 Welcome to our live broadcast and Twitter chat from Canberra, Australia. My name is Stephanie Kimber from the Innovation Exchange of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. We're here today talking to innovators who've joined us from around the world with their great ideas on how we can make humanitarian response better in the Pacific. I'm here with my colleague Nissan Maserath from the Open Innovation Agency, Second News. That's right Stephanie. We're here as part of the Pacific humanitarian challenge. The program was designed as a challenge to really look for global solutions that may be applicable to the Pacific region to solve issues connected to disaster response. So we're trying to improve how we do responses to natural disasters. Through the program we obtained 130 applications of solutions and basically the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade selected top 10 projects to come to Canberra, Australia and really explore how to do their implementations in the Pacific. Yeah and you can join us on Twitter and join the conversation using hashtag rethinking response. So first up we're going to talk to one of our innovators, Jack Hurley from Fyre Tail. We're going to invite him to come over. Hi Jack. Good day everyone. And Jack if you can tell us a little bit more about your low cost unmanned aerial system. Yep so this is Fyre Tail. Firstly Jack, her name is my name. I'm part of a team with Tim Sigmund and Samuel Cullen from Albany, New South Wales. So this is the Fyre Tail. Low cost unmanned aerial system. It is a easily deployed system as well. Low cost because it's foam. It's nearly indestructible. And we also create the autopilot. So we're able to produce a lot smaller autopilot now as of 10 days ago. And it's easily deployed because of these buttons. We're able to easily deploy this into a into a disaster scenario and anyone can fly. Meaning that little training, press the buttons 1, 2, 3 and this will fly away after you press the red button, shake it, then throw it. It'll fly away. It'll capture direct down imagery on images and then be able to stitch them in real time. And then when it comes back to the first responder or whoever's on the ground, then they're able to look at the maps and action on that. Wow. Can you use any mobile phone device to plug into it? Yeah so currently we have an Android app that's downloaded for free. And then we're working on the iOS, the Apple Find as we speak. Wow. That's awesome. Thank you, Jeff. And good luck with your idea. Just a quick reminder, you can join us on Twitter using the hashtag rethinkingresponse. Nisan, who do we have next? Yeah, we have Carol Angier from the project Nevaro Atu Disaster Response Platform. Basically they're trying to approach disaster response to a low cost low tech really approach. And it's a women led project and also about engaging women in the region. So Carol, you may want to explain us a bit more about the project. Yes. As we know during disasters, women are the fast responders. When a disaster strikes or is about to happen, they're the ones who are out there organizing their own families, ensuring the entire community is safe, and getting everybody prepared. But when it comes to deciding what is to happen in the disaster response or defining the protection issues women are never consulted, instead people decide on their behalf. And as a result, people miss out the critical issues that affect women in the community. And so this project, which actually Australia is doing in collaboration with SimLab, is going to enable women to share their information fast hand through a data dashboard that filters through the National Disaster Management Committee, articulating what their needs are, their own analysis, and the type of response that would resonate to their situation. So it's a great opportunity to promote women's leadership and agency in disaster response. And you've been trialling versions of this already? Yes, we have already established women's forums called Women Talk Talk Together forums that has membership of about 4,000 women. These forums are safe spaces for women to organize, strategize, and have critical actions towards humanitarian response. It creates, they create a great opportunity for providing an alternative analysis, but also building women's capacity to do it for themselves. And I think that this there's no better time to do this program than now. Fantastic. Great. Thank you so much, Carol. So Carol is joining us here at the Innovation Exchange in Canberra, Australia. Innovation Exchange is part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Australian Government. And you can learn more about the program in Pacific Humanitarian Challenge.org. So thank you, Carol. Thank you very much. Thanks. So we're continuing our live broadcast from the Innovation Exchange. Next up, we're going to go straight to Patrick Haynes. Patrick joins us. He's a DFAT staff member who works in Vanuatu at the High Commission. And he's going to tell us about some of the challenges that people face in the Pacific when a disaster strikes. In the Pacific during disasters, one of the, some of the main things that affect the people and the governments at that time are communications, of course, and other logistics. And also just the spirit at which humanitarian assistance is given to the general public. Yeah. And you lived through a cyclone pan. And maybe you can tell us what your personal experiences were and what it was like being in the High Commission involved in that response. Yeah. So it was quite a terrifying experience. One that I've lived through in the past. In 1987 