Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

What is AI and ML?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a field of computer science dedicated to solving cognitive problems commonly associated with human intelligence, such as learning, problem solving, and pattern recognition. Put another way, AI is a catch-all term used to describe new types of computer software that can mimic human intelligence. There is no single, precise, universal definition of AI.

Machine learning (ML) is a subset of AI. Essentially, machine learning is one of the ways computers “learn.” ML is an approach to AI that relies on algorithms on large datasets trained to develop their own rules. This is an alternative to traditional computer programs, in which rules have to be hand-coded in. Machine Learning extracts patterns from data and places that data into different sets. ML has been described as “the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed.” Two short videos provide simple explanations of AI and ML: What Is Artificial Intelligence? | AI Explained and What is machine learning?

Other subsets of AI include speech processing, natural language processing (NLP), robotics, cybernetics, vision, expert systems, planning systems and evolutionary computation. (See Artificial Intelligence – A modern approach).

artificial intelligence, types

The diagram above shows the many different types of technology fields that comprise AI. When referring to AI, one can be referring to any or several of these technologies or fields, and applications that use AI, like Siri or Alexa, utilize multiple technologies. For example, if you say to Siri, “Siri, show me a picture of a banana,” Siri utilizes “natural language processing” to understand what you’re asking, and then uses “vision” to find a banana and show it to you. The question of how Siri understood your question and how Siri knows something is a banana is answered by the algorithms and training used to develop Siri. In this example, Siri would be drawing from “question answering” and “image recognition.”

Most of these technologies and fields are very technical and relate more to computer science than political science. It is important to know that AI can refer to a broad set of technologies and applications. Machine learning is a tool used to create AI systems.

As noted above, AI doesn’t have a universal definition. There are lots of myths surrounding AI—everything from the notion that it’s going to take over the world by enslaving humans, to curing cancer. This primer is intended to provide a basic understanding of artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as outline some of the benefits and risks posed by AI. It is hoped that this primer will enable you to a conversation about how best to regulate AI so that its potential can be harnessed to improve democracy and governance.

Definitions

Algorithm:An algorithm is defined as “a finite series of well-defined instructions that can be implemented by a computer to solve a specific set of computable problems.” Algorithms are unambiguous, step-by-step procedures. A simple example of an algorithm is a recipe; another is that of a procedure to find the largest number in a set of randomly ordered numbers. An algorithm may either be created by a programmer or generated automatically. In the latter case, it is generated using data via ML.

Algorithmic decision-making/Algorithmic decision system (ADS): A system in which an algorithm makes decisions on its own or supports humans in doing so. ADSs usually function by data mining, regardless of whether they rely on machine learning or not. Examples of a fully automated ADSs are the electronic passport control check-point at airports, and an online decision made by a bank to award a customer an unsecured loan based on the person’s credit history and data profile with the bank. An example of a semi-automated ADS are the driver-assistance features in a car that control its brake, throttle, steering, speed and direction.

Big Data: Extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions. Data is classified as Big Data based on its volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value. This video provides a short explainer video with an introduction to big data and the concept of the 5Vs.

Class label: The label applied after the ML system has classified its inputs, for example, Is a given email message spam or not spam?

Data mining: The practice of examining large pre-existing databases in order to generate new information.” Data mining is also defined as “knowledge discovery from data.

Deep model, also called a “deep neural network” is a type of neural network containing multiple hidden layers.

Label: A label is what the ML system is predicting.

Model: The representation of what a machine learning system has learned from the training data.

Neural network: A biological neural network (BNN) is a system in the brain that enables a creature to sense stimuli and respond to them. An artificial neural network (ANN) is a computing system inspired by its biological counterpart in the human brain. In other words, an ANN is “an attempt to simulate the network of neurons that make up a human brain so that the computer will be able to learn things and make decisions in a humanlike manner.” Large-scale ANNs drive several applications of AI.

Profiling: Profiling involves automated data processing to develop profiles that can be used to make decisions about people.

Robot: Robots are programmable, artificially intelligent automated devices. Fully autonomous robots, e.g., self-driving vehicles, are capable of operating and making decisions without human control. AI enables robots to sense changes in their environments and adapt their responses/ behaviors accordingly in order to perform complex tasks without human intervention. – Report of COMEST on robotics ethics (2017).

Scoring: ¨Scoring is also called prediction, and is the process of generating values based on a trained machine-learning model, given some new input data. The values or scores that are created can represent predictions of future values, but they might also represent a likely category or outcome.” When used vis-a-vis people, scoring is a statistical prediction that determines if an individual fits a category or outcome. A credit score, for example, is a number drawn from statistical analysis that represents the creditworthiness of an individual.

Supervised learning: ML systems learn how to combine inputs to produce predictions on never-before-seen data.

Unsupervised learning: Refers to training a model to find patterns in a dataset, typically an unlabeled dataset.

Training: The process of determining the ideal parameters comprising a model.

 

How do artificial intelligence and machine learning work?

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is a cross-disciplinary approach that combines computer science, linguistics, psychology, philosophy, biology, neuroscience, statistics, mathematics, logic and economics to “understanding, modeling, and replicating intelligence and cognitive processes by invoking various computational, mathematical, logical, mechanical, and even biological principles and devices.”

AI applications exist in every domain, industry, and across different aspects of everyday life. Because AI is so broad, it is useful to think of AI as made up of three categories:

  • Narrow AI or Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) is an expert system in a specific task, like image recognition, playing Go, or asking Alexa or Siri to answer a question.
  • Strong AI or Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is an AI that matches human intelligence.
  • Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) is an AI that exceeds human capabilities.

Modern AI techniques are developing quickly, and AI applications are already pervasive. However, these applications only exist presently in the “Narrow AI” field. Narrow AI, also known as weak AI, is AI designed to perform a specific, singular task, for example, voice-enabled virtual assistants such as Siri and Cortana, web search engines, and facial-recognition systems.

Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Superintelligence have not yet been achieved and likely will not be for the next few years or decades.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning is an application of Artificial Intelligence. Although we often find the two terms used interchangeably, machine learning is a process by which an AI application is developed. The machine-learning process involves an algorithm that makes observations based on data, identifies patterns and correlations in the data, and uses the pattern/correlation to make predictions about something. Most of the AI in use today is driven by machine learning.

Just as it is useful to break-up AI into three categories, machine learning can also be thought of as three different techniques: Supervised Learning; Unsupervised Learning; and Deep Learning.

Supervised Learning

Supervised learning efficiently categorizes data according to pre-existing definitions embodied in a labeled data set. One starts with a data set containing training examples with associated labels. Take the example of a simple spam-filtering system that is being trained using spam as well as non-spam emails. The “input” in this case is all the emails the system processes. After humans have marked certain emails as spam, the system sorts spam emails into a separate folder. The “output” is the categorization of email. The system finds a correlation between the label “spam” and the characteristics of the email message, such as the text in the subject line, phrases in the body of the message, or the email address or IP address of the sender. Using the correlation, it tries to predict the correct label (spam/not spam) to apply to all the future emails it gets.

“Spam” and “not spam” in this instance are called “class labels”. The correlation that the system has found is called a “model” or “predictive model.” The model may be thought of as an algorithm the ML system has generated automatically by using data. The labelled messages from which the system learns are called “training data.” The “target variable” is the feature the system is searching for or wants to know more about — in this case, it is the “spaminess” of email. The “correct answer,” so to speak, in the endeavor to categorize email is called the “desired outcome” or “outcome of interest.” This type of learning paradigm is called “supervised learning.”

Unsupervised Learning

Unsupervised learning involves having neural networks learn to find a relationship or pattern without having access to datasets of input-output pairs that have been labelled already. They do so by organizing and grouping the data on their own, finding recurring patterns, and detecting a deviation from the usual pattern. These systems tend to be less predictable than those with labeled datasets and tend to be deployed in environments that may change at some frequency and/or are unstructured or partially structured. Examples include:

  1. an optical character-recognition system that can “read” handwritten text even if it has never encountered the handwriting before.
  2. the recommended products a user sees on online shopping websites. These recommendations may be determined by associating the user with a large number of variables such as their browsing history, items they purchased previously, their ratings of those items, items they saved to a wish list, the user’s location, the devices they use, their brand preference and the prices of their previous purchases.
  3. detection of fraudulent monetary transactions based on, say, their timing and locations. For instance, if two consecutive transactions happened on the same credit card within a short span of time in two different cities.

A combination of supervised and unsupervised learning (called “semi-supervised learning”) is used when a relatively small dataset with labels is available, which can be used to train the neural network to act upon a larger, un-labelled dataset. An example of semi-supervised learning is software that creates deepfakes – photos, videos and audio files that look and sound real to humans but are not.

Deep Learning

Deep learning makes use of large-scale artificial neural networks (ANNs) called deep neural networks, to  create AI that can detect financial fraud, conduct medical image analysis, translate large amounts of text without human intervention and automate moderation of content of social networking websites . These neural networks learn to perform tasks by utilizing numerous layers of mathematical processes to find patterns or relationships among different data points in the datasets. A key attribute to deep learning is that these ANNs can peruse, examine and sort huge amounts of data, which enables them, theoretically, to find new solutions to existing problems.

Although there are other types of machine learning, these three – Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning and Deep Learning – represent the basic techniques used to create and train AI systems.

Bias in AI and ML

Artificial intelligence doesn’t come from nowhere; it comes from data received and derived from its developers and from you and me.

And humans have biases. When an AI system learns from humans, it may inherit their individual and societal biases. In cases where it does not learn directly from humans, the “predictive model” as described above may be biased because of the presence of biases in the selection and sampling of data that train the AI system, the “class labels” identified by humans, the way class labels are “marked” and any errors that may have occurred while identifying them, the choice of the “target variable,” “desired outcome” (as opposed to an undesired outcome), “reward”, “regret” and so on. Bias may also occur because of the design of the system; its developers, designers, investors or makers may have ended up baking their own biases into it.

There are three types of biases in computing systems:

  • Pre-existing bias has its roots in social institutions, practices, and attitudes.
  • Technical bias arises from technical constraints or considerations.
  • Emergent bias arises in a context of use.

Bias may affect, for example, the political advertisements one sees on the Internet, the content pushed to the top of the pile in the feeds of social media websites, the amount of insurance premium one needs to pay, if one is screened out of a recruitment process, or if one is allowed to go past border-control checks in another country.

Bias in a computing system is a systematic and repeatable error. Because ML deals with large amounts of data, even a small error rate gets compounded or magnified and greatly affects the outcomes from the system. A decision made by an ML system, especially one that processes vast datasets, is often a statistical prediction. Hence, its accuracy is related to the size of the dataset. Larger training datasets are likely to yield decisions that are more accurate and lower the possibility of errors.

Bias in AI/ ML systems may create new inequalities, exacerbate existing ones, reproduce existing biases, discriminatory treatment and practices, and hide discrimination. See this explainer related to AI bias.

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How are AI and ML relevant in civic space and for democracy?

Elephant tusks pictured in Uganda. In wildlife conservation, AI/ ML algorithms and past data can be used to predict poacher attacks. Photo credit: NRCN.

The widespread proliferation, rapid deployment, scale, complexity and impact of AI on society is a topic of great interest and concern for governments, civil society, NGOs, human-rights bodies, businesses and the general public alike. AI systems may require varying degrees of human interaction or none at all. AI/ML when applied in design, operation and delivery of services offers the potential to provide new services, and improve the speed, targeting, precision, efficiency, consistency, quality or performance of existing ones. It may provide new insights by making apparent previously undiscovered linkages, relationships and patterns, and offer new solutions. By analyzing large amounts of data, ML systems save time, money and effort. Some examples of the application of AI/ ML in different domains include using AI/ ML algorithms and past data in wildlife conservation to predict poacher attacks  and discovering new species of viruses.

TB Microscopy Diagnosis in Uzbekistan. AI/ML systems aid healthcare professionals in medical diagnosis and easier detection of diseases. Photo credit: USAID.

The predictive abilities of AI and the application of AI and ML in categorizing, organizing, clustering and searching information have brought about improvements in many fields and domains, including healthcare, transportation, governance, education, energy, security and safety, crime prevention, policing, law enforcement, urban management and the judicial system. For example, ML may be used to track the progress and effectiveness of government and philanthropic programs. City administrations, including those of smart cities , use ML to analyze data accumulated over time, about energy consumption, traffic congestion, pollution levels, and waste, in order to monitor and manage them and identify patterns in their generation, consumption and handling.

Digital maps created in Mugumu, Tanzania. Artificial intelligence can support planning of infrastructure development and preparation for disaster. Photo credit: Bobby Neptune for DAI.

AI is also used in climate monitoring, weather forecasting, prediction of disasters and hazards, and planning of infrastructure development. In healthcare, AI systems aid healthcare professionals in medical diagnosis, robot-assisted surgery, easier detection of diseases, prediction of disease outbreaks, tracing the source(s) of disease spread, and so on. Law enforcement and security agencies deploy AI/ML-based surveillance systems, face recognition systems, drones , and predictive policing for the safety and security of the citizens. On the other side of the coin, many of these applications raise questions about individual autonomy, personhood, privacy, security, mass surveillance, reinforcement of social inequality and negative impacts on democracy (See the Risks section ).

Fish caught off the coast of Kema, North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Facial recognition is used to identify species of fish to contribute to sustainable fishing practices. Photo credit: courtesy of USAID SNAPPER.

The full impact of the deployment of AI systems on the individual, society and democracy is not known or knowable, which creates many legal, social, regulatory, technical and ethical conundrums. The topic of harmful bias in artificial intelligence and its intersection with human rights and civil rights has been a matter of concern for governments and activists. The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has provisions on automated decision-making, including profiling. The European Commission released a whitepaper on AI in February 2020 as a prequel to potential legislation governing the use of AI in the EU, while another EU body has released recommendations on the human rights impacts of algorithmic systems. Similarly, Germany, France, Japan and India have drafted AI strategies for policy and legislation. Physicist Stephen Hawking once said, “…success in creating AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. But it could also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks.”

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Opportunities

Artificial intelligence and machine learning can have positive impacts when used to further democracy, human rights and governance issues. Read below to learn how to more effectively and safely think about artificial intelligence and machine learning in your work.

Detect and overcome bias

Humans come with individual and cognitive biases and prejudices and may not always act or think rationally. By removing humans from the decision-making process, AI systems potentially eliminate the impact of human bias and irrational decisions, provided the systems are not biased themselves, and that they are intelligible, transparent and auditable. AI systems that aid traceability and transparency can be used to avoid, detect or trace human bias (some of which may be discriminatory) as well as non-human bias, such as bias originating from technical limitations. Much research has shown how automated filtering of job applications reproduces multiple biases; however research has also shown that AI can be used to combat unconscious recruiter biases in hiring. For processes like job hiring where many hidden human biases go undetected,  responsibly-designed algorithms can act as a double check for humans and bring those hidden biases into view, and in some cases even nudge people into less-biased outcomes, for example by masking candidates’ names and other bias-triggering features on a resume.

Improve security and safety

Automated systems based on AI can be used to detect attacks, such as credit card fraud or a cyberattack on public infrastructure. As online fraud becomes more advanced, companies, governments, and individuals need to be able to identify fraud even more quickly, even before it occurs. It is like a game of cat and mouse. Computers are creating more complex, unusual patterns to avoid detection, the human understanding of these patterns is limited— humans need to use equally agile and unusual patterns too, that can adapt and iterate in real time, and Machine Learning can provide this.

