NEWSDISASTER RELIEF

Peter Biro writes for the International Rescue Committee from the Dadaab Refugee Camp in Kenya where he saw first hand refugees seeking aid in the face of the famine in the horn of Africa. All photos by Peter Biro.

Our car is skidding across the deep sand tracks that cut through Hagadera, one of three sites that make up the sprawling Dadaab refugee camp near the Kenya-Somalia border. More than 1,300 refugees, fleeing drought and famine in southern Somalia, are arriving every day in the already overcrowded camp. Under such conditions infectious disease can spread quickly.

This morning, I’m traveling with an IRC medical team that is vaccinating refugee children against polio and measles, part of a mass immunization campaign that aid groups are conducting in Dadaab. All told, some 120,000 refugee children under the age of five will be inoculated over the next five days, a quarter of them by the IRC’s medical teams.

“The Somali refugees are malnourished and very weak,” says Antonia Kamore, the IRC’s community health program officer, who is sitting beside me. “This makes them even more susceptible to disease.”

After the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Masaya Uchino - a law student in San Francisco - and his parents waited 12 hours to find out if our family and friends in Tokyo were alright. While waiting, he donated some money by texting the Red Cross with hopes that it would help the millions of other affected by the horrible tragedy.

The following Monday he found out that his donation wouldn’t actually reach Japan for somewhere between 30 and 90 days. So he started a petition asking the mobile phone companies to process donations for Japan in the same way they did for Haiti – so the money would get there straight away.

As the petition climbed toward 50,000 signatures, California Senator Barbara Boxer took note and wrote to the CEOs of the major mobile carriers echoing Masaya’s petition.

At the end of last week, California Senator Barbara Boxer joined the call for mobile phone companies to expedite donations to Japan in the same way the did for Haiti.

With her support, news organizations in San Francisco realized this was a real story, and Masaya Uchino – the law student who created the petition just a week ago – found himself doing interviews with his local news stations as to why expediting donations is such a big deal.

He did a terrific job emphasizing the importance of his petition to a large number of people around the Bay Area, and also had the added benefit of having the news crews calling mobile phone companies to find out why they are treating this emergency differently.

Text-to-give programs have proven a powerful way to collect donations, with the American Red Cross reporting that they raised $32 million from mobile phone donations to help relief efforts in Haiti last year. The effort catapulted mobile phone giving into the mainstream – it was even hailed as a turning point for mobile business more broadly.

But the way donations worked for Haiti is not the way they operate now. For Haiti, mobile carriers passed a donation along to relief organizations as soon as you texted. For Japan, they are waiting until your next billing cycle to pass along the donation.

It’s because of this switch in policy that Change.org member Masaya Uchino created a massively successful petition asking cell phone companies to follow the same policy for Japan as they did for Haiti. He said:

When you text on your cell phone to donate to a charity or NGO, the process works in a peculiar way.

First, the mobile phone company registers that you’ve made a donation and adds that amount to your next bill. Then after you pay the bill, your phone company will transfer the money to a non-profit like mGive, which has partnered with mobile phone carriers to certify charity organizations doing mobile donations. Then mGive transfers your donation to the charity you had specified with your original message. At this point as many as 90 days may have passed.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. As the mGive Foundation notes; “In response to the Haiti Relief Effort, carriers are remitting  donations immediately to nonprofit organizations. “

So why aren’t they doing that for Japan?

Masaya Uchino, a Japanese-American law student in San Francisco, has started a petition asking mGive, Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint to sort it out.

“When I first head about the earthquake I was in total shock.  I called my parents to see if they heard anything from our family. That was about 11:30 at night, and we didn’t hear back that they were all ok until around noon the next day.”