Tag Archives technology

From Hands-On to High-Tech: How Dutch Care Workers Navigate Digitalization and Robotization

By Posted on 1862 views

Whether we embrace it or not, digital technologies and AI are here to stay, and they are fundamentally changing the human world of labour. As new technologies revolutionize the healthcare landscape, these changes are reshaping the lives and work of care workers. In this blog, Sreerekha Sathi shares insights from her research, which explores important questions about how digital technologies are reshaping care work in the Netherlands specifically: how these innovations are affecting care workers and how care homes are adapting to digital solutions and AI-assisted robotics. What specific forms of AI-assisted robotics are currently being utilized in Dutch care homes and how can we evaluate the benefits, challenges and risks associated with their implementation?

Source: Unsplash

Digitalization, robotization and the care worker

The Dutch healthcare sector faces increasing inequality in access to care, staff shortages, increasing workloads and a high percentage of aging populations. Around two thousand government-funded care homes serve the elderly, those with dementia, disabilities and other care needs.

Like other countries in Europe, the Netherlands has been experimenting with digitization and robotization in health care. Over the past two decades, AI-assisted digital tools and Socially Assistive Robots (SARS) have become more common in surgeries, patient monitoring, consultations, diagnostics, rehabilitation, telemedicine, cognitive and emotional care, especially in the post-pandemic period (Getson, C., & Nejat, G. 2021, Kang et al. 2023). Beyond Europe, countries like China and Japan lead these developments, with Sweden and the Netherlands close behind.

The use of digital solutions and AI-assisted robotics have moved beyond the experimental phase into early adoption. Current discussion focuses on opportunities for collaboration between private companies, academic institutions and healthcare providers. This pilot study involved conversations with few care workers in the care homes, innovation managers, company officials and academic scholars in the Netherlands.

Conversations with care workers show that most technologies in use are still relatively simple – medication dispensers, sensor systems and communication tablets – selected for their affordability and ease. Once prescribed, digital care tools like Compaan, Freestyle Libre, MelioTherm, Medido, Sansara or Mono Medical are introduced to clients by neighbourhood digital teams, usually via smartphone apps connected through WIFI as part of online digital care.

The introduction of robots is slowly gaining ground. Many universities, including Erasmus University, are collaborating with private companies on new projects in robotization and digitalization in health care. Some of the robots which are popular in use currently in Europe include TinyBots (Tessa), Zorabots (NAO), Pepper, Paro and other robotic pets, and SARA, which supports dementia patients. Some care workers believe that the robots promote social contact and enhance patients’ independence, while others appreciate that robots taking over peripheral tasks can make their own work easier.

Care workers are required to learn and engage with new technologies, which directly affect their everyday lives. Although they are relatively well paid by normal standards, their workload and stress often exceed what their pay reflects. Larger, well-funded care homes have support staff who assist care workers for indirect or non-medical support at lower pay. When new technologies are introduced without sufficient involvement and inputs from the workers, they can lead to more burden on workers in terms of time and labour costs. For them, new technologies are often ‘thrown over the fence’, with insufficient training or involvement of care workers in design or decision-making, leading to frustration, resistance and underuse even when the tools are effective. They argue, ‘we don’t need fancy tools – just the right tools used in the right way.’

Many workers feel that if a robot can take on physical tasks, the workers can give clients more time and attention. When the purpose of a tool is clearly explained, and workers remain present in critical moments, clients and families are more accepting of new technology.

Gender and labour in new technologies

Feminist Science and Technology Studies (FSTS) has long shown how technologies carry gendered biases. Feminist histories of computing have highlighted women’s contribution to the invention and introduction of computers and software (Browne, Stephen & McInerney, 2023). A relevant question to explore today is would new technologies using AI assisted robotics replicate the same biases. Although new technologies are often presented as objective, they are built upon datasets and assumptions that can reproduce biases and stereotypes, based on the foundations of the feeds and accesses in-built into it (1). Robots, for instance, often reflect the idealized gendered traits. Nurse robots are designed with feminine or childlike features – extroverted and friendly – versus ‘techno-police’ styled introvert security robots as stoic and masculine.

Care work remains a heavily gendered profession, though more men are joining the field. While some men care workers face occasional client push back, they are increasingly welcomed amid shortages. Many care workers worry about being replaced by robots, yet most agree that emotional presence of caregivers – especially in elderly and dementia care – remains essential and robots may support but cannot substitute the human connection that defines good care work.

