AI for efficient, evidence-informed humanitarianism
New-generation artificial intelligence tools can further human rights and humanitarian aims — if used responsibly and creatively.
By Fran Baker (Director of Social Impact, Arm), Hovig Etyemezian (Director, UNHCR Innovation Service), and Rebeca Moreno Jiménez (Lead Data Scientist, UNHCR Innovation Service)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a buzzword in many if not most fields of work, and the humanitarian sector is no exception. This emerging technology has proven — if not surpassed — Moore’s Law, the idea that, essentially, computing power will exponentially increase even as the costs of that technology drop sharply.
Almost 60 years on from Gordon Moore’s prediction, we can see that AI has, in recent years, rapidly become faster, cheaper, and perhaps — if we count the generative AI evolution — smarter. As commentator Kat Davis recently argued, “AI is on a sprint, with its computational power doubling not every two years, but approximately every six months.”
This breathtakingly quick development is overwhelming for any sector that must keep up with the technology in order to harness its potential and mitigate its risks.
A note on defining ‘AI’
‘Artificial Intelligence’ (AI) is a single term used for a remarkably wide range of technologies and use cases. The umbrella of AI is broad, to say the least, encompassing among others the disciplines of natural-language processing (NLP), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), as well as the products of research work into these disciplines — including generative AI-based tools like ChatGPT. While we use the overarching term ‘AI’ in this piece, for ease of reference, we understand its inherent limitations and obfuscations.
Implications for humanitarian actors
For the humanitarian sector — with its focus on humanitarian principles — AI’s promise is alluring, but there are risks. In a context of historic global humanitarian needs and almost-as-historic funding shortfalls, can these tools be used for good?
When Moore first made his statement, which we now think of as Moore’s Law, in 1965, UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, had been around for just 15 years. Although aggregate figures from this period are hard to find, the agency assisted less than 1 million people forced to flee in 1965. Today, UNHCR and its humanitarian and government partners are working together to support around 112.6 million people — including refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced people, and others. The imperative to understand these communities’ needs during their journey to safety and beyond is more urgent than ever.
AI can play a unique role in supporting us in this mission. It can make cumbersome processes more efficient, expedite information retrieval, provide insights into unstructured data, increase accountability to the users of systems, facilitate the inclusion of less technical people in the shaping of technical solutions, and help us to be more responsive at earlier stages of crisis situations. This is the promise and potential of AI — but it comes with a cost.
Both within and beyond the humanitarian sector, many companies have developed AI-based solutions to address existing challenges — and these solutions have, in turn, posed their own challenges. Automation challenges the value of human-centred approaches, as well as internal organisational rules. There are documented instances of AI-based solutions, among other issues, propagating bias, discriminating against certain populations in favour of others, unveiling protected data, plagiarizing intellectual property, and replacing human jobs.
These risks around bias, discrimination, and privacy — among others — are particularly problematic in humanitarian contexts, where organisations are working with and for populations who are experiencing heightened, often intersectional, vulnerability and disadvantage.
To mitigate these risks and explore the potential of AI, organisations must put in place systems and protocols to help guide the integration of their own values and rules while developing AI-supported solutions. Both UNHCR’s Innovation Service and UK-based technology company Arm have taken such steps — and forged a partnership, based on shared values, to ensure AI and other technologies contribute to a humanitarian response fit for the future.
The UNHCR–Arm partnership
Arm, founded in 1990, is a semiconductor design company. Semiconductor chips are an essential building block for many electronic devices, and one that is crucial to the development and evolution of AI. With this organic connection to the AI revolution, Arm has proactively sought to ensure that human-centred compliance, due diligence, and alignment with the company’s mindset and rules are at the heart of its engagement with this ever-evolving technology.
The integrity of intellectual property and an avoidance of digitally enhanced group think, as well as the highest data protection principles and an emphasis on creativity, are hallmarks of the company’s AI efforts. Arm’s AI Trust Manifesto, published in 2019, aimed to ensure that “a new set of ethical design system principles” would be established by the tech sector as a foundation on which to develop AI systems for good.
