Patrick Meier has noticed a change in his conversations with humanitarians. An innovator who co-founded UAViators, or, “the humanitarian UAV network,” Meier spent the last decade fighting resistance to new technologies.
Now, “from a discourse about whether we should” use a technology, the debate is “how do we make the most effective use of this,” he told Devex.
Nowhere is this attitude shift more evident than in the use of data in the humanitarian sphere. From real-time crisis information, to donor funding, to intervention effectiveness, the quantity, quality, and breadth of numbers being gathered has mushroomed.