was the last cyclone that hit Vanuatu. But it was really good to see how the Australian response came about. It was a cyclone with the first ones in to help the government of Vanuatu respond to the disaster. And it's very, it's very enlightening to be here and to see all the proposals that have been put forward despite this Pacific humanitarian challenge because they're all tackling the issues that are common around Pacific islands. And we hope that with this innovation, we can address some of those issues. And so that in the future, we build on the resilience of the people, but also helping governments respond to it. So I don't know, maybe there's people out there watching this who don't even know where Vanuatu is or what it looks like. Can you tell us about the geography of Vanuatu and why that's a challenge in responding? Yeah, Vanuatu is made up of 33 islands. It's kind of, yeah, archival ago. And like it's never been visited other nations. The challenge of logistically, to get assistance out of the communities is quite difficult. And it's quite a challenge for us as respondents to address that. And yeah, that's why it's really good to be here, seeing some of the innovation and some of the reviews that are coming forward. It's really promising for the city. Great. So I know in CyclonePam, it was not that difficult to get a lot of supplies into Fort Vila, into the capital, but then getting them out? Yes, the challenge of course presented to us and our humanitarian partners on the ground was that we were receiving a lot of assistance coming through deeper channels through the Prince forces, bringing it all to the main centres, but it was actually the challenge of getting them out to the remote areas of Vanuatu that presented a lot of challenge and quite a big challenge for us. And how long do you think people in those remote islands had to wait? Sometimes. Well, it varied between two weeks to a month. And you know, times that place a lot of pressure on all us respondents and things that we'd like to do better in future. Yeah, that's amazing. And telecommunications, obviously a big issue when nobody can communicate. That's something you experienced as well. Yes, we had a few, especially for Southern Islands, were in Blackouts for about three or four days, where there was nothing coming back and that was quite worrying. It was a big risk. We did not know how many people were injured and how many people, maybe it's emergency interventions. And so it was a big challenge. And it was something that really honed on home that, you know, and if you can disaster the moment of communication is really vital. And without that, it presented a huge challenge. Yeah, we all rely on our mobile phones to communicate none more in a disaster. So yeah, that's really a critical issue. It's been great to hear from you first hand, someone from the Pacific who's dealt with the response makes our challenge seem more real. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you, Patrick. So up next, we have someone from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. His name is Michael Hazard. Michael, how are you? Good. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. So Michael is part of the team leading humanitarian response at the department. And we'd just like to know from you, Michael, what was kind of the motivation behind this program? Yeah, look, I mean, the ultimate motivation for us is a safer, more resilient specific. And essentially, you know, we know that the Pacific is a very vast area. I think the statistic we heard yesterday was 30% of the world's land or surface area, and less than half a percent of the world's population. So that really highlights to us significant challenges in disaster response and preparedness. And certainly, from our perspective, the challenge is an opportunity to rethink how we work, to continually assess whether our approach with the Pacific is fit for purpose. And to establish new partnerships and forge new relationships to make sure that Australia and the region can respond better to crisis. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, thanks for that. I think it's very much this idea that there may be many concepts and maybe ideas out there, right, that could very much apply to the region. Yeah, look, I mean, what we've seen through this challenge of 130 applications and submissions is that there's lots of ideas, right? The whole idea for this challenge is to have resources set aside to test those ideas, to see if they work. And if they work, to encourage partnerships to take them to scale. What we want to see through this process is a stronger, more resilient Pacific. We want to build the capability of governments and communities in the Pacific to prepare for and to respond to crises. And it's only early days in the challenge, but so far, we've already seen new collaborations, new partnerships, and we really have high expectations that the challenge will really help us to reshape how we work in this region. The other thing that's really important is the particular role in the global humanitarian system. What we want to see through this challenge is an impact, the ability to influence the world humanitarian summit that's just coming up in May. And we're already seeing opportunities to reshape policies, to sort of rethink how the global humanitarian system works. And I really have high ambitions that this challenge will really be the start of a new way of working in our region. Are there kind of one or two specific issue areas that you think are kind of primed to be really addressed? Yeah, as we've identified in the challenges, there's