Moderate harmful online content

Enormous quantities of content uploaded every second to the social web (videos on YouTube and TikTok, photos and posts to Instagram and Facebook, etc.). There is simply too much for human reviewers to examine themselves. Filtering tools like algorithms and machine-learning techniques are used by many social media platforms to screen through every post for illegal or harmful content (like child sexual abuse material, copyright violations, or spam). Indeed, artificial intelligence is at work in your email inbox, automatically filtering unwanted marketing content away from your main inbox. Recently, the arrival of deepfake and other computer-generated content requires similarly advanced approaches to identify it. Deepfakes take their name from the deep learning artificial-intelligence technology used to make them. Fact-checkers and other actors working to diffuse the dangerous, misleading power of these false videos are developing their own artificial intelligence to identify these videos as false.

Web Search

Search engines run on algorithmic ranking systems. Of course, search engines are not without serious biases and flaws, but they allow us to locate information from the infinite stretches of the internet. Search engines on the web (like Google and Bing) or within platforms (like searches within Wikipedia or within The New York Times) can enhance their algorithmic ranking systems by using machine learning to favor certain kinds of results that may be beneficial to society or of higher quality. For example, Google has an initiative to highlight “original reporting.”

Translation

Machine Learning has allowed for truly incredible advances in translation. For example, Deepl is a small machine-translation company that has surpassed even the translation abilities of the biggest tech companies. Other companies have also created translation algorithms that allow people across the world to translate texts into their preferred languages, or communicate in languages beyond those they know well, which has advanced the fundamental right of access to information, as well as the right to freedom of expression and the right to be heard.

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Risks

The use of emerging technologies can also create risks in civil society programming. Read below on how to discern the possible dangers associated with artificial intelligence and machine learning in DRG work, as well as how to mitigate for unintended – and intended – consequences.

Discrimination against marginalized groups

There are several ways in which AI may make decisions that can lead to discrimination, including  how the “target variable” and the “class labels” are defined; during the process of labeling the training data; when collecting the training data;  during the feature selection; and when proxies are identified. It is also possible to intentionally set up an AI system to be discriminatory towards one or more groups. This video explains how commercially available facial recognition systems trained on racially biased data sets discriminate against people of dark skin, women and gender-diverse people.

The accuracy of AI systems is based on how ML processes Big Data , which in turn depends on the size of the dataset. The larger the size, the more accurate the system’s decisions are likely to be. However, women, Black people and people of color (PoC), disabled people, minorities, indigenous people, LGBTQ+ people, and other minorities, are less likely to be represented in a dataset because of structural discrimination, group size, or attitudes that prevent their full participation in society. Bias in training data reflects and systematizes existing discrimination. Because an AI system is often a black box, it is hard to conclusively prove or demonstrate that it has made a discriminatory decision, and why it makes certain decisions about some individuals or groups of people. Hence, it is difficult to assess whether certain people were discriminated against on the basis of their race, sex, marginalized status or other protected characteristics. For instance, AI systems used in predictive policing, crime prevention, law enforcement and the criminal justice system are, in a sense, tools for risk-assessment. Using historical data and complex algorithms, they generate predictive scores that are meant to indicate the probability of the occurrence of crime, the probable location and time, and the people who are likely to be involved. When relying on biased data or biased decision-making structures, these systems may end up reinforcing stereotypes about underprivileged, marginalized or minority groups.

A study by the Royal Statistical Society notes that “…predictive policing of drug crimes results in increasingly disproportionate policing of historically over‐policed communities… and, in the extreme, additional police contact will create additional opportunities for police violence in over‐policed areas. When the costs of policing are disproportionate to the level of crime, this amounts to discriminatory policy.” Likewise, when mobile applications for safe urban navigation, software for credit-scoring, banking, housing, insurance, healthcare, and selection of employees and university students rely on biased data and decisions, they reinforce social inequality and negative and harmful stereotypes.

The risks associated with AI systems are exacerbated when AI systems make decisions or predictions involving minorities such as refugees or “life and death” matters such as medical care. A 2018 report by The University of Toronto and Citizen Lab notes, “Many [asylum seekers and immigrants] come from war-torn countries seeking protection from violence and persecution. The nuanced and complex nature of many refugee and immigration claims may be lost on these technologies, leading to serious breaches of internationally and domestically protected human rights, in the form of bias, discrimination, privacy breaches, due process and procedural fairness issues, among others. These systems will have life-and-death ramifications for ordinary people, many of whom are fleeing for their lives.” For medical and healthcare uses, the stakes are especially high because an incorrect decision made by the AI system could potentially put lives at risk or drastically alter the quality of life or wellbeing of the people affected by it.

Security vulnerabilities

Malicious hackers and criminal organizations may use ML systems to identify vulnerabilities in and target public infrastructure or privately-owned systems such as IoT devices and self-driven cars, for example.

If malicious entities target AI systems deployed in public infrastructure, such as smart cities , smart grids, and nuclear installations as well as healthcare facilities and banking systems, among others, they  “will be harder to protect, since these attacks are likely to become more automated and more complex and the risk of cascading failures will be harder to predict. A smart adversary may either attempt to discover and exploit existing weaknesses in the algorithms or create one that they will later exploit.” Exploitation may happen, for example, through a poisoning attack, which interferes with the training data if machine learning is used. Attackers may also “use ML algorithms to automatically identify vulnerabilities and optimize attacks by studying and learning in real time about the systems they target.”

Privacy and data protection

The deployment of AI systems without adequate safeguards and redress mechanisms may pose many risks to privacy and data protection (See also the Data Protection . Businesses and governments collect immense amounts of personal data in order to train the algorithms of AI systems that render services or carry out specific tasks and activities. Criminals, rogue states/ governments/government bodies, and people with malicious intent often try to target these data for various reasons ranging from carrying out monetary fraud to commercial gains to political motives. For instance, health data captured from smartphone applications and Internet-enabled wearable devices, if leaked, can be misused by credit agencies, insurance companies, data brokers, cybercriminals, etc. The breach or abuse of non-personal data, such as anonymized data, simulations, synthetic data, or generalized rules or procedures, may also affect human rights.

Chilling effect

AI systems used for surveillance, policing, criminal sentencing, legal purposes, etc. become a new avenue for abuse of power by the state to control citizens and political dissidents. The fear of profiling, scoring, discrimination and pervasive digital surveillance may have a chilling effect on citizens’ ability or willingness to exercise their rights or express themselves. Most people will modify their behavior in order to obtain the benefits of a good score and to avoid the disadvantages that come with having a bad score.

Opacity (Black box nature of AI systems)

Opacity may be interpreted as either a lack of transparency or a lack of intelligibility. Algorithms, software code, ‘behind-the-scenes’ processing and the decision-making process itself may not be intelligible to those who are not experts or specialized professionals. In legal/judicial matters, for instance, the decisions made by an AI system do not come with explanations, unlike those of judges which are required to state the reasons on which their legal order or judgment is based. The legal order or judgment is quite likely to be on public record.

Technological unemployment

Automation systems, including AI/ML systems, are increasingly being used to replace human labor in various domains and industries, eliminating a large number of jobs and causing structural unemployment (known as technological unemployment). With the introduction of AI/ML systems, some types of jobs will be lost, some others will be transformed, and new jobs will appear. The new jobs are likely to require specific or specialized skills that are amenable to AI/ML systems.

Loss of individual autonomy and personhood

Profiling and scoring in AI raise apprehensions that people are being dehumanized and reduced to a profile or score. Automated decision-making systems may impact the wellbeing, physical integrity, quality of life of people, the information they find or are targeted with, the services and products they can or cannot avail, among other things. This affects what constitutes an individual’s consent (or lack thereof), the way consent is formed, communicated and understood, and the context in which it is valid. “[T]he dilution of the free basis of our individual consent – either through outright information distortion or even just the absence of transparency – imperils the very foundations of how we express our human rights and hold others accountable for their open (or even latent) deprivation”. – Human Rights in the Era of Automation and Artificial Intelligence

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Questions

If you are trying to understand the implications of artificial intelligence and machine learning in your work environment, or are considering using aspects of these technologies as part of your DRG programming, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Is artificial intelligence or machine learning an appropriate, necessary, and proportionate tool to use for this project and with this community?
  2. Who is designing and overseeing the technology? Can they explain to you what is happening at different steps of the process?
  3. What data are being used to design and train the technology? How could these data lead to biased or flawed functioning of the technology?
  4. What reason do you have to trust the technology’s decisions? Do you understand why you are getting a certain result, or might there be a mistake somewhere? Is anything not explainable?
  5. Are you confident the technology will work as it is claimed when it is used with your community and on your project, as opposed to in a lab setting (or a theoretical setting)? What elements of your situation might cause problems or change the functioning of the technology?
  6. Who is analyzing and implementing the AI/ML technology? Do these people understand the technology, and are they attuned to its potential flaws and dangers? Are these people likely to make any biased decisions, either by misinterpreting the technology or for other reasons?
  7. What measures do you have in place to identify and address potentially harmful biases in the technology?
  8. What regulatory safeguards and redress mechanisms do you have in place, for people who claim that the technology has been unfair to them or abused them in any way?
  9. Is there a way that your AI/ML technology could perpetuate or increase social inequalities, even if the benefits of using AI and ML outweigh these risks? What will you do to minimize these problems and stay alert to them?
  10. Are you certain that the technology abides with relevant regulations and legal standards, including GDPR?
  11. Is there a way that this technology may not discriminate against people by itself, but that it may lead to discrimination or other rights violations, for instance when it is deployed in different contexts or if it is shared with untrained actors? What can you do to prevent this?

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Case Studies

“Preventing echo chambers: depolarising the conversation on social media”

“Preventing echo chambers: depolarising the conversation on social media” 

“RNW Media’s digital teams… have pioneered moderation strategies to support inclusive digital communities and have significantly boosted the participation of women in specific country settings. Through Social Listening methodologies, RNW Media analyses online conversations on multiple platforms across the digital landscape to identify digital influencers and map topics and sentiments in the national arena. Using Natural Language Processing techniques (such as sentiment and topic detection models), RNW Media can mine text and analyze this data to unravel deep insights into how online dialogue is developing over time. This helps to establish the social impact of the online moderation strategies while at the same time collecting evidence that can be used to advocate for young people’s needs.”

Forecasting climate change, improving agricultural productivity

In 2014, the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, the Government of Colombia, and Colombia’s National Federation of Rice Growers, using weather and crop data collected over the prior decade, predicted climate change and resultant crop loss for farmers in different regions of the country. The prediction “helped 170 farmers in Córdoba avoid direct economic losses of an estimated $ 3.6 million and potentially improve productivity of rice by 1 to 3 tons per hectare. To achieve this, different data sources were analyzed in a complementary fashion to provide a more complete profile of climate change… Additionally, analytical algorithms were adopted and modified from other disciplines, such as biology and neuroscience, and were used to run statistical models and compare with weather records.”

Doberman.io developed an iOS app

Doberman.io developed an iOS app that employs machine learning and speech recognition to automatically analyze speech in a meeting room. The app determines the amount of time each person has spoken and tries to identify the sex of each speaker, using a visualization of the contribution of each speaker almost in real time with the relative percentages of time during which males and females have spoken. “When the meeting starts, the app uses the mic to record what’s being said and will continuously show you the equality of that meeting. When the meeting has ended and the recording stops, you’ll get a full report of the meeting.”

Food security: Detecting diseases in crops using image analysis (2016)

Food security: Detecting diseases in crops using image analysis (2016) 

“Using a public dataset of 54,306 images of diseased and healthy plant leaves collected under controlled conditions, we train a deep convolutional neural network to identify 14 crop species and 26 diseases (or absence thereof). The trained model achieves an accuracy of 99.35% on a held-out test set, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach.”

Can an ML model potentially predict the closure of civic spaces more effectively than traditional approaches? The USAID-funded INSPIRES project is testing the proposition that machine learning can help identify early flags that civic space may shift and generate opportunities to evaluate the success of interventions that strive to build civil society resilience to potential shocks.

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References

Find below the works cited in this resource.

Additional Resources

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Categories

Automation

What is automation?

Worker at the assembly line of car-wiring factory in Bizerte, Tunisia. The automation of labor disproportionately affects women, the poor and other vulnerable members of society. Photo credit: Alison Wright for USAID, Tunisia, Africa

Automation involves techniques and methods applied to enable machines, devices and systems to function with minimal or no human involvement. Automation is used, for example, in applications for managing the operation of traffic lights in a city, navigating aircrafts, running and configuring different elements of a telecommunications network, in robot-assisted surgeries, and even for automated storytelling (which uses an artificial intelligence software to create verbal stories). Automation can improve efficiency and reduce error, but it also creates new opportunities for error and introduces new costs and challenges for government and society.

How does automation work?

Processes can be automated by programming certain procedures to be performed without human intervention (like a recurring payment for a credit card or phone app) or by linking electronic devices to communicate directly with one another (like self-driving vehicles communicating with other vehicles and with road infrastructure). Automation can involve the use of temperature sensors, light sensors, alarms, microcontrollers, robots, and more. Home automation, for example, may include home assistants such as Amazon Echo, Google Home and OpenHAB. Some automation systems are virtual, for example, email filters that automatically sort incoming email into different folders, and AI-enabled moderation systems for online content .

The exact architecture and functioning of automation systems depend on their purpose and application. However, automation should not be confused with artificial intelligence in which an algorithm-led process ‘learns’ and changes over time: for instance, an algorithm that reviews thousands of job applications and studies and learns from patterns in the applications is using artificial intelligence, while a chatbot that replies to candidates’ questions is using automation.

For more information on the different components of automation systems, read also the resources about the Internet of Things and sensors, robots and drones, and biometrics.

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How is automation relevant in civic space and for democracy?

Automated processes can be built to increase transparency, accuracy, efficiency, and scale. They can help minimize effort (labor) and time; reduce errors and costs; improve the quality and/or precision in tasks/processes; carry out tasks that are too strenuous, hazardous or beyond the physical capabilities of humans; and generally free humans of repetitive, monotonous tasks.  

From a historical perspective, automation is not new: the first industrial revolution in the 1700s harnessed the power of steam and water; the technological revolution of the 1880s relied on railways and telegraphs; and the digital revolution in the 20th century saw the beginning of computing. Each of these transitions brought fundamental changes not only to industrial production and the economy, but to society, government, and international relations.  

Now, the fourth industrial revolution, or the automation revolution as it is sometimes called, promises to once again disrupt work as we know it as well as relationships between people, machines, and programmed processes.  

When used by governments, automated processes promise to deliver government services with greater speed, efficiency, and coverage. These developments are often called e-government, e-governance, or digital government. E-government includes the government communication and information sharing on the web (sometimes even the publishing of government budgets and agendas), facilitation of financial transactions online such as electronic filing of tax returns, digitization of health records, electronic voting, and digital IDs  

A health worker receives information on disease outbreak in Brewerville, Liberia. Automated processes promise to deliver government services with greater speed, efficiency, and coverage. Photo credit: Sarah Grile.

