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Movers & Shakers By Joan Oleck May 26, 1999


Giving Relief Workers a Hand -- through E-Biz
AlertNet Editor Paul Mylrea aims to set up a trading site where aid groups and suppliers make their deals online -- and both can benefit

From a part of the world where latrines, lactated porridge, and purified water are the dividing line between life and death, emergency relief workers involved in the Kosovo crisis are E-mailing home reports about the progress and pathos of the refugee camps of Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro.

The Reuter Foundation Web site www.alertnet.org., targeted at the international relief community, offers us a sampling of those snapshots. We can read, for example, as ADRA, an Adventist Church agency, describes its new trauma counseling at four Albania camps for Kosovars who must bear the unbearable: the murders of parents and children. We can fret alongside a Mercy Corps pediatrician, whose posting describes an alarming 14.7% diarrhea rate in the camps. And we can recoil at an offer by the Mines Advisory Group for land mines awareness training.

FIGHTING TYPHOID. AlertNet makes for a riveting read. An online news and communications service for disaster relief organizations worldwide, its electronic bulletin boards allow aid workers to communicate from even the most remote war zone or cyclone or mudslide locale. What are those aid workers talking about? Often it's business, pure and simple. Setting up refugee camps, fighting dehydration, hunger, and typhoid, and helping survivors put their lives back together means the sale of goods and services to nonprofits by the for-profit world.

That's where AlertNet can help. In the works is an eventual trading site where aid groups and equipment makers will make their deals online. One day soon, says Paul Mylrea, a key mover behind the project, "relief agencies will be able to put a tender on the Web saying, 'We need to supply X refugee camps with X number of tents. Best price, please.'"

 

Profitable deals are often made between groups like CARE and, say, all-terrain vehicle makers. Why not online?
 

Mylrea is the London-based editor of AlertNet. At age 43, he's also a veteran Reuters journalist who has experienced AlertNet-style crises firsthand, literally since infancy. He was only 2 months old during the 1955-56 campaign for independence in Cyprus when his schoolteacher-father was fatally shot by a terrorist. Raised in Manchester, England, he became a journalist in his 20s and moved from regional newspapers to the Reuters news service in 1982. From there he spent years trekking around Latin America for uprisings and adventures ranging from the Shining Path in Peru to the Amazon Basin gold rush.

En route, he says he felt tension between the demands of the heart and those of daily journalism. "When you work in conflict zones or places of extreme poverty, you can't fail to be moved," he says, "but you can't do anything at the moment because you have to do your job."

Helping to conceive AlertNet in 1997 answered "this need to do something," Mylrea says. He eagerly joined in on early talks about the site, led by the Reuter Foundation's director, Stephen Somerville, and AlertNet's first editor, John Owen-Davies. Those two also had reported from the world's hot spots. And they, too, felt "the need to make a difference," as Mylrea soberly describes it -- before he chuckles: "My colleagues would probably hit me over the head with a rolled-up newspaper if they heard me say that."

Although Mylrea was busy covering the then-newly elected Prime Minister, Tony Blair, at the point of AlertNet's September, 1997, launch, he joined the Web site two months later as an assistant editor. Earlier this year he was named to replace retiring editor Owen-Davies.

Along the way, Mylrea formulated a goal to bring E-commerce to the site, despite its obvious charitable bent. After all, he reasoned, E-commerce made sense even here: Profitable deals are frequently made between groups like CARE and the International Rescue Committee, on the one hand, and manufacturers of all-terrain vehicles, shower bags, and lactated porridge on the other. "The aid industry is a $6 billion-to-$8 billion-a-year market," Mylrea says, citing U.N. and aid-group figures.

 

Relief groups "need to know how to best use their limited resources," especially as the world crises multiply
 

A look at www.alertnet.org drives the point home. Consider the bathing cubicles OXFAM recently installed at the Stankovec 1 camp in Macedonia. Or the new water purifying system the British-Danish company Interbrit Ltd. promotes on the Web site. And then there's the medical equipment supplied by the Czech Republic's ProSpon s.r.o. Then think about the multimillion-dollar budgets of aid groups backed by the EU and U.N.