a couple of recurring themes from previous disasters, most recently with Cyclone Winston and Fuji, and Cyclone Pam is going to watch it. One of the things we really struggle is reaching those remote communities. So how do we get, how do we understand the needs and then get the right support quickly to the remote communities? And certainly the challenge focus areas really seeks to address that. The other thing that we need to do is invest in preparedness. So how do we build the resilience of communities to withstand shocks so that the response effort can be minimized after a crisis? So the three focus areas have been an ongoing discussion in the Pacific. And I think that the ideas that we're seeing really help us to break into those, how we respond to those crises when they occur. Great. Yeah, thank you so much for joining us. Excellent, thank you Michael. And obviously if anyone online has any comments or questions, please feel free to join the conversation on Twitter. Our hashtag, we think in response. Yeah, and we're adding our next innovator, Paul Gardner-Steven from Flinders University which is in South Australia. Hi Paul, thank you for being with us and we'd love to hear about your tech. Sure, so it's just interesting hearing the previous presenters talking about the need for being able to reach remote communities and building resilience with communications. It's so keen in all of these things that we do, we take away communications from any society and it becomes much more vulnerable. And of course when you're trying to deal with all these things that are very vulnerable to disaster, if you can't communicate, then this really makes it much harder. So we'll be looking at ways to make mobile phones communicate directly without needing any cellular infrastructure so that when everything is wiped out, people can still communicate. So we can do that over short range with phones directly or we can add into blocks like this one, as you call a message standard, and this allows the phones to communicate potentially over kilometres between them. So there's no mobile, you can't make a phone call, there's no data, there's no internet, there's no Wi-Fi, that's when you're... Yeah, so we can stand up a local temporary short-term and secure network so we can crimp it into n. Again, things like marketing, there's no turning of the time. And so the idea of someone sort of reading out your medical records over a two-day radio, this is, while it's possible and you're appreciative that it can happen, you'd still rather, actually, that you maintain your privacy and get the whole colour elements that come into this. Wow, and there's an app that sits on... That's right, so on the phone's installed app, some of this yellow box will actually offer the app to download to your phone. So we're perhaps reliquing that we can actually roll out a communications network in the acute phase of the disaster so that we can start making this difference without waiting for the phone network to come back up or for any of these other sort of infrastructure. Right, so if somebody's in the disaster and they go, they're with their friend and their friend has the app, and they go, oh, how can I get the app? They can actually still download it even if there's no connectivity. Absolutely, so there's one phone from Sheriff for the next, or you can download it from one of these boxes if there's one around, versus even without these boxes, the phones have to be nearby each other when they're communicating, but you can send a message to someone at some distance away, and that message will encrypted onto the other phones that encounter them. Eventually, one of those phones will encounter the phones that it's addressed to, then it will be encrypted for people to read it. So people moving around in the disaster zone are actually transporting data, so they've been unwitting data rules in a very positive sense. Wow, and you're working in partnership with New Zealand Red Cross and the other ones in the Sanctuary in South Australia. That is fantastic. Thank you so much, Paul. We look forward to seeing a lot more of your ideas. So, up next, we have Cristiano Giolando from the Humanitarian Open Street Map team. Hi, Cristiano. Hello. Thanks for joining us. So, can you tell us a little bit about your solution and what you're working on? Yeah, our solution is about drones and drone mapping, and we all know how drones can help and collect an imagery after a disaster, or even before disasters, for mapping. So with Humanitarian Open Street Map, we use imagery to start and create a map where a map doesn't exist. So, or if a disaster strikes like recently with the Apollo earthquake in 2015, a large community of mappers can come together and start tracing buildings, roads, and then are used for doing this kind of disaster. But all this is not possible unless you have imagery in which you can use to start tracing that map. And so, imagery is very important, but it's hard to find. So we have different teams that go in the field and collect imagery with UAVs, with drones, but then it's hard to put it all together into one place for visualizing it and using it. And so, our proposal is called Specific Drone Imagery Dashboard, and it's basically an online platform for collecting all this imagery into one place and make it accessible for disaster response. And have you used this in other countries already? Well, we have a project called Open Area Map, which puts together salad imagery, together with drone imagery and aircraft imagery. And so, we wanted to expand that project to apply to the specific context of the Pacific region. And we have seen, like in Vanuatu last year, the incredible imagery collected by drones after the impact of Cyclone Pam. And unfortunately, it was all scattered around and not collected into one easy place to analyze. And so, we thought that we could apply the idea of Open Area Map to the specific context of the region and the drone map. So the challenge actually inspired you to adapt what you were already working on to the Pacific region? Yeah, we saw the right opportunity to extend that idea to the Pacific region. Great. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you guys. Thanks, Chris Janos. So, next we're joined by one of our 15 expert advisors who spent the morning giving feedback to the innovators. I want to welcome Dr. Catherine Ball. She is one of Australia's leading experts in UAVs and imagery and data crunching and has once recently been named Dame of Drones. That's one of my favorite shows, I have to say. I think I'm writing a book with that title as well, so I'm going to claim that right now. Awesome. So, can you just tell us about what you've been hearing and learning from the innovators and any feelings you've got about the design to bring? Well, when I first heard about this challenge when it was announced back when in July in Auckland by Julie Bishop, I was just like, yes! I was like, this is again Australia is leading the rest of the world by actually putting some money where its mouth is and encouraging this kind of innovation. And I can't say how happy I am that it's happening here in Australia. My accent might give me away. I'm a POM by origin, but I've been here for six years and I've been working in innovation and applications of innovation for the last five years. I'm a real believer that the culture of innovation is a culture of conversation. And we've even witnessed today that there's been like a micro incubator kind of thing set up here. There's people in this room that have already started bouncing new ideas off each other. They've already started coming up with collaborations. And so I'd suggest even before any minutes have been announced, I think everybody taking part in this process has already gained something. That's fantastic, that's great. And do you have any thoughts about the fact that drones or drone imagery seems to be, you know, we had a lot of proposals about that. Is that it's the new thing? It is what we're doing. One of the issues with using it. Yeah, well I guess when people say to me, so how did you get into drones? My point is I'm not actually a drone person. I was always a data person, but I wanted to collect data without having to put people at risk at the right price point. And luckily here in Australia, we've actually been about five years ahead of the rest of the world in terms of the applications of drone technology. But as a data manager, you always know with big data comes big responsibility. And with drones, we're now able to capture the kinds of data that we could have only dreamed about sort of 10 or 15 years ago. And it's interesting to note the mirror that's kind of happening between industry and the way we're looking at using drones for oil spill response, for example, or for post site flow response in Northern Territory or Northern Queensland, where we have Australian communities that are isolated from traditional support networks. And the parallels between some of the innovation we're seeing here, specifically in the Pacific region from a development point of view, I actually see quite translatable to some of the issues that we have working in remote and inaccessible parts of Australia itself. So I think there's a lot more to be gained. But Australia is certainly leading the charge in terms of applications and new methods of remote sensing. Drones or RPAs, remotely piloted aircraft is kind of the acronym that I use now. So drone of RPA, Dame of RPA doesn't quite happen. But it's interesting to see that people get very attached to the idea of the technology and it's very sexy and very new. And that's where I sort of sit back and go, well, that's all well and good. But if it can't give me the data I want in the safe manner that I want with the right price point involved, then it's really not going to fly. It's a one to the better term. Nice pun. Okay, we might wrap it up there. Thank you so much to all for joining us. So yeah, next we have Nadine Haddad from Save the Children. Nadine, thanks for joining. Thank you for having me. So can you tell us a bit more about your project? Yes. So what we're proposing today is financial or insurance products for the pacific community. So we're looking at financially resilient communities across the Pacific. What we're looking at is this is a combined effort of Save the Children, QBE and the Bank of South Pacific. We're looking at developing two products. One that is at a micro level product that targets household, so well-being of livelihoods. And the other one more at a macro level, so targets infrastructure like communities, schools and hospitals and medical centres. Great. And have you already implemented in any countries? What's the level kind of development of the project? So this is the like the research and development phase. The stages that we're going to go through is there will be up to seven months of market assessments as well as social needs and impact across the Solomon Islands. And the reason why we want to invest in that is to have the products tailored to the needs of the community. So this is a chance for the community to tell us how they would like the product to be tailored, how they would like to get involved in these insurance products. Historically