The benefits of automating government services are numerous, as the UK’s K4D helpdesk explains, by lowering the cost of service delivery, improving quality and coverage  (for example, through telemedicine or drones ); strengthening communication, monitoring, and feedback, and in some cases by encouraging citizen participation at the local level. In Indonesia, for example, the Civil Service Agency (BKN) introduced a computer-assisted testing system (CAT) to disrupt the previously long-standing manual testing system that created rampant opportunities for corruption in civil service recruitment by line ministry officials. With the new system, the database of questions is tightly controlled, and the results are posted in real time outside the testing center.  

In India, an automated system relying on a specifically designed computer (an Advanced Virtual RISC) and the common telecommunications standard GSM (Global System for Mobile) is used to inform farmers about exact field conditions and to point to the necessary next steps with command functions such as irrigating, ploughing, deploying seeds and carrying out other farming activities. 

Drone used for irrigation scheduling in southern part of Bangladesh. Automated systems have vast applications in agriculture. Photo credit: Alanuzzaman Kurishi.

As with previous industrial revolutions, automation changes the nature of work, and these changes could bring unemployment in certain sectors if not properly planned. The removal of humans from processes also brings new opportunities for error (such as ‘automation bias’) and raises new legal and ethical questions. See the Risks section below. 

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Opportunities

Islamabad Electric Supply Company’s (IESCO) Power Distribution Control Center (PDC), Pakistan. Smart meters enable monitoring of power demand, supply and load shedding in real-time. Photo credit: USAID.

Automation can have positive impacts when used to further democracy, human rights and governance issues. Read below to learn how to more effectively and safely think about automation in your work.
Increase in productivity

Automation may improve output while reducing the time and labour required, thus increasing the productivity of workers and the demand for other kinds of work. For example, automation can streamline document review, cutting down on the time that lawyers need to search through documents or academics through sources, etc. In Azerbaijan, the government partnered with the private sector in the use of an automated system to reduce the backlog of relatively simple court cases, such as claims for unpaid bills. In instances where automation increases quality of services or goods and/or brings down their cost, a larger demand for the goods or services can be served.  

Improvements in processes and outputs

Automation can improve the speed, efficiency, quality, consistency and coverage of service delivery and reduce human error, time spent, and costs. It can therefore allow activities to scale up. For example, the UNDP and the government of the Maldives used automation to create 3-D maps of the islands and chart their topography. Having this information on record would speed up further disaster relief and rescue efforts. The use of drones also reduced the time and money required to conduct this exercise: while mapping 11 islands would normally take almost a year, using a drone reduced the time to one day. See the Robots and Drones resource for additional examples. 

Optimizing an automated task generally requires trade-offs among cost, precision, the permissible margin of error, and scale. Automation may sometimes require tolerating more errors in order to reduce costs or achieve greater scale. For more, see the section “Knowing when automation offers a suitable solution to the challenge at hand” in Automation of government processes. 

Increase transparency

Automation may increase transparency by making data and information easily available to the public, thus building public trust and aiding accountability. In India, the State Transport Department of Karnataka has automated driving test centers hoping to eliminate bribery in the issuing of driver’s licenses. A host of high-definition cameras and sensors placed along the test track captured the movement of the vehicle while a computerised system decides if the driver has passed or failed the test. See also Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption in developing countries? 

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Risks

The use of emerging technologies can also create risks in civil society programming. Read below on how to discern the possible dangers associated with automation in DRG work, as well as how to mitigate for unintended – and intended – consequences.
Labor issues


When automation is used to replace human labor, the resulting loss of jobs causes structural unemployment known as “technological unemployment.” Structural unemployment disproportionately affects women, the poor and other vulnerable members of society, unless they are re-skilled and provided with adequate protections. Automation also requires skilled labor that can operate, oversee or maintain automated systems, eventually creating jobs for a smaller section of the population. But the immediate impact of this transformation of work can be harmful for people and communities without social safety nets or opportunities for finding other work.

Discrimination towards marginalized groups and minorities and increasing social inequality

Automation systems equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) may produce results that are discriminatory towards some marginalized and minority groups when the system has learned from biased learning patterns, from biased datasets or biased human decision making. The outputs of AI-equipped automated systems may reflect real-life societal biases, prejudices and discriminatory treatment towards some demographics. Biases can also occur from the human implementation of automated systems, for instance, when the systems do not function in the real world as they were able to function in a lab or theoretical setting, or when the humans working with the machines misinterpret or misuse the automated technology.  

There are numerous examples of racial and other types of discrimination being either replicated or magnified by automation. To take an example from the field of predictive policing, ProPublica reported after conducting an investigation in 2016 that COMPAS, a data-driven AI tool meant to assist judges in the United States, was biased against Black people while determining if a convicted offender would commit more crimes in the future. For more on predictive policing see How to Fight Bias with Predictive Policing and A Popular Algorithm Is No Better at Predicting Crimes Than Random People.  

These risks exist in other domains as well. The University of Toronto and Citizen Lab report titled “Bots at the gate: A human rights analysis of automated decision-making in Canada’s immigration and refugee system notes that[m]any [asylum seekers and immigrants] come from war-torn countries seeking protection from violence and persecution. The nuanced and complex nature of many refugee and immigration claims is lost on these technologies, leading to serious breaches of internationally and domestically protected human rights, in the form of bias, discrimination, privacy breaches, due process and procedural fairness issues, among others. These systems will have life-and-death ramifications for ordinary people, many of whom are fleeing for their lives.” 

Insufficient Legal Protections

Existing laws and regulations may not be applicable to automation systems and, in cases where they are, the application may not be well-defined. Not all countries have laws that protect individuals against these dangers. Under the GDPR (the European General Data Protection Regulation), individuals have the right not to be subject to a decision based only on automated processing, including profiling. In other words, humans must oversee important decisions that affect individuals. But not all countries have or respect such regulations, and even the GDPR is not upheld in all situations. Meanwhile, individuals would have to actively claim their rights and contest these decisions, usually by seeking legal assistance, which is beyond the means of many. Groups at the receiving end of such discrimination tend to have fewer resources and limited access to human-rights protections to contest such decisions.

Automation Bias

People tend to have faith in automation and tend to believe that technology is accurate, neutral and non-discriminating. This can be described as “automation bias”: when humans working with or overseeing automated systems tend to give up responsibility to the machine and trust the machine’s decisionmaking uncritically. Automation bias has been shown to have harmful impacts across automated sectors, including leading to errors in healthcare. Automation bias also plays a role in the discrimination described above.
Uncharted ethical concerns

The ever-increasing use of automation brings ethical questions and concerns that may not have been considered before the arrival of the technology itself. For example, who is responsible if a self-driving car gets into an accident? How much personal information should be given to health-service providers to facilitate automated health monitoring? In many cases, further research is needed to even begin to address these dilemmas.
Issues related to individual consent

When automated systems make decisions that affect people’s lives, they blur the formation, context and expression of an individual’s consent (or lack thereof) as described in this quote: “…[T]he dilution of the free basis of our individual consent – either through outright information distortion or even just the absence of transparency – imperils the very foundations of how we express our human rights and hold others accountable for their open (or even latent) deprivation. See additional information about informed consent in the Data Protection resource . 

High capital costs

Large-scale automation technologies require very high capital costs, which is a risk in case the use of the technology becomes unviable in the long term or does not otherwise guarantee commensurate returns or recovery of costs. Hence, automation projects funded with public money (for example, some “smart city ” infrastructure) require thorough feasibility studies for assessing needs and ensuring long-term viability. On the other hand, initial costs also may be very high for individuals and communities. An automated solar-power installation or a rainwater-harvesting system is a large investment for a community. However, depending on the tariffs for grid power or water, the expenditure may be recovered in the long run.

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Questions

If you are trying to understand the implications of automation in your work environment, or are considering using aspects of automation as part of your DRG programming, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Is automation a suitable method for the problem you are trying to solve?
  2. What are the indicators or guiding factors that determine if automation is a suitable and required solution to a particular problem or challenge?
  3. What risks are involved regarding security, potential for discrimination, etc? How will you minimize these risks? Do the benefits of using automation or automated technology outweigh these risks?
  4. Who will work with and oversee these technologies? What is their training and what are their responsibilities? Who is liable legally in case of an accident?
  5. What are the long-term effects of using these technologies in the surrounding environment or community? What are the effects on individuals, jobs, salaries, social welfare, etc.? What measures are necessary to ensure that the use of these technologies does not aggravate or reinforce inequality through automation bias or otherwise?
  6. How will you ensure that humans are overseeing any important decision made about individuals using automated processes? (How will you abide by the GDPR or other applicable regulations?)
  7. What privacy and security safeguards are necessary for applying these technologies in a given context regarding, for example, cybersecurity, protection or personal privacy, protecting operators from accidents, etc.? How will you build in these safeguards?

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Case studies

Automated Farming Vehicles

Automated Farming Vehicles

“Forecasts of world population increases in the coming decades demand new production processes that are more efficient, safer, and less destructive to the environment. Industries are working to fulfill this mission by developing the smart factory concept. The agriculture world should follow industry leadership and develop approaches to implement the smart farm concept. One of the most vital elements that must be configured to meet the requirements of the new smart farms is the unmanned ground vehicles (UGV).”

Automated Mining in South Africa

Automated Mining in South Africa

“Spiraling labour and energy costs are putting pressure on the financial performance of gold mines in South Africa, but the solution could be found in adopting digital technologies. By implementing automation operators can remove underground workers from harm’s way, and that is going to become an ever-bigger imperative if gold miners are to remain investable by international capital. This increased emphasis for the safety of the workforce and mines is motivating the development of the mining automation market. Earlier, old-style techniques of exploration and drilling compromised the security of mine labour force. Such examples have forced operators to develop smart resolutions and tools to confirm security of workers.”

Automating Processing of Uncontested Civil Cases to Reduce Court Backlogs in Azerbaijan, Case Study 14

Automating Processing of Uncontested Civil Cases to Reduce Court Backlogs in Azerbaijan, Case Study 14

“In Azerbaijan, the government developed a new approach to dealing with their own backlog of cases, one which addressed both supply side and demand side elements. Recognizing that much of the backlog stemmed from relatively simple civil cases, such as claims for unpaid bills, the government partnered with the private sector in the use of an automated system to streamline the handling of uncontested cases, thus freeing up judges’ time for more important cases.”

Reforming Civil Service Recruitment through Computerized Examinations in Indonesia, Case Study 6

Reforming Civil Service Recruitment through Computerized Examinations in Indonesia, Case Study 6

“In Indonesia, the Civil Service Agency (BKN) succeeded in introducing a computer-assisted testing system (CAT) to disrupt the previously long-standing manual testing system that created rampant opportunities for corruption in civil service recruitment by line ministry officials. Now the database of questions is tightly controlled, and the results are posted in real time outside the testing center. Since its launch in 2013, CAT has become the de facto standard for more than 62 ministries and agencies.”

Hiring Tech Has Potential but Beware Automation Bias

Hiring Tech Has Potential but Beware Automation Bias

“Are we getting to the point where technology can nearly replace humans in the hiring process? It can screen applicants’ resumes and conduct prescreening outreach—and much more. But beware the misconceptions and risks involved in having tech take over for HR professionals, particularly in decision-making processes…. When deciding how to use technology appropriately in the talent acquisition process, avoid “automation bias”—the tendency to believe that technology is better than humans in performing various functions. Is it OK to automate rote tasks such as scheduling interviews with candidates? Sure. Conducting initial interviews with candidates? Maybe. Making hiring decisions? Probably not. ”

Real Time Automation of Indian Agriculture

Real Time Automation of Indian Agriculture

“Real time automation of Indian agricultural system’ using AVR (Advanced Virtual RISC) microcontroller and GSM (Global System for Mobile) is focused on making the agriculture process easier with the help of automation. The set up consists of processor which is an 8-bit microcontroller. GSM plays an important part by controlling the irrigation on field. GSM is used to send and receive the data collected by the sensors to the farmer. GSM acts as a connecting bridge between AVR microcontroller and farmer. Our study aims to implement the basic application of automation of the irrigation field by programming the components and building the necessary hardware. In our study different type of sensors like LM35, humidity sensor, soil moisture sensor, IR sensor used to find the exact field condition. GSM is used to inform the farmer about the exact field condition so that [they] can carry necessary steps. AT(Attention) commands are used to control the functions like irrigation, ploughing, deploying seeds and carrying out other farming activities.”

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References

Additional resources

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Categories

Blockchain

What is Blockchain?

A blockchain is a distributed database existing on multiple computers at the same time, with a detailed and un-changeable transaction history leveraging cryptography. Blockchain-based technologies, perhaps most famous for their use in “cryptocurrencies ” such as Bitcoin, are also referred to as “distributed ledger technology (DLT).”

How does Blockchain work?

Unlike hand-written records, like this bed net distribution in Tanzania, data added to a blockchain can’t be erased or manipulated. Photo credit: USAID.
Unlike hand-written records, like this bed net distribution in Tanzania, data added to a blockchain can’t be erased or manipulated. Photo credit: USAID.

Blockchain is a constantly growing database as new sets of recordings, or ‘blocks,’ are added to it. Each block contains a timestamp and a link to the previous block, so they form a chain. The resulting blockchain is not managed by any particular body; instead, everyone in the network has access to the whole database. Old blocks are preserved forever, and new blocks are added to the ledger irreversibly, making it impossible to erase or manipulate the database records.

Blockchain can provide solutions for very specific problems. The most clear-cut use case is for public, shared data where all changes or additions need to be clearly tracked, and where no data will ever need to be redacted. Different uses require different inputs (computing power, bandwidth, centralized management), which need to be carefully considered based on each context. Blockchain is also an over-hyped concept applied to a range of different problems where it may not be the most appropriate technology, or even in some cases, a responsible technology to use.

There are two core concepts around Blockchain technology: the transaction history aspect and the distributed aspect. They are technically tightly interwoven, but it is worth considering them and understanding them independently as well.

'Immutable' Transaction History

Imagine stacking blocks. With increasing effort, one can continue adding more blocks to the tower, but once a block is in the stack, it cannot be removed without fundamentally and very visibly altering—and in some cases destroying—the tower of blocks. A blockchain is similar in that each “block” contains some amount of information—information that may be used, for example, to track currency transactions and store actual data. (You can explore the bitcoin Blockchain, which itself has already been used to transmit messages and more, to learn about a real life example.).

This is a core aspect of the blockchain technology, generally called immutability, meaning data, once sored, cannot be altered. In rare cases, a 100% consensus among users can permit changes although it is incredibly tedious.

Blockchain is at its simplest, a valuable digital tool that replicates online the value of a paper-and-ink logbook. While this can be valuable to track a variety of sequential transactions or events (ownership of a specific item / parcel of land / supply chain) and could even be theoretically applied to concepts like voting or community ownership and management of resources, it comes with an important caveat. Mistakes can never be truly unmade, and changes to data tracked in a blockchain can never be updated.

Many of the potential applications of blockchain would naturally want one of the pieces of data tracked to be the identity of a person or legal organization. If that entity changes, their previous identity will be forever, immutably tracked and linked to the new identity. On top of being damaging to a person fleeing persecution or legally changing their identity, in case of transgender individuals, for example, this is also a violation of the right to privacy established under international human rights law.