Further, workers also stress that technology must be context-sensitive: its success depends on the socio-economic profile of the area, staff availability and the lived preferences of the people receiving care. They advocate for flexible, context-based implementation rather than top-down standardization of new machines. Core to the debates on digitalization and robotization in care are ethical issues often narrowly framed as privacy concerns but extending to autonomy, emotional dignity and growing surveillance and inequality.

Insights into the future

The study observe that many attempts to introduce digital technologies or robotics in care homes stall in the pilot phase, often disliked or abandoned by care professionals or clients. Care workers need time and training to trust these devices, especially regarding the risks and uncertainties involved. They emphasize early involvement through co-design as essential for building trust, transparency and accountability. For sustainable implementation, the focus should shift from what is ‘new’ to what is ‘useful’.

Future debates will likely centre around prioritizing digitization in health care versus SARs in physical care. Persistent challenges include time constraints to software failures (Huisman & Kort 2019). As efforts to create ‘smart homes’ and support independent living continue (Allaban, Wang & Padir 2020), environmental sustainability and climate resilience must become priorities.

Another important step for exploration is to critically analyze the growing corporatization and monopolization in digitization and robotization (Zuboff, 2019; Hao, 2025). Rather than leaving healthcare innovations to monopolies or private capital, public or community-based state welfare support must retain agency in how digital and robotic tools are implemented. Finally, pushing back from military robotics towards socially beneficial technologies – such as health care or waste management – needs to be prioritized.

As a work in progress, this research is significant for understanding the social impacts of digitalization and robotization. In the next step of this study, these conversations will further bring together care workers, academics and innovative managers between the global south and the global north to foster dialogue about how these changes are reshaping the healthcare economy, care homes and the future of care workers.

 

End Note:

  1. A focus on changing forms of labour, along with the concerns around gender stereotypes and gendered knowledges attributed to social robots, is important for further exploration in the fields of AI-assisted occupations. The introduction of new machines involves the invisible human labour behind them, which is mostly the ‘ghost workers’ from the global south, whether with data work, coding or mining. What is inherent to existing social contexts, including gender, class, and racial stereotypes, are already heavily compromising the digital world.

Acknowledgements: This research was supported by a small grant from Erasmus Trustfonds for 2024-2025, I embarked on this short study to explore these questions. Although the grant period concluded in June 2025, the research continues. I would like to thank Ms. Julia van Stenis for her invaluable support in making this study possible.

 

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question

 

About the author:

Sreerekha Sathi

Sreerekha Sathi works on issues of gender, political economy, and critical development studies. Her current research explores the intersections of gender, care, and labour with digitalization, AI, and the future of work, and engages with critical debates in decolonial thought. She is a member of the editorial board of Development and Change.

 

Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

AI and Emerging Tech for Humanitarian Action: Opportunities and Challenges

By Posted on 2048 views
Source: AI Generated

In this blog, members of the Humanitarian Observatory Initiative South Asia (HOISA) including Anisa Abeytia, Shanyal Uqaili, Mihir Bhatt and Khayal Trivedi consider the applications of AI and other emerging technologies for humanitarian action. With UNHCR and other organisations adopting AI-enhanced planning, mapping, and prediction tools, what are some of the ethical dilemmas and challenges posed for tech-enabled humanitarian action? How can we make sure that humanitarian principles are kept to by non-human actors? And what is ‘responsible AI’?

The use of digital and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence in the humanitarian sector is not new. Since the advent of these technologies, particularly in the last two decades, the sector has gone through several transitions as data collection, storage, and data processing have become increasingly available and sophisticated. However, the recent contemporary advances in computational power, along with ‘big data’ now at the disposal of the public and private sector has allowed for a widespread and pervasive use of these digital technologies in every sphere of human life – notably also in humanitarian contexts. AI, quite rapidly, is reshaping the humanitarian sector with projects such as Project Jetson by UNHCR, AI supported mapping for an emergency response in Mozambique, AI chatbots for displaced populations, and more besides.

Humanitarian workers therefore must pose the following questions. How can responsible AI along with emerging technology be used for humanitarian action? And what are the priority areas and conditions that the humanitarian sector should put forth while employing these technologies? And does emerging technology present any ethical challenges for the sector?

