(Cross-posted from the Google Lat Long Blog)

This past weekend at the 2010 World Expo, UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and Google gave a joint presentation and informational session about their recent work together in global humanitarian mapping.

Illustrating his remarks with information about the Pakistan 2010 flood relief efforts, UNITAR Geospatial Analyst Josh Lyons explained how Google Map Maker helps his organization quickly and accurately produce geospatial products and emergency response maps. By leveraging the high quality, up-to-date information provided by users in Google Map Maker, UNITAR is able to produce and distribute helpful composite map products using tools such as UNITAR’S Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT). These products played a key role in facilitating modern humanitarian relief for the recent disaster in Pakistan.

UNITAR/UNOSAT map for Pakistan flood analysis, with transport data from Google Map Maker

Dr. Carlos Lopes, United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Executive Director of UNITAR, expressed his excitement both to work with Google and that UNITAR/UNOSAT resources that had previously been spent on mapping data collection could now be invested directly into analysis. He remarked that users and beneficiaries aided by this collaborative effort include operational UN agencies, international NGOs and national entities from government and civil societies, and of course, the people directly affected by disasters and other crises.

We hope that the interest and increased awareness that the Shanghai World Expo event generated about Google Map Maker helps to build an even stronger user community. It’s the online mapping contributions of volunteers across the globe that enable Map Maker to be a valuable tool for humanitarian activities like this as well as a source of quality maps in the developing world. Let’s continue mapping the world together!

Posted by Andrea Fang Chu, Google Maps Software Engineer

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Last year’s flu season began with significant fanfare and concern. The H1N1 virus posed a new threat to public health and sent governments around the world scrambling to protect people’s well-being. We don’t yet know the severity of this flu season, but have learned in the past that many people come to Google to search for information about the flu.

In time for the upcoming flu season, Google is again collaborating with the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services (HHS), their flu.gov collaborators and the American Lung Association to release a feature which allows people to more easily find nearby locations for getting the flu vaccine. By searching for terms like [flu] or [flu shot], information will appear at the top of your search results, including tips from flu.gov as well as the flu vaccine finder box with an expanding map that displays locations where you can receive vaccine.



In addition to finding it in our search results, you can check out the flu vaccine finder at www.google.com/flushot. The same tool will also be available shortly on www.flu.gov and the American Lung Association websites.

This year’s flu vaccine protects against the three viruses that research suggests will be most common, including the H1N1 virus, so officials do not expect the need for multiple vaccines.

We continue to hope for a relatively uneventful flu season, but encourage you to prepare appropriately.

Update on 9/30: Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health & Human Services, just announced that the flu vaccine finder is now embedded on flu.gov, along with instructions for how others can embed it on their site.

Posted by Roni Zeiger, MD, Chief Health Strategist

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(Cross-posted from The Official Google Blog)

Two years ago today, we began Project 10^100 by asking you to share your ideas for changing the world by helping as many people as possible. Your spirit and participation surpassed even our most optimistic expectations. People from more than 170 countries submitted more than 150,000 ideas. We selected 16 big ideas and asked the public to vote for their favorites. The five ideas that received the most votes are the winners of Project 10^100. Over the past 12 months, we’ve reviewed concrete proposals to tackle these ideas, and today we’re pleased to give a total of $10 million to five inspiring organizations working on solutions to each of these global challenges:

Idea: Make educational content available online for free
Project funded: The Khan Academy is a non-profit educational organization that provides high-quality, free education to anyone, anywhere via an online library of more than 1,600 teaching videos. We are providing $2 million to support the creation of more courses and to enable the Khan Academy to translate their core library into the world’s most widely spoken languages.

Idea: Enhance science and engineering education
Project funded: FIRST is a non-profit organization that promotes science and math education around the world through team competition. Its mission is to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders by giving them real world experience working with professional engineers and scientists. We are providing $3 million to develop and jump start new student-driven robotics team fundraising programs that will empower more student teams to participate in FIRST.

