Diaspora Communities Seek New Ways to Stay Connected to Their Homelands

By Katherine Hubbard

In a recent Ushahidi Blog post entitled Building Bridges: Ushahidi as a Tool for the Haitian Community author Sabina Carleson writes about her four years of work on an oral history project chronicling the Haitian diaspora in the greater Boston area and discusses how Ushahidi technology could strengthen the connection between this community and their homeland.  Carleson shares her powerful and moving stories about a community that has faced great hardships, but has consistently met challenges with strength and innovation.  

Carleson argues that contrary to popular portrayals, Haiti’s elaborate human infrastructure makes it a truly strong country.  Community cooperatives are the backbone of daily life in Haiti and informal networks of communication cover the entire country.  Outside of Haiti, the diaspora community sends the most remittances per capita of all migrant populations worldwide.  In the U.S., diaspora communities form regionally-based “Hometown Associations” which are groups of Haitians who pool remittances to collectively offer support to individual towns in Haiti for small- and medium-scale development projects.  

Recently these Hometown Associations have been looking for new ways to maximize their impact on development by taking advantage of new technology platforms, such as Ushahidi.  As was discussed in a previous blog post, Homebound Security Event Promotes Discussion of Exciting New Technologies, Ushahidi is a technology platform that plots user-generated information about security incidents on Google maps to create visual representations of conflict zones or in the case of Haiti, disaster zones.  In the aftermath of the devastating earthquake, this tool can allow the Haitian diaspora to direct the flow of aid and have an impact on the reconstruction of their country.  In the long term, Ushahidi technology could be used as a communication tool to create new fast-paced links between the diaspora and the homeland.  Carleson hopes that Ushahidi will one day be the platform on which Haitians can construct their future.

Carleson’s support for increasing the influence of diasporas in their home countries echoes a recently published PCR report Homebound Security: Migrant Support for Improved Public Safety in Conflict-Prone Settings.  The report suggests that migrants and diasporas can play a more significant role in their home countries in terms of providing expertise and resources to improve public safety.  Mobile phones and websites such as Twitter can serve as ideal platforms for early warning.  Other technologies like Ushahidi use the ‘collective intelligence’ of the community to gather and share information.  The report suggests that migrant associations and international donors could potentially create and manage a community-based information-sharing platform for their home countries.  Migrant communities and diasporas are the ideal leaders for this type of work both because of their extensive knowledge of the home country and because of their deep commitment to long-term stability and development.

Flickr photo by Danny Hammontree used under a Creative Commons license.