There is an enormous potential in AI technology, with its ability to predict events and results that can help in international humanitarian action. With the rate at which disasters and conflicts are increasing in the past few years, the humanitarian sector particularly in terms of funding, is simply not at par in providing the relief and responses to the degree that the world requires1. In this light, strengthening disaster resilience and risk reduction by building community resilience through initiatives such as better early warning systems become crucial.

Case Study: Using AI to forecast Seismic Activity

A study using hybrid methodologies was conducted to develop a model that could forecast seismic activity in the region of Gazientep, Türkiye (bordering Syria). The system was trained using the data gathered after the massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake in early 2023, which was then followed by more than 4,300 minor tremors. To create the algorithm, key dimensions and indicators such as social, economic, institutional and infrastructural capacity from open-source websites, were identified. During the research, two regional states were identified to have extremely low resilience to earthquakes. Incidentally, this area is also home to a large number of Syrian refugees. After gathering two years of seismic data from more than 250 geographers on the ground and other open sources, two Convolutional Neural Network models were applied

that could predict 100 data points (with 93% accuracy) in future, which is amounts to about 10 seconds in future, . The study underlines the regional challenges in data collection. Several indicators were omitted due to the absence of openly availability data. This highlights the influence of power asymmetry, which allows for biased results and conclusions, thereby pushing researchers away from new understandings. A case-in-point, data pertaining to areas/neighborhoods where Syrian refugees reside was not gathered and thus excluded by default from the research findings. Despite these political challenges, there is great potential in this technology when provided with relevant data sets. AI becomes the model it is trained to be and therefore it is important to have a complete a data set to prevent reproducing real world/human biases

Fears of techno-colonialism and Asymmetric Power Structures

This case highlights the need for transparent, complete, and bias-free data sets, which remain a challenge in most parts of the world. Further, who owns these data sets? Who oversees data collection and training, and what is omitted? As AI and various deep learning methodologies transform our world, fears of techno-colonialism, techno-solutionism and surveillance are omnipresent.

Today’s post-colonial world, that in fact continues to carry forward colonial power hierarchies albeit in a new setting with changed roles, is ridden with inequalities. And these inequalities and pre-existing biases both in data and in people, are then transferred to the AI because of the way it is being (or not being) trained. Even ‘creative’ AI tools are still a conglomeration of the data that they are trained on.

AI and deep learning methodologies are tools that can be targeted to provide a solution. They require input of data, and if the data carries bias or racism to some degree then the output will also reflect that2. Questions such as, who is training the AI, what funds are being used, and who is the recipient of the effort, become critical to answer. Unfortunately, very few companies and countries in the world have the capacity to create data sets that train AI. These are often large conglomerates that work for profit in a capitalist ideology where a human centered approach is at best secondary. The decision power therefore lies in the hands of few, thereby forming a new form of colonialism.

Is AI then a tool or a medium to keep the status quo (of power structures)? Because if the few people in power, driven by capitalism, are invested in maintaining the power structures, then how will AI be of help in decisions about resource allocation? This points also to the much-needed democratization of AI and these tools. The human centric AI otherwise will remain a paradox.

Looking at Responsible AI and humanitarian principles

Can we employ AI that does no harm? For AI and similar tools to therefore be viable and inclusive, one must ensure transparency and inclusion in data gathering that forms the data sets. This requires conscious effort that is not technology driven, rather policy driven that invites people with diverse thought processes from diverse communities and especially minorities and vulnerable populations to be in a position of action and not just participate. One way is to rethink the humanitarian sector and its functioning. The other is to have a more community centered approach while thinking of AI applications, as James Landay puts it. He describes that in a community centered approach, the members of the community discuss and decide how and which resources must be allocated to what, according to their own priorities and needs. This method stands in contrast to the top-down politics, where communities are merely seen as consumers or beneficiaries.

Drawing from Edward Soja’s theory, Anisa Abeytia (2023) distinguishes and adds a fourth sphere or space to the already formed three-layer model by Soja, which Abeytia argues to be relevant in the use of AI.