Idea: Make government more transparent
Project funded: Public.Resource.Org is a non-profit organization focused on enabling online access to public government documents in the United States. We are providing $2 million to Public.Resource.Org to support the Law.Gov initiative, which aims to make all primary legal materials in the United States available to all.

Idea: Drive innovation in public transport
Project funded: Shweeb is a concept for short to medium distance, urban personal transport, using human-powered vehicles on a monorail. We are providing $1 million to fund research and development to test Shweeb’s technology for an urban setting.

Idea: Provide quality education to African students
Project funded: The African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) is a center for math and science education and research in Cape Town, South Africa. AIMS’ primary focus is a one-year bridge program for recent university graduates that helps build skills and knowledge prior to Masters and PhD study. We are providing $2 million to fund the opening of additional AIMS centers to promote graduate level math and science study in Africa.

Here’s a short video celebrating the inspiring work of these organizations:



We’ve learned that it takes quite a bit of effort and time to move from 150,000 ideas to five funded projects, but are excited about the potential of the ideas and projects you helped us choose. We’re happy to conclude Project 10^100 with today’s announcement of five winning ideas and encourage you to follow the progress of these projects on the organizations’ websites.

Posted by Lorraine Twohill, VP of Marketing

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(Cross-posted from The Official Google Blog)

At the opening ceremony of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) this morning, President Clinton discussed the urgent need to help the people of Pakistan recover from widespread floods which have affected more people than the 2004 South Asia tsunami, the 2005 South Asia earthquake, and the Haiti earthquake combined. The floods have put one-fifth of the land underwater, impacting more than 20 million people, damaging or destroying 1.9 million homes, putting 3.5 million children at risk of waterborne diseases, and wiping out livestock and crops.

Unfortunately the global response has been anemic. While U.S. corporations, foundations and individuals responded admirably to the earthquake in Haiti by donating $900 million in the first five weeks after the disaster, that same group donated $25 million to Pakistan in the first five week weeks after the floods hit. In an interview with citizens hosted by YouTube, President Clinton called for a dramatically increased global response.

As part of our CGI commitment this year, Google is providing $1 million in charitable grants, as well as technology support to help the people of Pakistan recover from these floods. Roughly one-third of our grants support organizations providing clean water, shelter, medical care and other immediate needs, while two-thirds will be focused on longer-term rebuilding efforts. Partners for the first round of support include: A.S. Edhi International Foundation, Architecture for Humanity, CARE, The Citizens Foundation, Naya Jeevan for Kids, Real Medicine Foundation, SIUT North America, Sungi Development Foundation and UM Healthcare Trust.

Amazing work is already being done by these organizations. SIUT, for example, has already established seven medical relief camps and three field hospitals in different parts of the country. Their doctors and paramedics have treated more than 100,000 people, many of whom are suffering from gastroenteritis, malaria and skin diseases.

In remarks during the opening plenary today, Eric Schmidt noted the importance of bringing 21st century technology solutions to disaster relief work. In collaboration with numerous NGOs, for example, Google developed Person Finder, an application that allows individuals to check on the status of friends and loved ones affected by a disaster, a few days after the Haiti earthquake. We developed Resource Finder, an experimental tool that aggregates information on health facilities to help first responders, and shared our MapMaker data with the U.N. We’ve published sites linked from our homepage to provide updated maps and imagery, videos, news and ways to donate in the wake of recent natural disasters in Haiti, Chile, China, Pakistan and the Gulf oil spill.

We’re excited to be at CGI this week to learn about innovative ways to use technology to assist with health, development and disaster response. We encourage non-profits to visit our newly updated Google for NonProfits site to learn how Google’s free tools can help expand the impact of each organization.

Posted by Jacquelline Fuller, Advocacy Director, Google.org

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(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)

Like many friends in the Bay Area and across the country, I’ve been stunned by the images of raging fires in San Bruno. Nearly 40 structures have been destroyed and 120 damaged, with several fatalities and multiple injuries after the explosion of a gas line. More than 100 people have been evacuated to nearby shelters.