Distributed and Decentralized

The second core tenet of blockchain technology is the absence of a central authority or oracle of “truth.” By nature of the unchangeable transaction records, every stakeholder contributing to a blockchain tracks and verifies the data it contains. At scale, this provides powerful protection against problems common not only to NGOs but to the private sector and other fields that are reliant on one service to maintain a consistent data store. This feature can protect a central system from collapsing or being censored, corrupted, lost, or hacked — but at the risk of placing significant hurdles in the development of the protocol and requirements for those interacting with the data.

A common misconception is that blockchain is completely open and transparent. Blockchains may be private, with various forms of permissions applied. In such cases, some users have more control over the data and transactions than others. Privacy settings for blockchain can make for easier management, but also replicate some of the specific challenges that blockchains, in theory, are solving.

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How is blockchain relevant in civic space and for democracy?

Blockchain technology has the potential to provide substantial benefits in the development sector broadly, as well as specifically for human rights programs. By providing a decentralized, verifiable source of data, blockchain technology can be a more transparent, efficient form of information and data management for improved governance, accountability, financial transparency, and even digital identities. While blockchain can be effective when used strategically on specific problems, practitioners who choose to use it must do so fastidiously. The decisions to use DLTs should be based on a detailed analysis and research on comparable technologies, including non-DLT options. . The decisions to use DLTs should be based on a detailed analysis and research on comparable technologies, including non-DLT options.

By providing a decentralized, verifiable source of data, blockchain technology can enable a more transparent, efficient form of information and data management. Practitioners should understand that blockchain technology can be applied to humanitarian challenges, but it is not a separate humanitarian innovation in itself.

Blockchain for the Humanitarian Sector – Future Opportunities

Blockchains lend themselves to some interesting tools being used by companies, governments, and civil society. Examples of how blockchain technology may be used in civic space include: land titles, digital IDs (especially for displaced persons), health records, voucher-based cash transfers, supply chain, censorship resistant publications and applications, digital currency , decentralized data management , crowdfunding and smart contracts. Some of these examples are discussed below. Specific examples of the use of blockchain technology may be found below under case studies.

A USAID-funded project used a mobile app and software to track the sale and transfer of land rights in Tanzania. Blockchain technology may also be used to record land titles. Photo credit: Riaz Jahanpour for USAID / Digital Development Communications.
A USAID-funded project used a mobile app and software to track the sale and transfer of land rights in Tanzania. Blockchain technology may also be used to record land titles. Photo credit: Riaz Jahanpour for USAID / Digital Development Communications.

Blockchain technology has the potential to provide substantial benefits in the humanitarian sector, such as protected data sharing, supply chain, donor financing, cash programmes and crowdfunding. By providing a decentralized, verifiable source of data, blockchain technology can enable a more transparent, efficient form of information and data management. Practitioners should understand that blockchain technology can be applied to humanitarian challenges, but it is not a separate humanitarian innovation in itself.

Blockchain for the Humanitarian Sector – Future Opportunities

Blockchain’s core tenets – an immutable transaction history and its distributed and decentralize nature – lend themselves to some interesting tools being used by companies, governments, and civil society. These will be explored more fully in the Case Studies section, below; but at a high level, many actors are looking at leveraging blockchain in the following ways:

Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are agreements that provide automatic payments on the completion of a specific task or event. For example, in civic space, smart contracts could be used to execute agreements between NGOs and local governments to expedite transactions, lower costs, and reduce mutual suspicions. However, since these contracts are “defined” in code, any software bugs become potential loopholes in which the contract could be exploited. Once case of this happened when an attacker exploited a software bug in a smart contract-based firm called The DAO for approximately $50M.

Innovative Currency and Payment Systems
Many new cryptocurrencies are considering ways to leverage blockchain for transactions without the volatility of bitcoin, and with other properties, such as speed, cost, stability and anonymity, at the forefront. Cryptocurrencies are also occasionally combined with smart contracts, to establish shared ownership through funding of projects.
Potential for fund-raising
In addition, the digital currency subset of blockchain is being used to establish shared ownership (not dissimilar to stocks / shares of large companies) of projects.
Censorship-resistant technology

The decentralized, immutable nature of blockchain provides clear benefits to protecting speech, but not without significant risks. There have been high-visibility uses of blockchain to publish censored speech in China, Turkey, and Catalonia. Article 19 has written an in-depth report specifically on the interplay between freedom of expression and blockchain technologies, which provides a balanced view of the potential benefits and risks, and guidance for stakeholders considering engaging in this facet.

Decentralized computation and storage

Ethereum is a cryptocurrency focused on using the blockchain system to help manage decentralized computation and storage through smart contracts and digital payments. Ethereum encourages the development of “distributed apps” which are tied to transactions on the Ethereum Blockchain. Examples include automated auctions, voting, a Twitter-like tool, and apps that pay for content creation/sharing. See case studies in the cryptocurrencies primer for more detail.

The vast majority of these solutions presume some form of micro-payment as part of the transaction. This transfer formalizes and records the action in the blockchain, but the design element has obvious challenges for equal access.

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Opportunities

Blockchain can have positive impacts when used to further democracy, human rights and governance issues. Read below to learn how to more effectively and safely think about blockchain in your work.

Proof of Digital Integrity

Data stored or tracked using blockchain technologies have a clear, sequential, and unalterable chain of verifications. Once data is added to the blockchain, there is ongoing mathematical proof that it has not been altered. This does not provide any assurance that the original data is valid or true, and it means that any data added cannot be deleted or changed – only appended to. Working in civil society, this benefit has been applied to concepts such as creating records for land titles/ownership; to improve voting, to ensure one person matches with one unchangeable vote; or to prevent fraud and corruption and enhance transparency in international philanthropy. It has been used for digital identities to help people retain ownership over their identity and documents, and in humanitarian contexts to make voucher-based cash transfers more efficient. As an enabler for digital currency, blockchain increases the sources of philanthropic wealth and, in some circumstances, facilitates cross-border funding of civil society.

A function such as this can provide a solution to the legal invisibility most often borne by refugees and migrants. Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, for example, are often at risk of discrimination and exploitation, because they are stateless. Proponents of blockchain argue that its distributed system can grant individuals with “self-sovereign identity,” a process through which they create and register their identity themselves and can therefore control and share that information.  However, if blockchain architects do not secure transaction permissions and public/private state variables, governments could use machine-learning algorithms to monitor public blockchain activity and gain insight into whatever daily, lower- level activity of their citizens are linkable to their blockchain identities. This might include interpersonal and business payments, timing, and any other locations or businesses where citizens need to “show their ID” for services, be they health, financial, or other. Furthermore, such a use of blockchain assumes that individuals would be prepared and able to adopt that technology, an unlikely possibility due to the financial insecurity many vulnerable groups, such as refugees, face.

The importance of legal identity has been recognised by international bodies. “Legal invisibility” is a major problem for various groups, placing them at risk of discrimination and exploitation, such as migrants often given fake ID documents for transport across borders, or people without proof of identity. Some argue that the decentralised nature of blockchain can provide a remedy to this by granting individuals with “self-sovereign identity” where they are the ones to create and register identity and the only ones to control what to do with it and with whom to share it” […] If blockchain architects aren’t careful in the way they align transaction permissions and public/private state variables, governments could use state-sponsored machine learning algorithms to monitor public blockchain activity and gain insight into the lower level activity of their citizens

Blockchain and freedom of expression

Decentralized Store of data

Around the world, blockchain technology helps displaced people regain IDs and access to other social services. Here, a CARD agent in the Philippines tracks IDs by hand. Photo credit: Brooke Patterson/USAID.
Around the world, blockchain technology helps displaced people regain IDs and access to other social services. Here, a CARD agent in the Philippines tracks IDs by hand. Photo credit: Brooke Patterson/USAID.

Blockchain is resistant to traditional problems of one central authority or data store being attacked or experiencing outages. In a blockchain, data are constantly being shared and verified across all members—although a blockchain requires large amounts of energy, storage and bandwidth to maintain a shared data store. This decentralization is most valued in digital currencies, which rely on the scale of their blockchain to balance not having a country or region “owning” and regulating the printing of the currency. Blockchain has also been explored to distribute data and coordinate resources without a reliance on a central authority and simultaneously being resistant to censorship.

Blockchains promise anonymity, or at least pseudonymity, because limited information regarding individuals is stored in transaction logs. However, this does not make the underlying access platforms resistant to protecting blockchain and freedom of expression. For instance, the central internet regulator in China proposed regulations that would require local blockchain companies to register users with their real names and national identification card numbers.
Blockchain and freedom of expression

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Risks

The use of emerging technologies can also create risks in civil society programming. Read below on how to discern the possible dangers associated with blockchain in DRG work, as well as how to mitigate for unintended – and intended – consequences.

Unequal Access

Blockchain presents multiple barriers to engaging with it. Connectivity, reliable and robust bandwidth and local storage are all needed. Therefore, mobile phones are often an insufficient device to host or download blockchains. The infrastructure it requires can serve as a barrier to access in areas where Internet connectivity primarily occurs via mobile devices. Because every full node (host of a blockchain) stores a copy of the entire transaction log, blockchains only grow longer and larger with time, and thus can be extremely resource-intensive to download on a mobile device. For instance, over the span of a few years, the blockchains underlying Bitcoin grew from several gigabytes to several hundred. While the use of blockchain offline is possible, offline components are among the most vulnerable to cyberattacks, and this could put the entire system at risk.

Blockchains — whether they are fully independent are part of existing blockchains — require some percentage of actors to lend processing power to the blockchain, which — especially as they scale — itself becomes either exclusionary or creates classes of privileged users.

Another problem that can undermine the intended benefits of the system is the unequal access to possibilities to convert blockchain-based currencies to traditional currency, for example in relation to philanthropy or to support civil society organizations in restrictive regulatory environments, as for cryptocurrencies to have actual value, someone has to be willing to pay money for it.

Lack of digital literacy

Beyond these technical challenges, blockchain technology requires a strong baseline understanding of technology and its use in situations where digital literacy itself is a challenge.

There are paths around some of these problems, but any blockchain use needs to reflect on what potential inequalities could be exacerbated by or with this technology.

Further, these technologies are inherently complex, and outside the atypical case where individuals do possess the technical sophistication and means to install blockchain software and set up nodes; the question remains as to how the majority of individuals can effectively access them. This is especially true of individuals who may have added difficulty interfacing with technologies due to disability, literacy or age. Ill-equipped users are at increased risk of their investments or information being exposed to hacking and theft.

Blockchain and freedom of expression

Breaches of Privacy

Account Ledgers for Nepali Savings and Credit Cooperatives shows the burden of paper. Blockchain replicates online the value of a paper-and-ink records. Photo credit: Brooke Patterson/USAID.
Account Ledgers for Nepali Savings and Credit Cooperatives shows the burden of paper. Blockchain replicates online the value of a paper-and-ink records. Photo credit: Brooke Patterson/USAID.

Storing sensitive information on a blockchain – such a biometrics or gender – combined with the immutable aspects of the system, can lead to considerable risks for individuals when this information is accessed by others with the intention to harm. Even when specific personally identifiable information is not stored on a blockchain, pseudonymous accounts are difficult to protect from being mapped to real-world identities, especially if they are connected with financial transactions, services, and/or actual identities. This can erode rights to privacy and protection of personal data, as well as exacerbate the vulnerability of already marginalized populations and persons who change fundamental aspects of their person (gender, name). Explicit consent, modification and deletion of one’s own data are often protected through data protection and privacy legislation, such as the General Data Protection Regulation in the EU that serves as example for many other laws around the world. An overview of legislation in this area around the world is kept up to date by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

For example, in September 2017, concerns surfaced about the Bangladeshi government’s plans to create a ‘merged ID’ that would combine citizens’ biometric, financial and communications data (Rahman, 2017). At that time, some local organizations had started exploring a DLT solution to identify and serve the needs of local Rohingya asylum-seekers and refugees. Because aid agencies are required to comply with national laws, any data recorded on a DLT platform could be subject to automatic data-sharing with government authorities. If these sets of records were to be combined, they would create an indelible, uneditable, untamperable set of records of highly vulnerable Rohingya asylum-seekers, ready for cross-referencing with other datasets. “As development and humanitarian donors and agencies rush to adopt new technologies that facilitate surveillance, they may be creating and supporting systems that pose serious threats to individuals’ human rights.”

These issues raise questions about meaningful, informed consent – how and to what extent do aid recipients understand DLTs and their implications when they receive assistance? […] Most experts agree that data protection needs to be considered not only in the realm of privacy, empowerment and dignity, but also in terms of potential physical impact or harm (ICRC and Brussels Privacy Hub, 2017; ICRC, 2018a)

Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies in the humanitarian sector

Environmental Impact

As blockchains scale, they require increasing amounts of computational power to stay in sync. In most digital currency blockchains, this scale problem is balanced by rewarding people who contribute to the processing power required with currency. The University of Cambridge estimated in fall 2019 that Bitcoin alone currently uses .28% of global electricity consumption, which, if Bitcoin were a country, would place it as the 41st most energy-consuming country, just ahead of Switzerland. Further, the negative impact is demonstrated by research showing that each Bitcoin transaction takes as much energy as needed to run a well-appointed house and all the appliances in it for an entire week.

Regulatory Uncertainty

As is often the case for emerging technology, the regulations surrounding blockchain are either ambiguous or nonexistent. In some cases, such as when it can publish censored speech, regulators overcorrect and block access to the entire system or remove pseudonymous protections of the system in country. In Western democracies, there are evolving financial regulations as well as concerns around the immutable nature of the records stored in a blockchain. Personally-Identifiable Information (see Privacy, above) in a blockchain cannot be removed or changed as required by the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and widely illegal content has already been inserted into the bitcoin blockchain.

Trust, Control, and Management Issues

While a blockchain has no “central database” which could be hacked, it also has no central authority to adjudicate or resolve problems. A lost or compromised password is almost guaranteed to result in the loss of ability to access funds or worse, digital identities. Compromised passwords or illegitimate use of the blockchain can harm individuals involved, especially when personal information is accessed or when child sexual abuse images are stored forever. Building mechanisms to address this problem undermines other key features of the blockchain.

That said, an enormous amount of trust is inherently placed in the software-development process around blockchain technologies, especially those using smart contracts. Any flaw in the software, and any intentional “back door”, could enable an attack that undermines or subverts the entire goal of the project.

Where is trust being placed: whether it is in the coders, the developers, those who design and govern mobile devices or apps; and whether trust is in fact being shifted from social institutions to private actors. All stakeholders should consider what implications does this have and how are these actors accountable to human rights standards

Blockchain and freedom of expression

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Questions

If you are trying to understand the implications of blockchain in your work environment, or are considering using aspects of blockchain as part of your DRG programming, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Does blockchain provide specific, needed features that existing solutions with proven track records and sustainability do not?
  2. Do you really need blockchain, or would a database be sufficient?
  3. How will this respect data privacy and control laws such as the GDPR?
  4. Do your intended beneficiaries have the internet bandwidth needed to use the product you are developing with blockchain?
  5. What external actors/partners will control critical aspects of the tool or infrastructure this project will rely on?
  6. What external actors/partners will have access to the data this project creates? What access conditions, limits, or ownership will they have?
  7. What level of transparency and trust do you have with these actors/partners?
  8. How you are you conducting and measuring informed consent processes for any data gathered?
  9. How will this project mitigate technical, financial, and/or infrastructural inequalities and ensure they are not exacerbated?
  10. Will the use of blockchain in your project comply with data protection and privacy laws?
  11. Do other existing laws and policies address the risks and offer mitigating measures related to the use of blockchain, such as anti-money-laundering regulation?
  12. Do existing laws enable the benefits you have identified for the blockchain-enabled project?
  13. Are these laws aligned with international human rights law such as the right to privacy, to freedom of expression and opinion and to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress?