According to the model, “Firstspace” is the geographic location that includes human, non-human (living and nonliving) entities and environments. “Secondspace” is our communal areas (library, schools, etc.). “Thirdspace” is the liminal landscape – the way people accept or reject ideas and technologies such as their apprehensions and fear to new transitions and change. And lastly, Abeytia adds a Fourthspace to represent the digital world which is as real as physical geographies today. An important rubric to measure viability of an AI application is how it will affect each of these spaces – the personal, the communal, the transitional and the digital space. For example, we can witness the use of AI affecting all four spaces in the project run by University of Utah and a refugee resettlement agency that used Virtual Reality (VR) headsets as a reception and resettlement tool to assist refugees to integrate into American societies.

Survey: What are the needs of the sector?

As members of the humanitarian sector, we must strive to develop our own solutions to the challenges we face, ensuring inclusivity for all. The identification of these challenges should also come from within the sector itself. Recently, a survey was conducted among key stakeholders to identify areas where AI could make a significant contribution. The most commonly highlighted areas of interest were as follows:

● Can AI assist in creating bias free intelligence that improves victim-state relationship with others?

● Can AI be utilized in measuring intolerance and widening hatred between communities, thereby causing riots such as in the UK and South Asia?

● Can AI provide guidance in identifying uncertainties of risks and resilience, along with humanitarian action insights that we have not spotted?

● Can AI conduct contribution analysis for impact evaluation?

● How to employ AI to identify methods of empowerment in decision making and developing strategies to offer universal humanitarian assistance?

● How can we harness the power of AI in analyzing epidemic preparedness and response improvement in health crises like monkeypox or Covid?

It is essential to actively investigate the use of AI and emerging technologies across the identified spheres. Efforts to make AI more equitable should include advocating for inclusive methodologies, creating transparent and diverse data sets, and amplifying the voices of Indigenous, marginalized and vulnerable populations.

While working towards more equitable systems, several critical questions arise: How can these projects be funded? Are they viable in a landscape where only a fraction of resources reaches those in need? What is the carbon footprint of developing AI and deep learning tools? How can Indigenous knowledge from resilient communities be integrated into AI systems? Each of these issues warrants thorough discussion, and every major humanitarian organization should address them.

Further reading:

Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8th ed., Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019; Luciano Floridi and Josh Cowls, “A Unified Framework of Five Principles for AI in Society”, Harvard Data Science Review, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2019.

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

 

Authors: Anisa Abeytia, Shanyal Uqaili, Mihir Bhatt and Khayal Trivedi are members of the Humanitarian Observatory Initiative South Asia (HOISA)

Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

 

Medical Drones in Africa: A Gamechanger for the Continent’s ‘Ailing’ Health Sector?

By Posted on 2305 views

While medical drones can be lauded as game-changing health technologies that help save lives, and usher efficiency and cost-effectiveness in the often contextualized as fragile African health systems, Edwin Ambani Ameso and Gift Mwonzora argue that this is not the complete picture.

The sight of desolate buildings, makeshift health settings characterised by a shortage of drugs and machinery and demoralised workers is an enduring reality of African health care centres. Medical professionals staffing these under-resourced health institutions work under depressed morale. The deplorable state of the African hospitals and clinics continues to affect in large part the underprivileged and often impoverished citizens. To fill in the gap where governments are failing to implement the right to health, some non-state actors like the Melinda and Bill Gates foundation have perennially stepped up. Thanks to the presence of vertical medical programmes funded through the assistance of donor agencies like USAID, UKAID, GIZ, DANIDA, NORAD, CIDA and more, this has saved somewhat dire situations.

While such assistance has helped improve the healthcare contexts for citizens, most African states have been left with the solitary and unfashionable role of coordinating healthcare initiatives rather than providing health as a public good accessible to all its citizens. Critical to note, however, has been the endless political rhetoric by African elites seeking political office who entice the electorate with the hype of ‘Health for All’. Often such public pronouncements are not met with clear-cut plans for providing universal access to healthcare for largely underprivileged portions of global citizens resident in the continent.

These governments anchor their political promises to the global health agenda of universal healthcare delivery with lofty promises of leaving no one behind.  It is in such contexts characterised by fragility, shortages, stock-outs, postcolonial legacies of poor infrastructures, and more grounded structural concerns that we are witnessing a rapid uptake and use of digital health technologies, notably medical drones, to leapfrog the aforementioned challenges. Thus,  questions arise  whether the real and imagined futures of healthcare access in Africa can in the long durée afford and embrace medical drones as the future of healthcare delivery.

