projects

Enhancing online protection and accountability with generative AI

Completed
A group of people sit on chairs in a circle
Start Date
Total Project Cost
USD 91,639.000
Country
Hungary
Project Team
UNHCR Hungary

Challenge

UNHCR Hungary faces challenges in addressing the increased activity within online communities of Ukrainian refugees. Current manual monitoring methods are resource heavy and prone to errors and language issues. As online-generated content increases, a more efficient approach is needed to engage with voices of refugees in online communities.

Solution

Explore, in collaboration with refugees, ways of using AI to follow online conversations, and gather and analyze information shared by/targeted at forcibly displaced people. Finding ways to use generative AI safely and ethically will help identify patterns and keywords, enabling UNHCR to accurately detect emerging needs and potential threats.

Impact

Enhanced digital engagement and inclusion with refugee communities online, ensuring timely and effective intervention strategies. By working with 150 refugees directly and potentially reaching up to 11,000 more, the project will find ways for UNHCR to gain understanding of refugees’ needs and challenges based on their digital interactions.

Project impact

100
refugees engaged across 4 countries to ground responsible AI design in lived experience
13
interviews conducted with Telegram & Facebook admins to understand operational realities
1
AI-powered prototype built to analyze unstructured online content & classify risks

Other information

Having designed, developed, and tested an AI-powered tool to help monitor online content for early identification of protection needs, the project developed SOPs, a taxonomy, and an ethical labelling framework for responsible, AI-supported monitoring of online content, enabling training and institutional knowledge-sharing. Read more about this initiative here.