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Case Studies

Blockchain in the humanitarian sector

The 2019 report “Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies in the humanitarian sector” provides multiple examples of humanitarian use of DLTs, including for financial inclusion, land titling, donation transparency, fraud reduction, cross-border transfers, cash programming, grant management and organizational governance, among others.

  • The World Food Programme’s Building Blocks project uses blockchain technology (Ethereum, four nodes and one controlling entity) to make its voucher-based cash transfers more efficient, transparent and secure, and to improve collaboration across the humanitarian system.
  • The Start Network and its member organisations Dorcas Aid International and Trócaire partnered with Disberse, a for-profit financial institution for the aid sector, on pilot programmes using DLT (Ethereum-based, two and three nodes and one controlling entity) to increase the humanitarian community’s comfort with the technology.
  • Helperbit uses the Bitcoin public network to create a decentralised, parametric peer-to-peer insurance service and donation system (multi-signature e-wallet) to change practices of humanitarian assistance both before and after an emergency.
  • Sikka, a digital-assets transfer platform (Ethereum, one node and one controlling entity), was created by World Vision International Nepal Innovation Lab to address the challenge of financial access during times of crises for financially marginalised and in-need communities.
  • The IFRC and Kenya Red Cross implemented the Blockchain Open Loop Payments Pilot Project (Multichain, four nodes with three controlling entities), through Red Rose, to explore how blockchain could increase the transparency and accountability of cash transfer programmes, including in relation to self-sovereign digital identities.”

Blockchain to permanently keep news articles
Civil.co is a journalism-supporting organization that has harnessed the blockchain to permanently keep news articles online in the face of censorship. Civil’s blockchain aims to encourage community trust of the news in different ways. First, the blockchain itself is used to publish articles, meaning a user with sufficient technical skills can theoretically verify that the articles came from where they say they did. Civil also supports this with two non-blockchain “technologies”: a “constitution” which their newsrooms must adopt, and a ranking system through which their community of readers and journalists can vote up news and newsrooms they find trustworthy. By publishing on a peer-to-peer blockchain, their publishing has additional resistance to censorship. Readers can also pay journalists for articles using Civil’s tokens. It is worth noting that Civil’s initial fundraising fell flat and its model is still struggling to prove itself.
Blockchain and Impact
In “Blockchain: Can We Talk About Impact Yet?”, Shailee Adinolfi, John Burg and Tara Vassefi respond to a MERLTech blog post that not only failed to find successful applications of bockchain in international development, but was unable to identify companies willing to talk about the process. This article highlights three case studies of in-progress projects with discussion and links to project information and/or case studies.
Digital Currencies and Blockchain in the Social Sector
Digital Currencies and Blockchain in the Social Sector,” David Lehr and Paul Lamb summarize work in international development leveraging blockchain for philanthropy, international development funding, remittances, identity, land rights, democracy and governance, and environmental protection.
Alas, the Blockchain Won’t Save Journalism After All
In “Alas, the Blockchain Won’t Save Journalism After All,” Jonah Engel Bromwich describes Civil.co’s initial attempts adapting blockchain to a media funding strategy.
Successful case studies by Consensys
Consensys, a company building and investing in blockchain solutions, including some in the civil sector, summarizes (successful) use cases in “Real-World Blockchain Case Studies.”
Blockchain to prevent child trafficking
UN Blockchain4Humanity Global Challenge considers the use of blockchain to help prevent child trafficking in Moldova. This use is also discussed in the Reuters article, “Scan on exit: can blockchain save Moldova’s children from traffickers?
Blockchain in a refugee camp in Jordan
The MIT Technology Review presents a case study of the use of biometrics and blockchain in a refugee camp in Jordan, that presents challenges to the right to data protection of the vulnerable individuals involved “Inside the Jordan refugee camp that runs on Blockchain.”

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References

Find below the works cited in this resource.

Additional Resources

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Categories

Cryptocurrency

What are cryptocurrencies?

Cryptocurrency is a form of digital money. It was created in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis to decentralize the system of financial transactions. Cryptocurrency is almost a direct contrast to the global financial system: no currency is attached to a state authority, it is unbound by geographic regulations, and most importantly, the maintenance of the system is community driven by a network of users. All transactions are logged anonymously on a public ledger, such as the Bitcoin’s blockchain .

Definitions

Blockchain: Blockchain is a type of technology used in many digital currencies as a bank ledger. Unlike a normal bank ledger, copies of that ledger are distributed digitally, among computers all over the world, automatically updating with every transaction.

Currency: A currency is a widely accepted system of money in circulation, usually designated by a nation or group of nations. Currency is commonly found in the form of paper and coins, but can also be digital (as this primer explores).

Fiat money: Government-issued currency, such as the USD. Sometimes referred to as Fiat currency.

Hashing: The process through which cryptocurrency transactions are verified. When one person pays another using Bitcoin, for example, computers on the blockchain automatically check that the transaction is accurate.

Hash: The mathematical problem computers must solve to add transactions to the blockchain.

Initial Coin Offering (ICO): The process by which a new cryptocurrency or digital “token” invites investment.

Mining: The process by which a computer solves a hash. The first computer to solve the hash permanently stores the transaction as a block on the blockchain. When a computer successfully adds a block to the blockchain, it is rewarded with a coin. Arriving at the right answer for a hash before another miner relates to how fast a computer can produce hashes. In the early years of bitcoin, for example, mining could be performed effectively using open-source software on standard desktop computers. More recently, only special-purpose machines known as application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) miners can mine bitcoin cost-effectively, because they are optimized for the task. Mining pools (groups of miners) and companies now control most bitcoin mining activity.

How do cryptocurrencies work?

Money transfer agencies in Nepal. Cryptocurrencies potentially allow users to send and receive remittances and access foreign financial markets. Photo credit: Brooke Patterson/USAID.

Users purchase cryptocurrency with a credit card, debit card, bank account or through mining. They then store the currency in a digital “wallet,” either online, on a computer, or offline, on a portable storage device, such as USB sticks. These wallets are used to send and receive money through “public addresses” or keys that link the money to a specific type of cryptocurrency. These  addresses are strings of characters that signify a wallet’s identity for transactions. A user’s public address can be shared with anyone to receive funds and can also be represented as a QR code. Anyone with whom a user makes a transaction can see the balance in the public address that he or she uses.

While transactions are publicly recorded, identifying user information is not. For example, on the Bitcoin blockchain, only a user’s public address appears next to a transaction—making transactions confidential but not necessarily anonymous.

Cryptocurrencies have increasingly struggled with intense periods of volatility, most of which stem from the decentralized system of which they are part. The lack of a central body means that cryptocurrencies are not legal tender, they are not regulated, there is little to no insurance if an individual’s digital wallet is hacked, and most payments are not reversible. As a result, cryptocurrencies are inherently speculative.  In 2017, Bitcoin peaked at a price of nearly $20,000 per coin, but on average, it has been valued at about $7,000 per coin. Newer cryptocurrencies, such as Tether, have attempted to offset volatility by tying their market value to an external currency like USD or gold. However, the industry overall has not yet reconciled how to maintain an autonomous, decentralized system with overall stability.

Types of Cryptocurrencies

The value of a certain cryptocurrency is heavily dependent on the faith of its investors, its integration into financial markets, public interest in using it, and its performance compared to other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin, founded in 2008, was the first and only cryptocurrency until 2011 when “altcoins” began to appear. Estimates for the number of cryptocurrencies vary, but as of August 2018, there were about 1,600 different types of cryptocurrencies.

  • Bitcoin
    It has the largest user base and a market capitalization in the hundreds of billions. While Bitcoin initially attracted financial institutions like Goldman Sachs, the collapse of Bitcoin’s value (along with other cryptocurrencies) in 2018 has since increased skepticism towards its long-term viability.
  • Ethereum
    Ethereum is a decentralized software platform that enables Smart Contracts and Decentralized Applications (DApps) to be built and automated without interference from a third party (like Bitcoin: they both run on Blockchain technology). Ethereum launched in 2015 and is currently the second largest cryptocurrency based on market capitalization after Bitcoin.
  • Ripple (XRP)
    Ripple is a real-time payment-processing network that offers both instant and low-cost international payments, to compete with other transaction systems such as SWIFT or VISA. It is the third largest cryptocurrency.
  • Tether (USDT)
    Tether is one of the first and most popular of a group of “stablecoins” — cryptocurrencies that peg their market value to a currency or other external reference point to reduce volatility.
  • Libra
    Libra is Facebook’s cryptocurrency due to be released in late 2020 or later. The company faced regulatory backlash: US and European regulators and legislators raised competition concerns, seeing as Facebook is one of the most powerful companies in the world. There were also fears that Libra would disrupt financial markets in smaller countries.Facebook has since rebranded its associated digital wallet as “Novi”, a standalone app. When Novi launches, it will include access to several stablecoins — each of them backed by a single fiat currency, such as USD, EUR, GBP or SGD. Facebook’s entry into cryptocurrency is expected to significantly alter the industry. Only a limited set of countries will be able to access it when it is launched.
  • Monero
    Monero is the largest of what are known as privacy coins. Unlike Bitcoin, Monero transactions and account balances are not public by default.
  • Zcash
    Another anonymity-preserving cryptocurrency, Zcash, is operated under a foundation of the same name. It is branded as a mission-based, privacy-centric cryptocurrency that enables users “to protect their privacy on their own terms”, regarding privacy as essential to human dignity and to the healthy functioning of civil society.

Fish vendor in Indonesia. Women are most of the unbanked, and financial technologies can provide tools to address this gap. Photo credit: Afandi Djauhari/NetHope.

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How are cryptocurrencies relevant in civic space and for democracy?

Cryptocurrencies are, in many ways, ideal for the needs of NGOs, humanitarians and other civil society actors. Civic space actors who require blocking-resistant, low-fee transactions might find cryptocurrencies both convenient and secure. The use of cryptocurrencies in the developing world reveals their role as not just vehicles for aid, but also tools that facilitate the development of small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) looking to enter international trade. For example, UNICEF created a cryptofund in 2019 in order to receive and distribute funding in cryptocurrencies (ether and bitcoin).  In June of 2020, UNICEF announced its largest investment yet in startups located in developing and economies, who are helping respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, regarding cryptocurrencies through only a traditional development lens – i.e. that they may only be useful for refugees or countries with unreliable fiat currencies – simplifies the economic landscape of such developing countries. Many countries are home to a significant youth population who are poised to harness cryptocurrency in innovative ways, for instance to send and receive remittances, to access foreign financial markets and investment possibilities, and even to encourage ecological or ethical purchasing behaviors (see the Case Studies section ). During the Coronavirus lockdown in India, and after the country’s reserve bank lifted a ban it had on cryptocurrencies, many young people started trading in Indian cryptocurrencies and using cryptocurrencies to transfer money to one another. Still, the future of crypto in India and elsewhere is uncertain. The frontier nature of cryptocurrencies poses significant risks to users when it comes to insurance and, in some cases, security.

Moreover, as will be discussed below, the distributed technology (blockchain) underlying cryptocurrencies is seen as offering resistance to censorship, as the data are distributed over a large network of computers. Cryptocurrencies could also give a broader range of people access to banking.

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Opportunities

Cryptocurrencies can have positive impacts when used to further democracy, human rights and governance issues. Read below to learn how to more effectively and safely think about cryptocurrencies in your work.

Accessibility

Cryptocurrencies are more accessible to a broader range of users than regular cash currency transactions are; they are not subject to government regulation and they don’t have high processing fees. Cross-border transactions in particular benefit from the features of cryptocurrencies; international banking fees and poor exchange rates can be extremely costly (See the BitPesa case study , below). In some cases, the value of cryptocurrencies may even be more stable than the local currency. Cryptocurrencies that require participants to log in (on “permissioned” systems) necessitate that an organization controls participation in its system. In some cases, certain users also help run the system in other ways, like operating servers. When this is the case, it is important to understand who those users are, how they are selected, and how their ability to use the system could be taken away if they turn out to be bad actors.

Additionally, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) lower the entry barrier to investing, cutting venture capitalists and investment banks out of the investing process. While similar to Initial Public Offering (IPO)s, ICOs differ significantly in that they allow companies to interact directly with individual investors. This also poses a risk to investors, as the safeguards offered by investment banks for traditional IPOs do not apply. (See Lack of Governance and Regulatory Uncertainty ). The lack of regulatory bodies has also spurred the growth of scam ICOs. When an ICO or cryptocurrency does not have a legitimate strategy for generating value, they are typically a scam ICO.

Anonymity and Censorship Resistance

The decentralized, peer-to-peer nature of cryptocurrencies may be of great comfort to those seeking anonymity, such as human rights defenders working in closed spaces or people simply seeking an equivalent to “cash” for online purchases (see the Cryptocurrencies in Volatile Markets case study , below). Cryptocurrencies can be useful for someone who wishes to donate anonymously to a foundation or organization, when that donation could put them at risk if their identity were known.

Since the data that supports the currency is distributed over a large network of computers, it is more difficult for a bad actor to locate and target a transaction or system operation. But a currency’s ability to protect anonymity largely depends on the specific goal of the cryptocurrency. Zcash, for example, was specifically developed to hide transaction amounts and user addresses from public view. Cryptocurrencies with a large number of participants are also resistant to more benign, routine, system outages because some data stores in the network can operate if others are breached.

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Risks

User in the Philippines received transaction confirmation. Users purchase cryptocurrency with a credit card, debit card, bank account or through mining. Photo credit: Brooke Patterson/USAID.

The use of emerging technologies can also create risks in civil society programming. Read below on how to discern the possible dangers associated with cryptocurrencies in DRG work, as well as how to mitigate for unintended – and intended – consequences.

Anonymity

While no central authority records cryptocurrency transactions, the public nature of the transactions does not prevent governments from recording them. Identity that can be associated with records on a blockchain is particularly a problem under totalitarian surveillance regimes. The central internet regulator in China, for example,  proposed regulations that would require local blockchain companies to register users with their real names and national identification card numbers. In order to trade or exchange a cryptocurrency into an established fiat currency, a new digital currency would need to incorporate Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML), and Combating the Financing of Terrorism (CFT) regulations into its process for signing up new users and validating their identities. These processes pose a high barrier to undocumented migrants and anyone else not holding a valid government ID.

As described in the case study below, the partially anarchical environment of cryptocurrencies can also foster criminal activity.

Case Study: The Dark Side of the Anonymous User Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are praised for supporting financial transactions that do not reveal a user’s identity. But this has made them popular on “dark web” sites like Silk Road, where cryptocurrency can be exchanged for illegal goods and services like drugs, weapons, or sex work. Silk Road was eventually taken down by the U.S. Federal Bureau of investigation, when its founder, Ross Ulbricht, used the same name to advertise the site and seek employees in another forum, linking to a Gmail address. Google provided the contents of that address to the authorities when subpoenaed.

The lessons to take from the Silk Road case are that anonymity is rarely perfect and unbreakable, and cryptocurrency’s identity protection is not an ironclad guarantee. On a public blockchain, a single identity slip (even in some other forum) can tie all of the transactions of that cryptocurrency account to one user. The owner of that wallet can then be connected to their subsequent purchases, as easily as a cookie tracks a user’s web browsing activity.