Against this background, there is a need for robust research on whether African countries need these drones. If so, to serve which health  areas and how successful  have they been in saving lives in areas where they have been utilised so far? If found ineffective, what should be done, and with what urgency, to remedy the situation? Issues of the procurement and supply chain management of these drones at a government level also remain critical. This is considering African government elites’ proclivity to flout tendering processes: a trend reeking of grand corruption schemes.

These schemes have birthed what others have referred to as the ‘tenderpreneurs’ within the African healthcare systems. Worth noting have been the cases of looting of COVID-19 funds and the subsequent inflating and overpricing of medical accessories among various African countries. How then do we guard against state-led grand heists and corruption clothed under the procurement of moon-shot medical technologies with lofty promises of saving thousands if not millions of lives in much of Africa?  We contend that to simply adopt such technology without also addressing the governance side in several states would simply be tinkering on the edges.

We maintain that even if African governments embrace the digitalisation of the health sector without a change of conduct all efforts will come to naught. Digitalising the health sector is ideal but seems to be favouring private players such as drone companies whose contractual engagements with African states guarantee their health funds cut. This then leaves the health care budgets skewed to the detriment of the whole health system where human resource deficits, stockouts, and ill-equipped health settings persist.

Africa’s New Era of Digital Health Technologies

To then celebrate the digitalisation of the health sector without the concomitant financial support of the sector will be an disingenuous act  on the part of African ruling elites who are failing as duty bearers to guarantee the fundamental right to health for all citizens. This is sometimes in ways hard to see if one is to swallow the populist narratives of ‘health for all’ spewed during election campaigns.

Currently, the urge to embrace these technologies as essential to meeting the World Health Organisation’s triple billion target seems to be a politically driven promises of precision health delivery.

Drones or No Drones: Time for a Reality Check

Today, more than at any point, unlucky children and adults are dying from kwashiorkor, malaria, and snake bites in remote areas in rural Africa. What should be done? Is digitalising medical health including access to medical care and attention the panacea to cure this malady

Numerous benefits of medical drones range from the facilitation of emergency medical supply delivery, rapid response to disease outbreaks, improvement of maternal and child healthcare, provision of telemedicine, and facilitation of remote consultations. These drones have also proved useful in other contexts in mapping and the surveillance of disease-prone areas. Further, it is observed that medical drones can also be effectively used in humanitarian aid delivery, especially on impassable roads. Others have even stated that relying on road traffic can only go so fast and so far. Undoubtedly, these drones are convenient for providing emergency relief and aid, especially in low-lying areas such as Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe. These are contexts prone to recurrent floods and cyclones.

The Road Ahead

In the end, successful adoption twinned with sustainable use of these drones requires a multi-stakeholder buy-in. This will include the collaboration between governments, healthcare institutions, donors, drone service providers, the aviation industry, and local authorities.  Further, the buy-in (reception and acceptance) by the community is also paramount. It needs to be rehashed that without addressing the structural and underlying factors affecting Africa’s health care system, relying on drones alone as the magic bullet to cure challenges affecting the sector will be missing the forest for the trees. Medical technology needs to be anchored in a socio-economic, cultural, financial and political context which is not only permissible for innovation to thrive. The political will to stem corrupt practices, bad governance and other bulwarks that may militate against the full adoption and use of medical technology should be available. Absent due diligence, embracing medical drones in Africa without addressing the underlying structural, institutional, political, and governance factors will be akin to lofty ambitions of flying a kite where there is no wind.

This article was first published on EADI

Opinions expressed in Bliss posts reflect solely the views of the author of the post in question.

About the authors:

Edwin Ameso

Edwin Ambani Ameso is a postdoctoral Researcher at Universität Leipzig, Germany. He researches on “off-the-grid”: Infrastructures, processes of spatialization, and drones in Africa. His areas of research include health insurance, social protection and welfare, digital health technologies, infrastructures of care.

Gift Mwonzora

Gift Mwonzora is a Research Fellow in the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at the University of Erfurt, Germany. He researches on digitalisation, politics and the future of work in Middle-Income Countries. His areas of Research include development policy, digitalisation, governance, democracy, human rights, social justice.

Are you looking for more content about Global Development and Social Justice? Subscribe to Bliss, the official blog of the International Institute of Social Studies, and stay updated about interesting topics our researchers are working on.