Trouble is, those groups may not always spend that cash wisely. "People need to know how to best use their limited resources, particularly when you have what's called 'donor fatigue,'" Mylrea says of the scenario of multiple world crises competing for scarce donations. "Using information efficiently can help you use your resources efficiently."

Toward that goal, Mylrea and his six staffers began AlertNet's transformation last January from an information-only site to a trading site. The first step: an International Register of Aid Suppliers for those specializing in disaster relief. On paper, it's "a step towards promoting the benefits of E-commerce to a major international industry, which to date has largely been a stranger to it."

In actuality, the register enables the small, closed world of international relief -- with its traditional word-of-mouth referrals to suppliers -- to expand that network. The point: a more competitively priced market to speed logistics and aid Third World economies.

Now five months old, the register includes 40 suppliers from 14 countries and 75 private and government organizations. Mylrea likens the project to the currency-exchange service Reuters established in 1973. "We have a market that is very similar," the editor comments. "People deal with the same people they've always dealt with. But there may be someone out there that's got a better price or product. So, we thought, what if we put a database of suppliers...on-screen?"

So far, results have been modest. Only a handful of deals have taken place. Mylrea blames that partly on the fact that the suppliers' list is short -- because of the requirement that they be nominated by the aid groups themselves. This bureaucracy has created a "terrible bottleneck," Mylrea concedes. So nominations soon may be replaced by a members' "guidance group." Another roadblock: the required manual input of postings from the field. Mylrea's staff is moving toward automation, new software, and larger servers. By summer, suppliers will be able to update and edit their company descriptions themselves.

FOOTBALL FAN. The online trading service remains the loftiest goal. One early E-commerce-style feature is the posting of Air Cargo Service information, enabling price-shopping. "What we're trying to do," Mylrea says, "is build up the same [relief] expertise that we've built with the [currency] markets, where originally people said, 'This isn't going to work.'"

Mylrea, a father of three and an avid football fan, says AlertNet is working so far. Key here is the ability of private aid groups to exchange confidential information about emergency and policy issues, operational logistics, and field reports.

Also discussed are recommendations and feedback about suppliers. This appeals strongly to a supplier and AlertNet member like Edward Bizub, of Clark, N.J., whose Bizub Communications Inc. lends sales and support to Telenor Satellite Service. The Norwegian company sells laptop-size telephones for remote communications. Bizub is proud that AlertNet customer-NGOs nominated him for the register. He thinks it will bring him more business. After all, he says, supplier directories list companies providing products, but they can't compete with the recommendation of an AlertNet client.

 

The Web can pull in more bidders on aid jobs, and that can slash the time it takes to get porridge for refugee kids
 

No wonder, then, that the news of AlertNet's changes leaves Bizub feeling "a little disappointed" since the register may open up to his half-dozen competitors. Not so Ian Rankine, managing director of Lifeline WRS Ltd., a humanitarian procurement organization based in Britain's Southampton. In a crisis like Kosovo, Rankine says, "there are lots of [ad hoc] organizations that want to make money." But year-round organizations have the advantage.

Currently, Rankine is working to procure computers and radio components, under an $80,000 order from CARE for its Albania office. He's upbeat about AlertNet's ability to expand his clientele. "As an organization, we don't advertise ourselves," Rankine says. "It's a very closed community."

That drawback can affect relief issues like the purchase of that lactated porridge. Jean-Francois Vidal, executive director of Action Against Hunger-USA, says that when his group needed 80 metric tons of the stuff for Kosovo, its French manufacturer required a week to fill the order. That meant a week of children hungry in the Balkan camps. "What can I say?" Vidal says, recalling his helpless feeling. "We had to wait -- he was the only supplier."

That's precisely the kind of problem E-commerce can solve, Mylrea says. The more businesspeople out there who understand nutrition's technical fine points -- and take that expertise online -- the better future relief operations will go.

Mylrea looks forward to that day. Meanwhile, he's encouraging suppliers to get involved in the relief business, where both profits and good vibes can be found. "You can do business, make money, and save the world -- all at the same time," Mylrea says. Perhaps you can make a difference, too.

Oleck, a staff editor at Business Week, writes frequently on social issues and the Internet


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