This disaster strikes close to home; our YouTube offices are about two miles away from the main gas explosion. We’re thankful that no Google employee was hurt, but remain concerned for the well-being of our neighbors in the area.

We are donating an initial amount of $50,000 to the American Red Cross Bay Area Chapter to help with relief efforts. We’re directing Googlers to the local blood drives today and will be hosting blood drives in our San Bruno, Mountain View and San Francisco offices early next week.

We’ve created this map to show the location of the explosion and highlight nearby shelters and resources. The map is open for collaboration and welcomes additional useful information. We encourage you to embed it in your website or blog. We are also exploring the possibility of obtaining updated imagery of the area to help responders visualize the scope of the disaster.


View San Bruno Gas Explosion in a larger map

Our hearts go out to our neighbors who have been affected by the explosion. We thank the firefighters and first responders who have been working tirelessly to contain the fires and help the residents of San Bruno. You can donate to help here.

Posted by Laszlo Bock, VP of People Operations

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Official data on the number of people still lacking access to adequate water and sanitation services prove that the current situation is simply unacceptable: 884 million people lack adequate access to clean water and 2.6 billion lack access to proper sanitation, according to the WHO and UNICEF’s Joint Water Monitoring Program. Disease spreads rapidly with over one billion people forced to defecate outside due to a lack of sanitation and indoor plumbing; in fact, unsafe water and sanitation is the most important environmental cause of ill-health, with millions dying every year as a result of poor water, sanitation and hygiene conditions. Young children in particular tend to suffer from water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea.

Success in water supply and sanitation interventions is commonly measured in terms of the number of wells dug, public water points connected or public toilets constructed. This is what the official data - available at national scale only - reflect. The assumption is that every water point and every toilet will provide adequate and sustainable services to a fixed number of people. Too often, though, wells run dry, hand pumps break, toilets go “out-of-service,” or the quality of the water provided is not safe.

As a result the official data seriously underestimate the water and sanitation crisis. A realistic assessment requires continuous monitoring at local levels. Modern technology now makes that possible.

The H2.0 group of partners set out to demonstrate that community level monitoring of operational water and sanitation services is feasible at national scales. Google.org is one of the H2.0 partners. We have co-funded the effort and provided technical support. Yesterday the group launched the H2.0 platform at a World Water Week event in Stockholm. Over the past several years, the partners have collected detailed water and sanitation service data and developed a data management and mapping platform. This platform will enable users open access to analyse, visualise and interact with the data. We want to support government and development partners prioritize water investments and help NGOs and service providers assess their performance in a transparent manner.

Three components of the platform show Google tools in action.

The data show that the number of people with access to safe and affordable water is significantly lower than official estimates have previously shown:

• For Kenya, the initial analysis of data collected by the Water Services Trust Fund shows, according to Han Seur of GTZ, that: “In over a thousand low income urban areas with a total population over 4.5 million less than 25% have access to safe and affordable water.”
• For Tanzania WaterAid and partners mapped over 25 thousand rural public water points in 2006. Vincent Casey of WaterAid summarized their report as: “Water point data mapped by WaterAid Tanzania has demonstrated that nearly half (46%) of rural water points are not functional. A quarter of all new water points are no longer working just two years after installation.”
• For Zanzibar, according to Graham Alabaster of UN-Habitat: “Counting only those who are paying less 10% of their income for water as having affordable access, the water access rate had to be revised from 90% down to 22%.”
  

Unfortunately this information implies that the water and sanitation crisis is affecting two to three times more people in the areas surveyed than the official data suggest.

Better data on water services can help consumers hold their water service provider accountable. H2.0 partner ITC developed the Human Sensor Web, a system that allows Zanzibar citizens to report water outages by SMS and receive alert messages on water quality and availability.

To understand the issue and invest in solutions that work, we need to stop measuring success as construction of taps and toilets, and start measuring success by monitoring the number of people with sustainable access to safe and affordable water and sanitation services.

Posted by Frank Rijsberman, Director Program, Google.org and Chair, H2.0 Consortium

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