitor runs mostly in the browser (html5, javascript and
php) and is designed to work over extremely unreliable mobile data
connections. The entire 8000 oil spill records collected since 2007 by
NOSDRA and all core functions (including editing of spill records) is
provided in under 2mb of compressed Javascript which can run entirely
offline (except for external map baselayers) should the need arise,
which it often does.
The Oil Spill Monitor has been developed
(thanks to DFID and Dutch Government funding) with programming expertise
from Alberto González Palomo (Sentido-labs.com), a software engineer
with an artificial intelligence and computer graphics background and
with the careful guidance and project management of SDN's Rory Hodgson.
A final training of 18 NOSDRA staff was carried out in May 2014 after
two years of careful needs assessment, specification development, user
feedback and training sessions plus hours of delicate political
engagement.
Thanks to a strong partnership plus the SDN team's perseverance and
attention to detail, NOSDRA is now wholly responsible for the ongoing
maintenance and management of the data in the system, a system they
designed based on their needs. Multiple NOSDRA staff from each of its 6
regional offices update the oil spill data in the system daily using
information gathered from the paper forms that are filled in (by law)
when an oil spill occurs. When submitted to the central server this data
is then checked by their head office in Abuja and confirmed. They do
this using an intuitive, powerful and responsive interface which also
provides the regulator, and the general public, contextualized GIS
baselayers like soil types, populations and other geo-political and
environmental information.
But if the data in the Nigerian Oil Spill Monitor tells many stories then it does not tell many more ...
NOSDRA relies on the voluntary engagement and support of oil
companies in Nigeria to provide them with logistics, data, quantity
estimates and even soil and water sample results. This is not ideal for
an independent Government regulator and these companies are not always
as helpful as they might be. Coupled with this there are many many
logistical, security and operational issues that can make NOSDRA's job
very difficult, not least to mention rampant oil theft and insecurity in
the Niger Delta region.
The other story not told by the official data is the human-impact,
the poisoned waters, the dead fish, the local demand for illegally
refined fuel, the problems in the process of collecting spill data, the
implication of military and government elements in oil theft protection
rackets and the wholesale theft of entire tankers of fuel oil. It
doesn't tell the story that oil company contractors, paid to fix pipes
and clean up oil spills, also break pipes and steal oil by night.
The details of these stories are vitally important to understanding
the issues faced by all parties and how to address them. If troops were
paid more would they resort to extortion and protection rackets? If
communities had clean power, would they buy locally refined fuels? If
people could still fish and farm in a subsistence way, would they need
illegally refined fuels for generators to run power-hungry businesses?
If government staff were paid properly and on-time, would they be more
robust in their reporting of oil spills and take their roles more
seriously?
It is these stories that Civil Society must tell, and why we need
crowd-sourced community perspectives and citizen journalism to counter
and contextualise the official line. At the same time we need some level
of trusted empirical data and associated regulatory powers and systems.
Only by working together can we solve these issues in a holistic
fashion and, as SDN has found, the devil is in the minor details.
Even if the data we gather officially or from crowd-sourcing might
not paint a perfect picture, together it forms a more useful
understanding of the situation and the many factors that continue to
drive this environmental, human and financial disaster.
Oil companies themselves are slowly opening up their data on oil
spills too, but in Nigeria they have a long way to go to comply with
existing government regulation but moves are being made in the right
direction.
Shell publishes its Joint Investigative Visit reports on its website
and ENI/AGIP's own shareholders have told the company to do the same in
the face of public corruption allegations. Rather than publishing their
own oil spill records on a separate websites (or not publishing them at
all) perhaps the oil companies should consider working much more
closely with the environmental regulators of Nigeria and civil society
groups on the issue of oil spills to find holistic approaches to the
myriad of issues and incentives that feed this ongoing catastrophe.
In the mean time SDN will continue to work towards improving
compensation, regulation, engaging oil companies, strengthening
communities, addressing oil theft, highlighting corruption and improving
energy security in the Niger Delta.