Lack of Governance

The lack of a central body greatly increases the risk of investing in a cryptocurrency. There is little to no recourse for users if the system is attacked digitally and their currency is stolen. In 2016, criminals hacked the Ethereum blockchain and stole $50 million worth of that currency, known as the DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) Bailout. It resulted in a major division in the Ethereum community, leading to a total split in governance where some participants wanted to see the value of that $50 million returned to holders, and others wanted to continue treating that value as permanently lost.

Regulatory Uncertainty

The legal and regulatory frameworks for blockchain are developing at a slower pace than the technology. Each jurisdiction – whether within a country or a financial zone, such as the 26 European countries known as the Schengen area that have abolished passports and border controls – regulate cryptocurrencies differently, and there is yet to be a global financial standard for regulating them. The seven Arab nations bordering the Persian Gulf  (Gulf States) , for example, have enacted a number of different laws on cryptocurrencies: they face an outright ban in the United Arab Emirates while they are partially banned in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  Other countries have developed tax laws, anti-money-laundering laws, and anti-terrorism laws to regulate cryptocurrencies. In many places, cryptocurrency is taxed as a property, instead of as a currency.

Cryptocurrency’s commitment to autonomy – that is, its separation from a fiat currency – has pitted it as an antagonist to many established regulatory bodies. Observers note that eliminating the ability of intermediaries (e.g., governments or banks) to claim transaction fees, for example, alters existing power balances and may trigger prohibitive regulations even as it temporarily decreases financial costs. Thus, there is always a risk that governments will develop policies unfavorable to financial technologies (fintech), rendering cryptocurrency and mobile money useless within its borders. The constantly evolving nature of laws around fintech proves difficult for any new digital currency.

Environmental Inefficiency

The larger a blockchain grows, the more computational power it requires. In late 2019, the University of Cambridge estimated that Bitcoin uses .28% of the global electricity consumption. If Bitcoin were a country, it would be ranked the 41st most energy-consuming country, just ahead of Switzerland.

Digital Literacy and Access Requirements

Blockchain technology underlaying cryptocurrencies requires access to the Internet, and areas with inadequate infrastructure or capacity would not be usable contexts for cryptocurrencies, although limited possibilities of using cryptocurrency without Internet access do exist. “This digital divide also extends to technological understanding between those who know how to ‘operate securely on the Internet, and those who do not’”, as noted by the DH Network. Cryptocurrency apps are not usable on lower-end devices, which requires users to use a smartphone or computer. The apps themselves involve a steep learning curve. Additionally, the slow speed of transactions — which can take minutes or up to an hour — are a significant disadvantage, especially when compared to the seconds-fast speed of standard Visa transactions.

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Questions

If you are trying to understand the implications of cryptocurrencies in your work environment, or are considering using cryptocurrencies as part of your DRG programming, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Do the issues you or your organization are seeking to address require cryptocurrency? Can more traditional currency solutions apply to the problem?
  2. Is cryptocurrency an appropriate currency for the populations you are working with? Will it help them access the resources they need? Is it accepted by the other relevant stakeholders?
  3. Do you or your organization need an immutable database distributed across multiple servers? Would it be ok to have the currency and transactions connected to a central server?
  4. Is the cryptocurrency you wish to use viable? Do you trust the currency and have good reason to assume it will be sufficiently stable in the future?
  5. Is the currency legal in the areas where you will be operating? If not, will this pose problems for your organization?
  6. How will you obtain this currency? What risks are involved? What external actors will you be reliant on?
  7. Will the users of this currency be able to benefit from it easily and safely? Will they have the required devices and knowledge?

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Case Studies

Mobile money agency in Ghana. The use of cryptocurrencies in the developing world can facilitate the development of small- to medium-sized enterprises looking to enter international trade. Photo credit: John O’Bryan/ USAID.
BitPesa Proves Cost-Effective SMEs

To many humanitarian actors, the ideal role for cryptocurrencies would be to facilitate the provision of remittances to families. But in a number of cases, cryptocurrency has been shown to be used not as a remittance channel, but for people to send money to themselves. For example, in Kenya, many of the international money transfers conducted on the Nairobi-based bitcoin exchange, BitPesa, are from an individual’s foreign account to a Kenyan one, or vice versa. Many cite the use of BitPesa as a tool to save money on bank transfer fees and high foreign exchange rates. Young Kenyans sometimes use the site to access global trading markets that they otherwise would not be able to access in Kenya, where many trading sites are not available. Increasingly, BitPesa is highly useful for upper-middle-class entrepreneurs who are building international businesses through trade and online commerce. However, the largest telecommunications company in Kenya – Safaricom – recently banned the use of Bitcoin on its mobile-money-exchange system, mPesa. When companies hold a monopoly or a significant majority of the market that relates to mobile and internet connectivity, the use of cryptocurrencies may be significantly curbed.

Cryptocurrencies in Volatile Markets

Between August 2014 and November 2016, the number of Bitcoin users in Venezuela rose from 450 to 85,000. The financial crisis in the country has prompted many of its citizens to search for new options. Bitcoin has been used to purchase medicine (in short supply there), Amazon gift cards, and to send remittances. There are no laws regulating Bitcoin in Venezuela, which has emboldened people further. Countries with financial markets that have experienced similar rates of inflation to Venezuela- such as South Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Argentina – all have relatively active cryptocurrency markets.

Cryptocurrencies for Social Impact

Many new cryptocurrencies have attempted to monetize the social impacts of their users. SolarCoin rewards people for installing solar panels. Tree Coin gathers resources for planting trees in the developing world (as one way to fight climate change) and rewards local people for maintaining those trees. Impak Coin is “the first app to reward and simplify responsible consumption” by helping users find socially responsible businesses. The coin it offered is intended to be used to buy products and services from these businesses, and to support users in microlending and crowdlending. It was part of an ecosystem of technologies that included ratings based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Impact Management Project. True to its principles, Impak has proposed to begin assessing its impact.

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References

Find below the works cited in this resource.

Additional Resources

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Categories

Data Protection

What is data protection?

Data protection refers to practices, measures and laws that aim to prevent certain information about a person from being collected, used or shared in a way that is harmful to that person.

Interview with fisherman in Bone South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Data collectors must receive training on how to avoid bias during the data collection process. Photo credit: Indah Rufiati/MDPI – Courtesy of USAID Oceans.

Data protection isn’t new. Bad actors have always sought to gain access to individuals’ private records. Before the digital era, data protection meant protecting individuals’ private data from someone physically accessing, viewing or taking files and documents. Data protection laws have been in existence for more than 40 years.

Now that many aspects of peoples’ lives have moved online, private, personal and identifiable information is regularly shared with all sorts of private and public entities. Data protection seeks to ensure that this information is collected, stored and maintained responsibly and that unintended consequences of using data are minimized or mitigated.

What are data?

Data refer to digital information, such as text messages, videos, clicks, digital fingerprints, a bitcoin, search history and even mere cursor movements. Data can be stored on computers, mobile devices, in clouds and on external drives. It can be shared via e-mail, messaging apps and file transfer tools. Your posts, likes and retweets, your videos about cats and protests, and everything you share on social media is data.

Metadata are a subset of data. It is information stored within a document or file. It’s an electronic fingerprint that contains information about the document or file. Let’s use an email as an example. If you send an email to your friend, the text of the email is data. The email itself, however, contains all sorts of metadata like, who created it, who the recipient is, the IP address of the author, the size of the email, etc.

Large amounts of data get combined and stored together. These large files containing thousands or millions of individual files are known as datasets. Datasets then get combined into very large datasets. These very large datasets, referred to as to big data , are used to train machine-learning systems.

Personal Data and Personally Identifiable Information

Data can seem to be quite abstract, but the pieces of information are very often reflective of the identities or behaviors of actual persons. Not all data require protection, but some data, even metadata, can reveal a lot about a person. This is referred to as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). PII is commonly referred to as personal data. PII is information that can be used to distinguish or trace an individual’s identity such as a name, passport number or biometric data like fingerprints and facial patterns. PII is also information that is linked or linkable to an individual, such as date of birth and religion.

Personal data can be collected, analyzed and shared for the benefit of the persons involved, but they can also be used for harmful purposes. Personal data are valuable for many public and private actors. For example, they are collected by social media platforms and sold to advertising companies. They are collected by governments to serve law-enforcement purposes like prosecution of crimes. Politicians value personal data to target voters with certain political information. Personal data can be monetized by people with criminal purposes such as selling false identities.

“Sharing data is a regular practice that is becoming increasingly ubiquitous as society moves online. Sharing data does not only bring users benefits, but is often also necessary to fulfill administrative duties or engage with today’s society. But this is not without risk. Your personal information reveals a lot about you, your thoughts, and your life, which is why it needs to be protected.”

Access Now’s ‘Creating a Data Protection Framework’, November 2018.

How does data protection relate to the right to privacy?

The right to protection of personal data is closely interconnected to, but distinct from, the right to privacy. The understanding of what “privacy” means varies from one country to another based on history, culture, or philosophical influences. Data protection is not always considered a right in itself. Read more about the differences between privacy and data protection here.

Data privacy is also a common way of speaking about sensitive data and the importance to protect it against unintentional sharing and undue or illegal  gathering and use of data about an individual or group. USAID recently shared a resource about promoting data privacy in COVID-19 and development, which defines data privacy as ‘the  right  of  an  individual  or  group  to  maintain  control  over  and  confidentiality  of  information  about  themselves’.

How does data protection work?

Participant of the USAID WeMUNIZE program in Nigeria. Data protection must be considered for existing datasets as well. Photo credit: KC Nwakalor for USAID / Digital Development Communications

Personal data can and should be protected by measures that protect from harm the identity or other information about a person and that respects their right to privacy. Examples of such measures include determining which data are vulnerable based on privacy-risk assessments; keeping sensitive data offline; limiting who has access to certain data; anonymizing sensitive data; and only collecting necessary data.

There are a couple of established principles and practices to protect sensitive data. In many countries, these measures are enforced via laws, which contain the key principles that are important to guarantee data protection.

“Data Protection laws seek to protect people’s data by providing individuals with rights over their data, imposing rules on the way in which companies and governments use data, and establishing regulators to enforce the laws.”

Privacy International on data protection

A couple of important terms and principles are outlined below, based on The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

  • Data Subject: any person whose personal data are being processed, such as added to a contacts database or to a mailing list for promotional emails.
  • Processing data means that any operation is performed on the personal data, manually or automated.
  • Data Controller: the actor that determines the purposes for, and means by which, personal data are processed.
  • Data Processor: the actor that processes personal data on behalf of the controller, often a third-party external to the controller, such as a party that offers mailing list or survey services.
  • Informed Consent: individuals understand and agree that their personal data are collected, accessed, used and/or shared and how they can withdraw their consent.
  • Purpose limitation: personal data are only collected for a specific and justified use and the data cannot be used for other purposes by other parties.
  • Data minimization: that data collection is minimized and limited to essential details.

 

Healthcare provider in Eswatini. Quality data and protected datasets can accelerate impact in the public health sector. Photo credit: Ncamsile Maseko & Lindani Sifundza.

Access Now’s guide lists eight data-protection principles that come largely from international standards, in particular the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data (widely known as Convention 108) and the Organization for Economic Development (OECD) Privacy Guidelines and are considered to be “minimum standards” for the protection of fundamental rights by countries that have ratified international data protection frameworks. 

A development project that uses data, whether establishing a mailing list or analyzing datasets, should comply with laws on data protection. When there is no national legal framework, international principles, norms and standards can serve as a baseline to achieve the same level of protection of data and people. Compliance with these principles may seem burdensome, but implementing a few steps related to data protection from the beginning of the project will help to achieve the intended results without putting people at risk. 

common practices of civil society organizations relate to the terms and principles of the data protection framework of laws and norms

The figure above shows how common practices of civil society organizations relate to the terms and principles of the data protection framework of laws and norms.  

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The data-protection law in the EU, the GDPR, went into effect in 2018. It is often considered the world’s strongest data-protection law. The law aims to enhance how people can access their information and limits what organizations can do with personal data from EU citizens. Although coming from the EU, the GDPR can also apply to organizations that are based outside the region when EU citizens’ data are concerned. GDPR therefore has a global impact.

The obligations stemming from the GDPR and other data protection laws may have broad implications for civil society organizations. For information about the GDPR- compliance process and other resources, see the European Center for Not-for-Profit Law ‘s guide on data-protection standards for civil society organizations.

Notwithstanding its protections, the GDPR also has been used to harass CSOs and journalists. For example, a mining company used a provision of the GDPR to try to force Global Witness to disclose sources it used in an anti-mining campaign. Global Witness successfully resisted these attempts.

Personal or organizational protection tactics

How to protect your own sensitive information or the data of your organization will depend on your specific situation in terms of activities and legal environment. A first step is to assess your specific needs in terms of security and data protection. For example, which information could, in the wrong hands, have negative consequences for you and your organization 

Digitalsecurity specialists have developed online resources you can use to protect yourself. Examples are the Security Planner, an easy-to-use guide with expert-reviewed advice for staying safer online with recommendations on implementing basic online practices. The Digital Safety Manual offers information and practical tips on enhancing digital security for government officials working with civil society and Human Rights Defenders (HRDs). This manual offers 12 cards tailored to various common activities in the collaboration between governments (and other partners) and civil society organizations. The first card helps to assess the digital security

Digital Safety Manual

  1. Assessing Digital Security Needs
  2. Basic Device Security
  3. Passwords and Account Protection
  4. Connecting to the Internet Securely
  5. Secure Calls, Chat, and Email
  6. Security and Social Media Use
  7. Secure Data Storage and Deletion
  8. Secure File Transfer
  9. Secure Contract Handling
  10. Targeted Malware and Other Attacks
  11. Phone Tracking and Surveillance
  12. Security Concerns Related to In-Person Meetings

 

The Digital First Aid Kit is a free resource for rapid responders, digital security trainers, and tech-savvy activists to better protect themselves and the communities they support against the most common types of digital emergencies. Global digital safety responders and mentors can help with specific questions or mentorship, for example, The Digital Defenders Partnership and the Computer Incident Response Centre for Civil Society (CiviCERT) . 

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How is data protection relevant in civic space and for democracy?

Many initiatives that aim to strengthen civic space or improve democracy use digital technology. There is a widespread belief that the increasing volume of data and the tools to process them can be used for good. And indeed, integrating digital technology and the use of data in democracy, human rights and governance programming can have significant benefits; for example, they can connect communities around the globe, reach underserved populations better, and help mitigate inequality.

“Within social change work, there is usually a stark power asymmetry. From humanitarian work, to campaigning, documenting human rights violations to movement building, advocacy organisations are often led by – and work with – vulnerable or marginalised communities. We often approach social change work through a critical lens, prioritising how to mitigate power asymmetries. We believe we need to do the same thing when it comes to the data we work with – question it, understand its limitations, and learn from it in responsible ways.”

What is Responsible Data?

When quality information is available to the right people when they need it, the data are protected against misuse and the project is designed with protection of its users in mind, it can accelerate impact.