Similarly, the UN has established parameters for AI’s use, to “ensure that the United Nations uses artificial intelligence for the best interest of the people whom it serves, in order to benefit humanity and the planet.” For UNHCR, with the wellbeing of communities we work with and for as our paramount focus, ethical use of technologies is a key prerequisite. Arm and UNHCR’s Innovation Service are fully aligned on the importance of refugees and displaced populations being active participants in our joint venture on using AI and exponential technologies for good.
The Innovation Service takes a community-based approach to AI solutions in design, development, and deployment by working closely with refugee communities and civil societies to include stateless and forcibly displaced people in ongoing efforts. By adopting a human-centred approach, we champion the inclusion and empowerment of underrepresented groups, taking into account age, gender, and diversity considerations by design, building diversity into tech tools, levelling the digital playing field for people forced to flee, and paving a way to women- and refugee-led AI initiatives.
Building on this common foundation, Arm and UNHCR’s Innovation Service forged a multidimensional partnership in 2023 that seeks to ensure technology is leveraged to advance UNHCR’s mandate. Through this partnership — developed under the auspices of UK for UNHCR — Arm is providing financial resources to the Innovation Service, in addition to in-kind support and the valuable time of a host of Arm experts, who work closely with UNHCR teams and refugee-led organisations to help solve the complex challenges we face.
AI opportunities and best practices
UNHCR teams around the world are exploring the ethical development of AI-supported solutions to better address challenges in contexts of forced displacement. They’re, for example, using AI alongside traditional and nontraditional datasets to develop a global early warning system on forced displacement, to enhance emergency preparedness and response. They’re developing bespoke generative AI instances to securely analyse information provided by communities to better understand their protection needs, and to deliver an effective way for colleagues to query and understand the specifics of refugee law.
Perhaps even more importantly, the Innovation Service is supporting refugee-led organisations to innovate with AI. In 2024, Welcome Place — a France-based, grassroots organisation — will be exploring the use of AI to improve existing identity verification tools, enabling refugees to access the banking system with various types of ID. By ensuring refugees are in the driving seat, we can better address the potential biases and uneven benefits of AI-supported tools.
All of these initiatives are investigating the utility of these tools to further humanitarian aims, and gathering important lessons to inform future programming. Many of them are also benefiting from the expertise of Arm’s workforce, through an innovative Employee Engagement Programme. Meanwhile, UK for UNHCR has developed the Teach AI campaign, to encourage communities to proactively combat the existing bias within AI tools toward refugees and other forcibly displaced and stateless people.
Looking ahead
Going forward, there is no doubt that the ongoing rapid development of a range of AI technologies will bring additional ethical and practical concerns, as well as potentially game-changing benefits to humanitarian workers and the communities they work with and for.
Taking both an innovative and realistic approach, the partnership between Arm and UNHCR’s Innovation Service aims to ensure those benefits can be realized and attendant risks can be mitigated. As a concrete outcome of this collaboration, Arm experts are working closely with recipients of the Innovation Service’s Data Innovation Fund — which supports creative and responsible approaches to data analysis and emergent tech — to provide technical advisory support.
Through this Fund, UNHCR teams are implementing projects across 2024 that leverage AI to, among other things, draft submissions to court to help refugees contending nonrecognition decisions in South Korea and support UNHCR in the processing and analysis of unstructured data in languages used by communities in Iraq.
The presence of Arm experts to act as a sounding board for the effective design and development of these projects enhances their potential to transform organisational practice and the lives of refugees. On a basis of commonly held values and complementary expertise, Arm and UNHCR are working together to keep pace with technological change and ensure that its remarkable potential can be harnessed for good.
Our strategic partnership aims to shape the present and the future of the humanitarian response. We are committed to collectively and responsibly using AI and technologies to solve the complex challenges we face — and we are doing so in close collaboration with refugees and displaced communities.
Read more about the UNHCR Innovation Service’s work here. Read more about Arm’s mission here.
