Preliminary Key Findings from Interviews in Accra on the Ebola Response
The Disaster Resilience Lab
The Disaster Resilience Lab (DRL) was established in the response to Haiyan in 2013 as a joint initiative of researchers working in different fields of humanitarian information management, decision support and logistics. The DRL team has developed an interdisciplinary approach, which is grounded in the members’ respective research expertise in information management, humanitarian logistics, decision support and human-computer interaction.
To conduct research that is relevant to practitioners’ while applying scientifically sound and rigorous methodologies, we have developed an approach that is based on cooperation between research teams deployed to the field during the response while providing continuous remote expert support during the team's operations.
The approach developed by the DRL has in the past year been field tested in research missions to the Philippines (December 12-23, 2013) and Amman, Jordan (May 1-8, 2014). Our findings have been published in reports and academic conference and journal papers.
This Report
This work was carried out by DRL Team members Tina Comes and Bartel Van de Walle in December 2014 at the UNMEER and UNHRD offices in Accra, Ghana. The key findings presented here are derived from interviews conducted by the authors in Accra with individuals from different responding organizations.
The authors thank the interviewees for their sharing of their experiences. Their contributions have been anonymized by the authors to protect confidentiality.
The conclusions formulated in this report are the authors’ alone, and do not reflect any formal or informal position from their respective universities.