  • USAID’s funding of improved vineyard inspection using drones and GPS-data in Moldova, allowing farmers to quickly inspect, identify, and isolate vines infected by a ​phytoplasma disease of the vine. 
  • Círculo is a digital tool for female journalists in Mexico to help them create strong networks of support, strengthen their safety protocols and meet needs related to protection of themselves and their data. The tool was developed with the end-users through chat groups and in-person workshops to make sure everything built in the app was something they needed and could trust.

At the same time, data-driven development brings a new responsibility to prevent misuse of data, when designing,  implementing or monitoring development projects. When the use of personal data is a means to identify people who are eligible for humanitarian services, privacy and security concerns are very real.  

  • Refugee camps In Jordan have required community members to allow scans of their irises to purchase food and supplies and take out cash from ATMs. This practice has not integrated meaningful ways to ask for consent or allow people to opt-out. Additionally, the use and collection of highly sensitive personal data like biometrics to enable daily purchasing habits is disproportionate, because other less personal digital technologies are available and used in many parts of the world.  

Governments, international organizations, private actors can all – even unintentionally – misuse personal data for other purposes than intended, negatively affecting the wellbeing of the people related to that data. Some examples have been highlighted by Privacy International: 

  • The case of Tullow Oil, the largest oil and gas exploration and production company in Africa, shows how a private actor considered extensive and detailed research by a micro-targeting research company into the behaviors of local communities in order to get ‘cognitive and emotional strategies to influence and modify Turkana attitudes and behavior’ to the Tullow Oil’s advantage.
  • In Ghana, the Ministry of Health commissioned a large study on health practices and requirements in Ghana. This resulted in an order from the ruling political party to model future vote distribution within each constituency based on how respondents said they would vote, and a negative campaign trying to get opposition supporters not to vote.  

There are resources and experts available to help with this process. The Principles for Digital Development  website offers recommendations, tips and resources to protect privacy and security throughout a project lifecycle, such as the analysis and planning stage, for designing and developing projects and when deploying and implementing. Measurement and evaluation are also covered. The Responsible Data website offers the Illustrated Hand-Book of the Modern Development Specialist with attractive, understandable guidance through all steps of a data-driven development project: designing it, managing data, with specific information about collecting, understanding and sharing it, and closing a project. 

NGO worker prepares for data collection in Buru Maluku, Indonesia. When collecting new data, it’s important to design the process carefully and think through how it affects the individuals involved. Photo credit: Indah Rufiati/MDPI – Courtesy of USAID Oceans.

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Opportunities

Data protection measures further democracy, human rights and governance issues. Read below to learn how to more effectively and safely think about data protection in your work.

Privacy respected and people protected

Implementing dataprotection standards in development projects protects people against potential harm from abuse of their data. Abuse happens when an individual, company or government accesses personal data and uses them for purposes other than those for which the data were collected. Intelligence services and law enforcement authorities often have legal and technical means to enforce access to datasets and abuse the data. Individuals hired by governments can access datasets through hacking the security of software or clouds. This has often led to intimidation, silencing and arrests of human rights defenders and civil society leaders criticizing their government. Privacy International maps examples of governments and private actors abusing individuals’ data.  

Strong protective measures against data abuse ensure respect for the fundamental right to privacy of the people whose data are collected and used. Protective measures allow positive development such as improving official statistics, better service delivery, targeted early warning mechanisms and effective disaster response. 

It is important to determine how data are protected throughout the entire life cycle of a project. Individuals should also be ensured of protection after the project ends, either abruptly or as intended, when the project moves into a different phase or when it receives funding from different sources. Oxfam has developed a leaflet to help anyone handling, sharing or accessing program data to properly consider responsible data issues throughout the data lifecycle, from making a plan to disposing data. 

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Risks

The collection and use of data can also create risks in civil society programming. Read below on how to discern the possible dangers associated with collection and use of data in DRG work, as well as how to mitigate for unintended – and intended – consequences.

Unauthorized access to data

Data need to be stored somewhere. On a computer or an external drive, in a cloud or on a local server. Wherever the data are stored, precautions need to be taken to protect the data from unauthorized access and to avoid revealing the identities of vulnerable persons. The level of protection that is needed depends on the sensitivity of the data, i.e. to what extent it could have negative consequences if the information fell into the wrong hands.

Data can be stored on a nearby and well-protected server that is connected to drives with strong encryption and very limited access, which is a method to stay in control of the data you own. Cloud services offered by well-known tech companies often offer basic protection measures and wide access to the dataset for free versions. More advanced security features are available for paying customers, such as storage of data in certain jurisdictions with data- protection legislation. The guidelines on how to secure private data stored and accessed in the cloud help to understand various aspects of clouds and to decide about a specific situation.

Every system needs to be secured against cyberattacks and manipulation. One common challenge is finding a way to protect identities in the dataset, for example, by removing all information that could identify individuals from the data, i.e. anonymizing it. Proper anonymization is of key importance and harder than often assumed.

One can imagine that a dataset of GPS-locations of People Living with Albinism across Uganda requires strong protection. Persecution is based on the belief that certain body parts of people with albinism can transmit magical powers, or that they are presumed to be cursed and bring bad luck. A spatial-profiling project mapping the exact location of individuals belonging to a vulnerable group can improve outreach and delivery of support services to them. However, hacking of the database or other unlawful access to their personal data might put them at risk by people wanting to exploit or harm them.

One could also imagine that the people operating an alternative system to send out warning sirens for air strikes in Syria run the risk of being targeted by authorities. While data collection and sharing by this group aims to prevent death and injury, it diminishes the impact of air strikes by the Syrian authorities. The location data of the individuals running and contributing to the system needs to be protected against access or exposure.

Another risk is that private actors who run or cooperate in data-driven projects could be tempted to sell data if they are offered large sums of money. Such buyers could be advertising companies or politicians that aim to target commercial or political campaigns at specific people.

The Tiko system designed by social enterprise Triggerise rewards young people for positive health-seeking behaviors, such as visiting pharmacies and seeking information online. Among other things, the system gathers and stores sensitive personal and health information about young female subscribers who use the platform to seek guidance on contraceptives and safe abortions, and it tracks their visits to local clinics. If these data are not protected, governments that have criminalized abortion could potentially access and use that data to carry out law-enforcement actions against pregnant women and medical providers.

Unsafe collection of data

When you are planning to collect new data, it is important to carefully design the collection process and think through how it affects the individuals involved. It should be clear from the start what kind of data will be collected, for what purpose, and that the people involved agree with that purpose. For example, an effort to map people with disabilities in a specific city can improve services. However, the database should not expose these people to risks, such as attacks or stigmatization that can be targeted at specific homes. Also, establishing this database should answer to the needs of the people involved and not driven by the mere wish to use data. For further guidance, see the chapter Getting Data in the Hand-book of the Modern Development Specialist and the OHCHR Guidance to adopt a Human Rights Based Approach to Data, focused on collection and disaggregation. 

If data are collected in person by people recruited for this process, proper training is required. They need to be able to create a safe space to obtain informed consent from people whose data are being collected and know how to avoid bias during the data-collection process. 

Unknowns in existing datasets

Data-driven initiatives can either gather new data, for example, through a survey of students and teachers in a school, or use existing datasets from secondary sources, for example by using a government census or scraping social media sources. Data protection must also be considered when you plan to use existing datasets, such as images of the Earth for spatial mapping. You need to analyze what kind of data you want to use and whether it is necessary to use a specific dataset to reach your objective. For third-party datasets, it is important to gain insight into how the data that you want to use were obtained, whether the principles of data protection were met during the collection phase, who licensed the data and who funded the process. If you are not able to get this information, you must carefully consider whether to use the data or not. See the Hand-book of the Modern Development Specialist on working with existing data. 

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Questions

If you are trying to understand the implications of lacking data protection measures in your work environment, or are considering using data as part of your DRG programming, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Are data protection laws adopted in the country or countries concerned?
    Are these laws aligned with international human rights law, including provisions protecting the right to privacy?
  2. How will the use of data in your project comply with data protection and privacy standards?
  3. What kind of data do you plan to use? Are personal or other sensitive data involved?
  4. What could happen to the persons related to that data if the government accesses these data?
  5. What could happen if the data are sold to a private actor for other purposes than intended?
  6. What precaution and mitigation measures are taken to protect the data and the individuals related to the data?
  7. How is the data protected against manipulation and access and misuse by third parties?
  8. Do you have sufficient expertise integrated during the entire course of the project to make sure that data are handled well?
  9. If you plan to collect data, what is the purpose of the collection of data? Is data collection necessary to reach this purpose?
  10. How are collectors of personal data trained? How is informed consent generated when data are collected?
  11. If you are creating or using databases, how is anonymity of the individuals related to the data guaranteed?
  12. How is the data that you plan to use obtained and stored? Is the level of protection appropriate to the sensitivity of the data?
  13. Who has access to the data? What measures are taken to guarantee that data are accessed for the intended purpose?
  14. Which other entities – companies, partners – process, analyze, visualize and otherwise use the data in your project? What measures are taken by them to protect the data? Have agreements been made with them to avoid monetization or misuse?
  15. If you build a platform, how are the registered users of your platform protected?
  16. Is the database, the system to store data or the platform auditable to independent research?

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Case Studies

People Living with HIV Stigma Index and Implementation Brief

The People Living with HIV Stigma Index is a standardized questionnaire and sampling strategy to gather critical data on intersecting stigmas and discrimination affecting people living with HIV. It monitors HIV-related stigma and discrimination in various countries and provides evidence for advocacy in countries. The data in this project are the experiences of people living with HIV. The implementation brief provides insight in data protection measures. People living with HIV are at the center of the entire process, continuously linking the data that is collected about them to the people themselves, starting from research design, through implementation, to  using the findings for advocacy. Data are gathered through a peer-to-peer interview process, with people living with HIV from diverse backgrounds serving as trained interviewers. A standard  implementation  methodology has been developed, including the establishment if a steering committee with key  stakeholders and population groups. 

RNW Media’s Love Matters Program Data Protection

RNW Media’s Love Matters Program offers online platforms to foster discussion and information-sharing on love, sex and relationships to 18-30 year-olds in areas where information on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) is censored or taboo. RNW Media’s digital teams introduced creative approaches to data processing and analysis, Social Listening methodologies and Natural Language Processing techniques to make the platforms more inclusive, create targeted content and identify influencers and trending topics. Governments have imposed restrictions such as license fees or registrations for online influencers as a way of monitoring and blocking “undesirable” content, and RNW Media has invested in security of its platforms and literacy of the users to protect them from access to their sensitive personal information. Read more in the publication 33 Showcases – Digitalisation and Development – Inspiration from Dutch development cooperation’, Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2019, p 12-14. 

The Indigenous Navigator

The Indigenous Navigator is a framework and set of tools for and by indigenous peoples to systematically monitor the level of recognition and implementation of their rights. The data in this project are experiences of indigenous communities and organizations and tools facilitate indigenous communities’ own generation of quality data. One objective of the navigator is that this quality data can be fed into existing human rights and sustainable development monitoring processes at local, national, regional and international levels. The project’s page about privacy shows data protection measures such as the requirement of community consent and how to obtain it and an explanation about how the Indigenous Navigator uses personal data.  

Girl Effect

Girl Effect, a creative non-profit working where girls are marginalized and vulnerable, uses media and mobile tech to empower girls. The organisation embraces digital tools and interventions and acknowledge that any organisation that uses data also has a responsibility to protect the people it talks to or connects online. Their ‘Digital safeguarding tips and guidance’ provides in-depth guidance on implementing data protection measures while working with vulnerable people. Referring to Girl Effect as inspiration, Oxfam has developed and implemented a Responsible Data Policy and shares many supporting resources online. The publication ‘Privacy and data security under GDPR for quantitative impact evaluation’ provides detailed considerations of the data protection measures Oxfam implements while doing quantitative impact evaluation through digital and paper-based surveys and interviews.  

The LAND (Land Administration for National Development) Partnership

The LAND (Land Administration for National Development) Partnership led by Kadaster International aims to design fast and affordable land administration to meet people’s needs. Through the processing and storage of geodata such as GPS, aerial photographs and satellite imagery (determining general boundaries instead of fixed boundaries), a digital spatial framework is established that enables affordable, real-time and participatory registration of land by its owners. Kadaster is aware of the sensitive nature of some of the data in the system that needs to be protected, in view of possible manipulation and privacy violation, and the need to train people in the digital processing of data. Read more in the publication 33 Showcases – Digitalisation and Development – Inspiration from Dutch development cooperation’, Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2019, p. 25-26.

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References

Find below the works cited in this resource.

Additional Resources

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Categories

Digital Gender Divide

What is the digital gender divide?

The digital gender divide refers to the gap in access and use of the internet between women* and men, which can perpetuate and exacerbate gender inequalities and leave women out of an increasingly digital world. Despite the rapid growth of internet access around the globe (97% of people now live within reach of a mobile cellular network), women are still 17% less likely to use the internet compared to men; a gap that is actually widening in many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where women are 8% less likely than men to own a mobile phone and 20% less likely to actually access the internet on a mobile device.

Civil society leader in La Paz, Honduras. The gender digital divide affects every aspect of women’s lives. Photo credit: Honduras Local Governance Activity / USAID Honduras.

Though it might seem like a relatively small gap, because mobile phones and smartphones have surpassed computers as the primary way people access the internet, that statistic translates to 390 million fewer women online in LMICs than men. Without access to the internet, women cannot fully participate in different aspects of the economy, join educational opportunities, and fully utilize legal systems.

The digital gender divide does not just stop at access to the internet however; it is also the gap in how women and men use the internet once they get online. Studies show that even when women own mobile phones, they tend to use them less frequently and intensively than men, especially for more sophisticated services, including searching for information, looking for jobs, or engaging in civic and political spaces. Additionally, there is less locally relevant content available to women internet users, because women themselves are more often content consumers than content creators.

The digital gender divide is also apparent in the exclusion of women from leadership or development roles in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. In fact, the proportion of women working in the ICT sector has been declining over the last 20 years. In the United States alone, women only hold around 18% of programming and software development jobs, down from 37% in the 1980s. This helps explain why software, apps, and tools do not often reflect the unique needs that women have, further alienating them. Apple, for instance, whose tech employees are 77% male, did not include a menstrual cycle tracker in its Health app until 2019, five years after it was launched (though it did have a sodium level tracker and blood alcohol tracker during that time).

Ward nurses providing vaccines in Haiti. Closing the gender digital divide is key to global public health efforts. Photo credit: Karen Kasmauski / MCSP and Jhpiego

A NOTE ON GENDER TERMINOLOGY
All references to “women” (except those that reference specific external studies or surveys, which has been set by those respective authors) is gender-inclusive of girls, women, or any person or persons identifying as a woman.

Why is there a digital gender divide?

At the root of the digital gender divide are entrenched traditional gender inequalities, including gender bias, socio-cultural norms, lack of affordability and digital literacy, digital safety issues, and women’s lower (compared to men’s) confidence levels navigating the digital world. While all of these factors play a part in keeping women from achieving equity in their access to and use of digital technologies, the relative importance of each factor depends largely on the region or country.

Affordability

In developing countries especially, the biggest barrier to access is simple: affordability. While the costs of internet access and of devices have been decreasing, they are often still too expensive for many people. While this is true for both genders, women tend to face secondary barriers that keep them from getting access, such as not being financially independent, or being passed over by family members in favor of a male relative. In Rwanda, an evaluation of The Digital Ambassador Programme pilot phase found that the costs of data bundles and/or access to devices were prohibitively expensive for a large number of potential women users, especially in the rural areas.

