Community Cohesion in a Digital Space:
Focus on People, Information, and Trust
Violence erupted in Nigeria’s Middle Belt states of Kaduna and Plateau in 2018 due to a boiling-over of hostilities between pastoral and agricultural communities. The loss of human life, destruction of livelihoods, and inhibited mobility, were severe and resulted in drastic economic hardship for those involved. While the violence in 2018 stemmed from land and resource disputes, notions of ethnic and religious differences between the communities provoked inflammatory hate speech based on negative stereotypes that exacerbated these ongoing tensions.
To combat dangerous speech and build community cohesion, Mercy Corps Nigeria’s Conflict Management program works with divided communities to realize their shared assets and economic interests in order to put aside their cultural differences. Darius Radcliffe, former country director of Mercy Corps Nigeria, explained that these forms of hate speech are not new, but they have evolved to spread faster and be amplified with new technologies like social media.
Mercy Corps Nigeria and the Technology for Development (T4D) team worked together to use technology to ease tensions and stem digital hate speech. The collaboration brought local technology professionals and social advocates together at Mercy Corps Nigeria’s Hate Speech Hackathon to brainstorm solutions that combined technology with community building. Mercy Corps team member Faye Mooney led the event that ultimately produced the winning concept, YAFE, a mobile app designed to help communities discuss and steer away from spreading online and offline hate speech. YAFE, meaning forgiveness in Hausa, was named for Faye, who tragically passed away shortly after the event. The app was designed and piloted over one year, and many lessons emerged around the use of technology in community cohesion and countering dangerous speech.
Design
YAFE was designed to support local leaders in addressing negative narratives and dangerous speech before they escalated to violence or deepened divisions. Using artificial intelligence, the app could do this by educating users about dangerous speech, providing a reporting mechanism, and creating a digital community of practice to build capacity among the leaders, and by extension, their communities.
The pilot was also meant to test new ways for Mercy Corps staff to engage remotely with people they could not reach due to safety concerns or remote locations without the use of technology. During the course of designing the YAFE pilot, Mercy Corps learned a number of key lessons:
1.) Set expectations and frame hypotheses early: Before a pilot launches, field teams and participants must understand that the pilot technology is not a finished product and that it can, and will, adjust to better meet user needs. The pilot team should communicate to participants that they are testing a new technology and are part of an iterative process where their feedback is highly valued for making improvements. As a pilot changes over time, the foundational principles of Protection and Do No Harm should be taken into consideration at all stages of a pilot to account for risk in the humanitarian context.
2.) Ensure clear focal points and key responsibilities between HQ and field staff are established: Technology pilots run smoothly when designed with clear focal points and key responsibilities drawn between all the teams involved in the project. Defining who is the ultimate authority over the management and implementation of the pilot will streamline workflows, and organizing activities by who is specifically responsible for them is also helpful. Consider which team would be responsible for managing consultants, software developers, and other staff, as examples.
3.) Acknowledge and adapt to limitations posed by available technology, infrastructure, and user needs: Agile is a project management style commonly used in the technology industry because it allows programs to adapt to changing needs, limitations, and other conditions as they arise instead of relying on an inflexible plan. Pilots should have feedback mechanisms embedded in their design to allow project managers to be agile and reshape the features and functions of the pilot in accordance with user input, needs, and changing social landscapes.
Additionally, needs and/or digital landscape assessments can help identify potential challenges regarding available technology and infrastructure as well as opportunities for other digital interventions. In the case of YAFE, many participant users had smartphones of various quality, but cellular network coverage was poor, making it challenging to test a web-based application. This challenge could have been foreseen and remedied with a digital landscape assessment.
It is also important to assess the level of digital literacy among participant users as well as field tech support. Training and pre-work for participants and staff is sometimes necessary to build confidence and usability as new tools are introduced.
Implementation
While implementing the YAFE pilot, Mercy Corps’ Technology for Development team took away several key learnings related to moderating a digital platform for dispute resolution and community cohesion that revolve around relevant content, trusted information, and user-group dynamics.
1.) Plan and design content with participants, allowing for relevant content to evolve and be shared in meaningful, actionable ways: The YAFE pilot set out to build an application that connected users from diverse communities to learn about and report hate speech using artificial intelligence. In the end, YAFE was not able to support the level of AI technology we hoped to use. Fortunately, Mercy Corps’s Nigeria and T4D teams, as well as YAFE users themselves, were able to share information about current events, and things they heard or saw in their community that provided examples of dangerous speech for discussion. While the technology of the YAFE app pilot did not come to fruition, it provided a digital safe space that enabled discussion and the ability to identify and dispel rumors and/or potentially triggering speech.
2.) Create Closed, Curated and moderated groups: Digital community building programs should insure that user groups are closed, curated, and moderated in order to build the safest and most successful environments. All of the YAFE pilot users had a chance to meet each other in-person at the YAFE training, and the user-group was closed to outside participants. From our experience with YAFE, digital community building projects should not solely rely on technology to replace in-person contact as face-to-face conversations are essential to building trust. Despite returning to their dispersed hometowns, knowing the other users from a real live experience and the closed group environment made participants feel safe on the YAFE app and built trust among its users.
Additionally, the YAFE pilot’s group was small and diverse in order to build trust as well as a platform for informative discussion. Where large social media groups tend to attract like-minded people, the YAFE pilot was intentional about creating diverse conversation groups by organizing users from varied backgrounds, locations, and faith traditions.
“I am part of different online groups, but this is unique because Muslims and Christians are together. Now, I can call [other users] and we now have a friendship. We know what the other can do. I can ask a favor of him, and he can ask a favor of me.” Endline Kll, YAFE Pilot Participant
3.) The level of trust allows for sharing of information in positive ways: Developing trust in the YAFE group was essential to accomplishing the overall goal of the YAFE pilot, promoting cohesion across diverse communities, and identifying dangerous speech. The sense of trust among participants encouraged them to share relevant and verified information that drove meaningful conversations about addressing negative stereotypes, dispelling rumors, and building inter-community cohesion. The participants could verify the information among themselves, but quality control was, and must be, practiced by an assigned, and neutral, group moderator. Moderators must ensure that disputes between individuals of the group are resolved in order to build trust among group members. For the YAFE pilot, a Mercy Corps team member acted as the group moderator.
Looking Forward
The YAFE pilot has explored new territory in digital community building by bringing users together across geographically disparate and insecure locations, aggregating potentially dangerous narratives and rumors, and encouraging discourse about community cohesion over a digital platform. While the artificial intelligence pieces were never integrated into the YAFE app, the pilot reminded us that small discussion groups of diverse trusting individuals with a moderator are powerful and can successfully take place on a digital platform. YAFE’s discussion groups were able to dispel rumors and address negative events occurring between communities, particularly those triggered by dangerous speech.
Programs like YAFE could be used to mediate inter-community conflict as well as inform early warning systems of inter-communal violence by identifying and tracking indicators that may signify an escalation in tension among groups.
The Mercy Corps T4D and Nigeria teams are currently working together to further refine our use of digital platforms and ICT tools to combat the spread of misinformation and to support the creation of online spaces that support cohesion across different communities.
Acknowledgements
This is a summary of a larger report on the YAFE pilot, originally written by Adrienne Brooks, MEL Advisor | Mercy Corps, Technology for Development
Follow the link here to read the full report: Community Cohesion in a Digital Space
