You’ve heard of Ushahidi, the crowd sourced crisis tracking platform that was developed in Kenya at the time of the post-election violence in 2008, and that has since been used to track events like the Haiti earthquake and Snowmageddon. Well, now there’s also an LRA crisis tracker, following the actions of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a group that has been abducting, raping, maiming, and killing civilians (including the enslaving of numerous children) in Uganda, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic for decades. The LRA Crisis Tracker collects data from NGOs and regional actors to produce real time reports of LRA activities; here, for instance, is some of their Twitter feed:
12 Feb-Napopo, DRC: 4 of the 5 people abducted on 11 Feb escaped from the #LRA. 1 woman is still being held captive.
20h11 Feb-Napopo, DRC: Returning home from the market, 5 people ambushed by suspected #LRA. They were abducted and their goods looted.
21h14 Feb-Nangilidakwe, DRC: A fisherman shot in the hand by alleged #LRA is currently being treated at a local health center.
22h10 Feb-Bangulukpu, DRC: Suspected #LRA killed a man with a knife when he fell to the ground carrying 2 bags of flour and corn.
And here you can find their monthly security brief for November, 2011.
I learned of the LRA crisis tracker from Chris Blattman’s blog post Can we predict eruptions of violence? Statistics and the future of conflict early warning, in which he discusses the use of data collected in Liberia in 2009 “to predict mass violence–communal killings, ethnic conflicts, or mob violence–in 2010.”
Some highlights:
We correctly predict up to 75% of all conflicts two years later
Simpler model with fewer factors do better than more interactive models with many factors
We can train the models not only to maximize accuracy, but to minimize “false negatives”–the costly cases where you predict peace instead of violence
We can identify 40 to 70 percent of all incidents (“true positives”), with three to five false alarms (or “false positives”) for each correctly predicted incident
Other African news:
The Harvard Business Review has a blog post by Bright B. Simons, who lives in Ghana and who invented the SMS shortcode system for authenticating pharmaceuticals, on Africa’s Chance to Leapfrog the West.
Forbes has an article on the Top 20 Tech Startups in Africa.
Kenya has been declared free from polio, but Chad is finding why polio is so hard to eliminate.
Oxfam International reports that Ending Poverty Need Not Be At the Expense of the Environment.
In Nigeria, the First Islamic Bank begins business with three branches.
Food Imports Drive Inflation in Eastern Africa.
In South Africa Class Overtakes Race As Most Divisive Factor in Country, Says IJR Report. I note a parallel with the US, where income, more than race, is now driving the achievement gap.
The LRA is so weird, and so brutal that I find it hard to believe that they have managed to exist this long. I assume they serve some function for other power groups, but you would think the association damning.
Steve
During the years when Sudan was torn by a civil war between north and south (as opposed to the more recent years when a peace agreement was concluded between north and south and war broke out in Darfur), Sudan used the LRA in a proxy war: http://www.smallarmssurveysudan.org/pdfs/HSBA-SWP-8-LRA.pdf
The Sudan/LRA alliance, though, ended, perhaps in 2005, perhaps in 2006.
The LRA has also gotten some mileage out of hiding out in countries that are already conflict ridden. The DRC and the Central African Republic have both been ranked highly, repeatedly, on the annual Failed States Index.