Education

Education is another major barrier for women all over the world. According to the Web Foundation, women who have some secondary education or have completed secondary school are six times more likely to be online than women with primary school or less.

Further, digital skills are also required to meaningfully engage with the Internet. While digital education varies widely by country (and even within countries), girls are still less likely to go to school over all, and those that do tend to have “lower self-efficacy and interest” in studying Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) topics, according to a report by UNICEF and the ITU. While STEM subjects are not strictly required to use digital technologies, these subjects can help to expose girls to ICTs and build skills that help them be confident in their use of new and emerging technologies. Without encouragement and confidence in their digital skills, women may shy away or avoid opportunities that are perceived to be technologically advanced, even when they do not actually require a high level of digital knowledge.

Social Norms

Social norms have an outsized impact on many aspects of the digital gender divide because they can also be a driving factor vis-à-vis other barriers. Social norms look different in different communities; in places where women are round-the-clock caregivers, they often do not have time to spend online, while in other situations women are discouraged pursuing STEM careers. In other cases, the barriers are more strictly cultural. For example, a report by the OECD indicated that in India and Egypt around one-fifth of women considered that the Internet “was not an appropriate place for them” due to cultural reasons.

Online Violence

Scarcity of content that is relevant and empowering for women and other barriers that prevent women from speaking freely and safely online are also fundamental aspects of the digital gender divide. Even when women access online environments, they face a disproportionate risk of gender-based violence (GBV) online: digital harassment, cyberstalking, doxxing, and the nonconsensual distribution of images (e.g., “revenge porn”). Gender minorities are also targets of online GBV. Trans activists, for example, have experienced increased vulnerability in digital spaces, especially as they have become more visible and vocal. Cyber harassment of women is so extreme that the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights has warned, “if trends continue, instead of empowering women, online spaces may actually widen sex and gender-based discrimination and violence.

“…if trends continue, instead of empowering women, online spaces may actually widen sex and gender-based discrimination and violence.”

UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights

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How is the digital gender divide relevant in civic space and for democracy?

The UN understands the importance of women’s inclusion and participation in a digital society. The fifth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) calls to “enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women.” Moreover, women’s digital inclusion and technological empowerment are relevant to achieving quality education, creating decent work and economic growth, reducing inequality, and building peaceful and inclusive institutions. While digital technologies offer unparalleled opportunities in areas ranging from economic development to health improvement, education, cultural development and political participation, gaps in the access to and use of these technologies and heightened safety concerns hinder women’s ability to access resources and information that are key to improve their lives and the wellbeing of their communities, and exacerbate gender inequalities.

Further, the ways in which technologies are designed and employed, and how data are collected and used impact men and women differently. Whether using technologies to develop artificial intelligence systems and implement data protection frameworks or just for the everyday uses of social media, gender considerations should be at the center of decision–making and planning in the democracy, rights and governance space.

Students in Zanzibar. Without access to the internet, women and girls cannot fully engage in economies, participate in educational opportunities or access legal systems. Photo credit: Morgana Wingard / USAID.

Initiatives that ignore gender disparities in access to the Internet and ownership and use of mobile phones will exacerbate the gender inequalities already experienced by the most vulnerable and marginalized populations. In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic and increasing GBV during lockdown, millions of women and non-binary individuals have been left with limited access to help, whether via instant messaging services, calls to domestic abuse hotlines, or discreet apps that provide disguised support and information to survivors in case of surveillance by abusers.

Most importantly, initiatives in the civic space must recognize women’s agency and knowledge and be gender-inclusive from the design stage. Women must participate as co-designers of programs and engaged as competent members of society with equal potential to devise solutions rather than perceived as passive victims.

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Opportunities

There are a number of different areas to engage in that can have a positive impact in closing the digital gender divide. Read below to learn how to more effectively and safely think about some areas that your work may already touch on (or could include).

Widening job opportunities


According to the ITU, 90% of future jobs will require ICT skills. As traditional analog jobs in which women are overrepresented (such as in the manufacturing, service, and agricultural sectors) are replaced by automation, it is more vital than ever that women learn ICT skills to be able to compete for jobs. While digital literacy is becoming a requirement for many sectors, new, more flexible job opportunities are also becoming more common, and are eliminating traditional barriers to entry, such as age, experience, or location. Digital platforms can enable women in rural areas to connect with cities, where they can more easily sell goods or services. And part-time, contractor jobs in the “gig economy” (such as ride sharing, food delivery, and other freelance platforms) allow women more flexible schedules that are often necessitated by familial responsibilities.
Increasing access to financial services

The majority of the world’s unbanked population is comprised of women. Women are more likely than men to lack credit history and the mobility to go to the bank. As such, financial technologies can play a large equalizing role, not only in terms of access to tools but also in terms of how financial products and services could be designed to respond to women’s needs. In the MENA region, for example, where 52% of men but only 35% of women have bank accounts, and up to 20 million unbanked adults in the region send or receive domestic remittances using cash or an over-the-counter service, opportunities to increase women’s financial inclusion through digital financial services are promising.
Policy change for legal protections

There are few legal protections for women and gender-diverse people who seek justice for the online abuse they face. According to the UN Broadband Commission, only one in five women live in a country where online abuse is likely to be punished. In many countries, perpetrators of online violence act with impunity, as laws have not been updated for the digital world, even when online harassment results in real-world violence. In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for instance, there are no laws that specifically protect women from online harassment, and women who have brought related crimes to the police risk being prosecuted for “ruining the reputation of the attacker.” Sometimes cyber legislation even results in the punishment of victimized women: women in Uganda have been arrested under the Anti-Pornography Act after ex-partners released nude photos of them online. As many of these laws are new, and technologies are constantly changing, there is a need for lawyers and advocates to understand these laws and gaps in legislation to propose policies and amend existing laws that allow women to be truly protected online and safe from abuse.
Digital security education and digital literacy training

Digital-security education can help women (especially those at higher risk, like HRDs and journalists) stay safe online and attain critical knowledge to survive and thrive politically, socially, and economically in an increasingly digital world. However, there are not enough digital-safety trainers that understand the context and the challenges at-risk women face; there are few digital-safety resources that provide contextualized guidance around the unique threats that women face or have usable solutions for the problems they need to solve; and social and cultural pressures can prevent women from attending digital- safety trainings. Women can and will be content creators and build resources for themselves and others, but they first must be given the chance to learn about digital safety and security as part of a digital- literacy curricula. Men and boys, too, need training on online harassment and digital-safety education.
Connecting and campaigning on issues that matter

Digital platforms enable women to connect with each other, build networks and organize on justice issues. For example, the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct in the media industry, which became a global movement, has allowed a multitude of people to participate in activism previously bound to a certain time and place. Read more about digital activism in the Social Media primer.

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Risks

Young women at a digital inclusion center in the Peruvian Amazon. Cost remains the greatest barrier for women to access the Internet and own a mobile phone. Photo credit: Jack Gordon / USAID / Digital Development Communications.

There are many ways in which the digital gender divide is widening, even with external intervention. Read below to learn about some of the factors that are accelerating this gap, as well as how to mitigate for unintended – and intended – consequences.

Considering the gender digital divide as “women’s issue”


It is fundamental to consider the gender digital divide as a cross-cutting and holistic issue, affecting countries, societies, communities, and families, and not just as a “women’s issue.” As such, closing the gender gap in access, use and development of technology demands the involvement of societies as a whole. Approaches to close the divide must be holistic and take into account context-specific power and gender dynamics and include active participation of men in the relevant communities to make a sustained difference.

Further, the gender digital divide should not be understood as restricted to the technology space, but as a social, political, and economic issue with far-reaching implications.

National disasters intensify the education gap for women

Lockdowns and school closures due to the Covid-19 pandemic are contributing to the gender gap in education, especially in the most vulnerable contexts. According to UNESCO, more than 111 million girls who were forced out of school in March 2020 live in the world’s least-developed countries where gender disparities in education are already the highest. In Mali, Niger and South Sudan, countries with some of the lowest enrolment and completion rates for girls, closures left over 4 million girls out of school. Increasing domestic and caregiving responsibilities, a shift towards income generation, and gaps in digital-literacy skills mean that many girls will stop receiving an education, even where access to the Internet and distance-learning opportunities are available. In Ghana, for example, 16% of adolescent boys have digital skills compared to only 7% of girls.
Online violence increases self-censorship

Online GBV has proven an especially powerful tool for undermining women and women-identifying human-rights defenders, civil society leaders and journalists, leading to self-censorship, weakening women’s political leadership and engagement, and restraining women’s self-expression and innovation. According to UNESCO, 73% of women have been or will be exposed to some form of cyber violence in their lifetimes, and 52% of women feel the internet is not a safe place to express their opinions. If these trends are not addressed, closing the digital divide will never be possible, as many women who do get online will be pushed off because of the threats they face there. Women journalists, activists, politicians, and other female public figures receive the brunt of online harassment, through threats of sexual violence and other intimidation tactics. Online violence against journalists leads to journalistic self-censorship, affecting the quality of the information environment and democratic debate.

Solutions include education (training women to use computers and men and boys on how not to behave in online environments), policy change (advocating for the adoption of policies that address online harassment and protect women’s rights online), and technology change (encouraging more women to be involved in the creation of tech will help ensure that the tools and software that are available serve their needs, as women).

Artificial intelligence systems exacerbate biases

Reduced participation of women in leadership of development, coding and design of AI and machine-learning systems leads to reinforcement of gender inequalities through the replication of stereotypes and maintenance of harmful social norms. For example, groups of predominantly male engineers have designed digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, which use women-sounding voices, reinforcing entrenched gender biases, such as women being more caring, sympathetic, cordial and even submissive.

In 2019, UNESCO released “I’d blush if I could”, a research paper whose title was based on the response given by Siri when a human user addressed “her” in an extremely offensive manner. The paper noted that although the system was updated in April 2019 to reply to the insult more flatly (“I don’t know how to respond to that”), “the assistant’s submissiveness in the face of gender abuse remain[ed] unchanged since the technology’s wide release in 2011.” UNESCO suggested that by rendering the voices as women-sounding by default, tech companies were preconditioning users to rely on antiquated and harmful perceptions of women as subservient and failed to build in proper safeguards against abusive, gendered language.

Further, machine-learning systems rely on data that reflect larger gender biases. A group of researchers from Microsoft Research and Boston University trained a machine learning algorithm on Google News articles, and then asked it to complete the analogy: “Man is to Computer Programmer as Woman is to X.” The answer was “Homemaker,” reflecting the stereotyped portrayal and the deficit of women’s authoritative voices in the news. (Read more about bias in artificial intelligence systems in the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Primer section on Bias in AI and ML).

In addition to expanding job opportunities, higher participation of women in tech leadership and development can help add a gender lens to the field and enhance the ways in which new technologies can be used to improve women’s lives.

New technologies allow for the increased surveillance of women

Research conducted by Privacy International shows that there is a uniqueness to the surveillance faced by women and gender non-conforming individuals. From data privacy implications related to menstrual-tracker apps, which might collect data without appropriate informed consent, to the ability of women to privately access information about sexual and reproductive health online, to stalkerware and GPS trackers installed on smartphones and internet of things (IoT) devices by intimate partners, pervasive technology use has exacerbated privacy concerns and the surveillance of women.

Research conducted by the CitizenLab, for example, highlights the alarming breadth of commercial software that exists for the explicit purpose of covertly tracking another mobile device activities, remotely and in real-time. This could include monitoring someone’s text messages, call logs, browser history, personal calendars, email accounts and/or photos.

Increased technological unemployment

Job losses caused by the replacement of human labor with automated systems lead to “technological unemployment,” which disproportionately affects women, the poor and other vulnerable groups, unless they are re-skilled and provided with adequate protections. Automation also requires skilled labor that can operate, oversee and/or maintain automated systems, eventually creating jobs for a smaller section of the population. But the immediate impact of this transformation of work can be harmful for people and communities without social safety nets or opportunities for finding other work.

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Questions

Consider these questions when developing or assessing a project proposal that works with women or girls:

  1. Have women been involved in the design of your project?
  2. Have you considered the gendered impacts and unintended consequences of adopting a particular technology in your work?
  3. How are differences in access and use of technology likely to affect the outcomes of your project?
  4. Are you employing in your project technologies that could reinforce harmful gender stereotypes or fail the needs of women participants?
  5. Are women and/or non-binary people exposed to additional safety concerns brought about by the use of the tools and technologies adopted in your project?
  6. Have you considered gaps in sex- or gender-disaggregated data in the dataset used to inform the design and implementation of your project? How could these gaps be bridged through additional primary or secondary research?
  7. How can your project meaningfully engage men and boys to address the gender digital divide?
  8. How can your organization’s work help mitigate and eventually close the gender digital divide?

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Case studies

There are many examples of programs that are engaging with women to have a positive effect on the digital gender divide. Find out more about a few of these below.

USAID’s WomenConnect Challenge

In 2018, USAID launched the WomenConnect Challenge to enable women’s access to, and use of, digital technologies. The first call for solutions brought in more than 530 ideas from 89 countries, and USAID selected nine organizations to receive $100,000 awards. In the Republic of Mozambique, the development-finance institution GAPI is lowering barriers to women’s mobile access by providing offline Internet browsing, rent-to-own options, and tailored training in micro-entrepreneurship for women by region. Another awardee, AFCHIX, creates opportunities for rural women in Kenya, Namibia, and Sénégal and Morocco to become network engineers and build their own community networks or Internet services. The entrepreneurial and empowerment program helps women establish their own companies, provides important community services, and positions these individuals as role models.
Safe Sisters – Empowering women to take on digital security
In 2017, Internews and DefendDefenders piloted the Safe Sisters program in East Africa to empower women to protect themselves against online GBV. Safe Sisters is a digital-safety training-of-trainers program that provides female human rights defenders and journalists who are new to digital safety with techniques and tools to navigate online spaces safely, assume informed risks, and take control of their lives in an increasingly digital world. Through the program, which was created and run entirely by women, for women, participants learn digital-security skills and get hands-on experience by training their own at-risk communities.

In building the Safe Sisters model, Internews has verified that women will dive into improving their understanding of digital safety and share this information in their communities and get new job opportunities—if given the chance. Women can also create context- and language-specific digital-safety resources and will fight for policies that protect their rights online and deter abuse. There is strong evidence of the lasting impact of the Safe Sisters program: two years after the pilot cohort of 13 women, 80% are actively involved in digital safety; 10 have earned new professional opportunities because of their participation; and four have changed careers to pursue digital security professionally.

Internet Saathi
In 2015, Google India and Tata Trusts launched Internet Saathi, a program designed to equip women (known as Internet Saathis) in villages across the country with basic Internet skills and provide them with Internet-enabled devices. The Saathis then train other women in digital literacy skills, based on ‘train the trainer’ model. As of April 2019, there were more than 81,500 Internet Saathis who helped over 28 million women learn about the Internet across 289,000 villages. Read more about the Saathis here.

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References

Find below the works cited in this resource.

Additional Resources

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*A NOTE ON GENDER TERMINOLOGY
All references to “women” (except those that reference specific external studies or surveys, which has been set by those respective authors) is gender-inclusive of girls, women, or any person or persons identifying as a woman.

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