Moving towards crisis prevention in emerging extractive economies...
With oil having recently been found in other African nations and with
the global rush on African natural resources, SDN would like to use its
extensive experience of the complex landscape of the Nigerian resource
curse to move towards using open-government data, open-company data and
crowd-sourced citizen data as a potential means to avoid this travesty
from happening elsewhere.
We believe that by intervening early in emerging extractive economies
and working together with technical partners, communities on the
ground, companies, and governments to share best practice and promote
understanding that maybe, just maybe, the worst aspects of resource
curse, as seen in the Niger Delta, could be avoided.
An
increasingly popular way for students to make money is to fill out
online surveys in their spare time. Research companies are always
recruiting new members to answer surveys and test new products.
See how much you can get for your old mobile phone using our in-house mobile phone price comparison tool! Maybe ask your parents if they have any lying around too.
Similar
to making money from online surveys, GPT sites reward you in cash and
vouchers for completing various offers or activities online.
For example, in 2011 you could buy Beauty and the Beast on Blu-ray 3D for just £24.99. In just a couple of years it’s now on Amazon for a staggering £74.99!
If
you’ve ever seen the film “The Social Network” then you’ve most likely
had your brain spinning as to what website you can start-up to make you
billions.
If
you love music, make it your business by reviewing unsigned bands and
artists for cash. I know… we couldn’t believe it either.
A
part-time job is the obvious first choice, opted for by most students
looking to supplement their student loan. It provides a pretty steady
flow of income and can enable you to gain valuable work experience.
Fiverr is now the world’s largest marketplace for people to make money selling small services (known as ‘gigs’).
A
domain name is just a website address (eg. ‘savethestudent.org’ or
‘mysite.co.uk’) and there are lots of extensions (.com, .net, .co.uk
etc).
If
you are looking to make a very quick buck, then selling your old bits
and bobs that are cluttering up your room is a good idea.
You
may feel as if you aren’t qualified to be a tutor, but seeing as you
are at university you will most likely have the qualifications to tutor
for GCSE or even A-Level. Some parents may feel that their child will
react better to a younger tutor, and it can be great experience, so why
not give it a go?
Some student accommodation
comes with a drive or garage. If you aren’t using your parking space
and you live in a busy area then you might be in luck. There are plenty
of people that may work in the city centre and are fed up of paying
through the roof for daily parking.
Advertise
your services locally. It’s a classic money-maker, and for good reason.
You get paid (well) to watch TV and not very much else!
Becoming
a mystery shopper is easier than you think. You can get paid to spend
money in shops, usually in the form of a voucher for the shop in
question.
Directors for TV and film are always on the hunt for houses to film in. For instance, a scene for Coronation Street was recently filmed in the student house one of the Save the Student editors used to live in!
Ok,
ok – this isn’t what you think. “Renting out your body” can go as far
as you want it to go. For example we reported on a story a while back
about students who are turning to lap dancing to make a quick buck.
If
you can sing or dance then this is your time to shine baby! Did you
know that Justin Bieber started off busking? That’s right, with a little
work you can be as annoying as him.
Everyone’s best friend when it comes to getting rid of junk is eBay.
Online auctions are a sure-fire way to turn that sleeveless jacket
(which came in and out of fashion in a week) into hard cash.
According to recent stats we now watch more videos on YouTube than searches on Google. And with the recently introduced YouTube Partner Program
you can now profit from making and uploading videos. You will receive a
percentage of the advertising revenue collected per 1,000 views.
Also
known as Multi-Level Marketing (MLM), this is a business model that
allows you to generate ongoing income in two ways: by making a
commission selling products and by recruiting other members who go on to
sell. The later allows you to make money from the sales made by those
you have recruited.
We
all know how much money there is in property, but on the surface (with
house prices as high as they are) you might be thinking this market is
off-limits.
What can you do well where others struggle? Fix bikes, computers, write articles, create websites, make cupcakes or fresh lemonade?!
