Collective Crisis Intelligence for Frontline Responders
This project is now closed.
What was the innovation?
Collective crisis intelligence (CCI) combined methods that gather information from communities affected by crises and frontline responders using artificial intelligence (AI) for more effective crisis mitigation, response and recovery.
Using CCI methods, the research project has prototyped tools in Nepal and Cameroon with local people and communities generating new insights into how CCI can improve and localise humanitarian action.
Why we need to innovate
With humanitarian crises increasing in scale and frequency, new solutions and tools are needed to better predict and manage crises, and reduce their impact. By testing and developing models of participatory AI, new evidence and knowledge can be generated on how to use CCI to enhance humanitarian response.
What is the opportunity?
The development of CCI solutions built a richer and more local understanding of crises, drawing on the expertise of frontline responders and communities. Combined with the processing power of AI technologies, this gave humanitarians access to more timely and contextual data for anticipatory action, effective response and sustainable recovery.
Investment summary
Investment typeAccelerated innovation collaborations
People involved
Genna Barnett, Aleks Berditchevskia, Issy Gill, Nasara Hussein, Eirini Malliaraki, Joana Murta Rosa, Kathy Peach, George Richardson, Isabel Stewart, Oli Wittington; Fellows: Princewill Achem Nkongho, Pius Ngwa, Saurav Poudel
Project length16 months
Locations
UK, Nepal and Cameroon
Collaborations
Fellows
Pius Ngwa
Collective crisis intelligence
Pius is a data scientist with an MSc in data science, and a background in teaching and software engineering.
He is interested in natural language processing and using AI for social good. As a UKHIH fellow, Pius helped develop an AI prototype to fight disinformation at community level, curating and processing data, and leading the unsupervised approach of the AI tool.
Saurav Poudel
Collective crisis intelligence
Saurav is a data science teacher with experience in the health, humanitarian and social science domains.
As a UKHIH fellow, he worked on a project to create a machine learning model to optimise the distribution of relief items in crisis situations.
Princewill Achem Nkongho
Citizen engagement and technology in crisis settings
Princewill is a development evaluation specialist with expertise in monitoring and evaluation, humanitarian relief, risk communication, health promotion and social media monitoring.
His experience spans WHO HQ, the IFRC Africa Regional Office, Catholic Relief Services, the Malaria Consortium and GIZ. As a UKHIH fellow, he worked with the Cameroon Red Cross Society to support humanitarian emergency response through using AI to improve community feedback mechanisms.
Attachments
Collective Crisis Intelligence for Frontline Humanitarian Response
This report provided the first analysis of how an emerging innovation approach, Collective Crisis Intelligence, was used to improve anticipation, management and response in the humanitarian sector.
Localising AI for Crisis Response
This report documented the results of a year-long project to design and evaluate new Collective Crisis Intelligence tools that combined data from crisis-affected communities with the processing power of AI to improve humanitarian action.
Online course: Community Crisis Intelligence - Elevating community voices with AI
This course was designed for anyone in the humanitarian sector who wants to learn more about leveraging the potential of community intelligence and AI.
AI Safety Label explainer
This explainer shows]ed how Nesta has been developing and testing a conceptual AI Safety Label as part of ongoing research to promote the responsible adoption of humanitarian AI tools.