insurance has not been a big thing across the Pacific and this is kind of a new concept that we're coming with to the Pacific. So it would be really exciting to see the change in behavior and the acceptance of such a model. And are you thinking about local partners? How are you going to do the engagement? Yes, absolutely. So as I said, this is a joint initiative that would save the children in QBE and the Bank of South Pacific. The way we're going to go about it is by forming steering committees and it's really to get representatives from the communities to commit different provinces. We will have groups of women as well as groups of children. And at the same table, we will have representatives from the NDMOs, local governments, local NGOs. It's really critical to get the different levels of the different parties on the same table to have this ownership. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Very interesting to hear what you're putting in. So next up, we've got so many interesting people today. I just have to say. Next up, I'd like to invite Simon Schwoll from the Beamer leapfrog project. And he's going to tell us what his amazing idea is. So how do you just talk about insurance? Yes. And you can speak about insurance as well. All right. So we're coming from a different angle. It's about assets reconstruction. It's about life and hospital insurance. What we've seen is that most people in the Pacific, actually 95% of people in the Pacific are not insured. They'll have access to formal kind of insurance. And when disasters hit, that's obviously a big problem. So we've designed insurance products that are affordable for the low income people and that they pay and subscribe to using their mobile phone. So you don't have to have to make a account. You don't have to be in the city and just use your phone to look to be insured. And you've tried this already? Yes. Somewhere else in the Pacific? I was in Papua New Guinea for a year and a half where I developed this project. We became pretty the first, the most popular product, insurance product in the Pacific. We sold 500,000 policies. And this is a model that exists in other parts of the world. We actually devised, actually operating in 15 countries now. Wow. And so this doesn't rely on money from aid programs or government assistance once that's been running? Exactly. Sustainable? Yes. So we're not an NGO. We're a for-profit company. And we plan to be profitable within one or two years to recommend and then improve yourself sustainable and be there. And there's something particular about your product that you're targeting not individuals, but their employers. So individuals, we already do that. We already provide this service to people in Papua New Guinea in Fiji and in the coming days, we're not in Fiji. But the enterprise targets and customers are forgetful customers that we cannot access yet. And they're almost definitely more difficult to access because we need to talk to the companies and the employers being more on behalf of the employees. Also, these markets that we're targeting, now we are somewhere in Fiji, our small markets, where we have a lot of challenges, a lot of difficult challenges. So that's why we're here to ask for a grant and for help. It's because we like to extend our reach to more people. But it's difficult to make it in this case. We've got it. Wonderful. Thank you so much Simon. Thanks for telling us and good luck with your idea. Thank you. And next we have Stefan Kraus from the Benoit to Disaster Response platform. Hey guys. Hi. How are you? Good. Where are you coming from? Where are you? Well, it's a really long bit of travel for me. I'm from Canberra. So I went about maybe a kilometer from my house. It's tough. Can you tell us about your project? Yeah, sure. So what we're proposing is kind of a number of different components that make up a platform to improve the capture, understand and share of data when it comes to disaster response. So what we know is that quality data is really critical to making decisions around allocation of resources and support and all of those things when it comes to disaster response. And working in Vanuatu already, after cycling PAM, we kind of identified a number of bottlenecks that exist in that process and we're trying to respond to some of those. Great. Would you want to tell us a little bit about the chemical aspect of it? Yeah. How are you approaching the solution? Yeah, sure. So I mean there are a few different components that we can expand on. One of them is when data collection happens, making sure that you have high quality surveys to ask the right questions at the right time is really important. So we want to kind of work with government and with partners to get that happen. And then the other real critical bottleneck is around the data analysis that comes back, that has to happen after data comes back. And we think that there's space to simplify and to use digital systems and the innovations to kind of simplify that analysis process. So that's a kind of space that we are working. Okay. Awesome. Great. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you. Stefan and for making such a huge trip to get here. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on YouTube and on Twitter. It's been great engaging with you and you can learn more about the Pacific Humanitarian Challenge by going to our website PacificHumanitarianChallenge.org and keep using the hashtag rethinking response. Yeah, definitely keep the conversation going and we hope to hear from more new innovative ideas for disaster response in the Pacific and beyond. Thank you. Thank you.