Featured

Perpetuating data colonialism through digital humanitarian technologies by Kristin Bergtora Sandvik

By Posted on 4069 views
Refugee Registration in Lebanon

In recent years, humanitarian spaces have become technologized as aid agencies have turned to digital technologies to improve aid allocation. Wearables and other forms of digital humanitarian artifacts can foster improved surveillance of aid beneficiaries, their needs, and aid distribution, but raise serious ethical concerns. Through tracking devices, aid beneficiaries risk becoming the producers of commercial data extracted from emergency settings under the pretext of a reciprocal ‘gifting’ relationship between benefactor and beneficiary, writes Kristin Bergtora Sandvik.

Operating at the interface of bio and sensor technology, wearables such as activity trackers and smartwatches facilitate the measurement, selection, screening, legibility, calculability and visibility of data associated with human bodies. Tracking operates through and upon multiple layers: general biodata, such as height, weight, gender, age and race; bodily fluids, including blood, sweat, sperm and tears; and the capture of individual characteristics, including DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, and voice and face recognition. These are conceptualized as smart devices that can be placed on or inside human bodies for many purposes, including tracking and improving health, safety, and nutrition.

Wearables for tracking and protecting health, safety and nutrition offer interesting possibilities for the humanitarian aid sector due to their ability to monitor the needs and movements of aid beneficiaries that can improve the efficiency and timeliness of aid allocation. By tracking aid beneficiaries, aid agencies are able to deliver or monitor reproductive health services, strengthen security and accountability through more efficient registration of wearers, or ensure adequate nutrition to those who need it.

However, while the sociological literature on tracking devices focusing on individual self-tracing and consumer behaviour is large and growing, little critical scholarly attention has been paid to the use of tracking devices in the Global South, and none at all to their use in the humanitarian context. The deployment of wearables in emergencies entails deployment in contexts where there are deep, extra-democratic power differences between beneficiaries and structurally unaccountable humanitarian actors, donors and private sector actors—something that requires urgent attention.

Worryingly, increased surveillance of human bodies through human wearables and other digital humanitarian artifacts points to the commodification of the human body. While digital humanitarian goods such as human wearables are hailed by private sector actors and humanitarians as ‘game changers’, their use is not only leading to improved aid allocation. The game is changing in a different way: beneficiaries wearing tracking devices are becoming data producers.

The postcolonial past still shapes and limits what a wearable can be and do. The humanitarian sector has long used wristbands to control and care for beneficiaries. In the past, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has tried to avoid multiple registrations by using stamps, wristbands, photographs, fingerprints, or biometrics. The historical use of wristbands raises questions about potentially repressive aspects of contemporary humanitarian use of wearables. According to the UNHCR, wristbands identify each individual claiming to be a refugee, limit the recycling of the refugee population, serve as distribution ‘cards’, and give everyone better access to food and other assistance. At the same time, wristbands are also commonly used in extreme registration contexts, such as those involving enclosure systems—the herding of people into a confined space for registration. These types of uses indicate that complicated historical baggage calls into question the idea of humanitarian wearables as a uniquely benevolent technology.

Moreover, wearables are part of a process of miniaturization of the communicative architecture of aid:  As observed by Collier et al. (2017), the grand aid schemes of yesterday are today found as gadgets. Small technologies of government now permeate the field of international aid.  Wearables are part of a general trend in aid, whereby “tremendous intellectual and moral energy, as well as the financial and organizational resources, is being devoted to inventing and disseminating … micro-endeavors”. However, the literature on humanitarian goods has so far given little attention to how the incorporation of international aid into the global data economy, dominated by tech giants in the global East and the Global North, changes this equation. No attention has been paid so far to the ‘gift’ element of data production and its implications for how we think about the nature of aid.

Data extraction through aid: beneficiaries as data producers

In The Gift, Marel Mauss explores how reciprocal exchanges of objects between groups—gifting—build relationships between humans. The obligation is articulated as a moral contract to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. A significant body of literature has explored aid as ‘gift exchanges’, focusing on aid as a form of symbolic violence or a source of asymmetric power differences in which gifting is seemingly based on reciprocal, equal relationships, but in reality is not (here, here, here and here).

In the humanitarian aid sector, gifting, at least by donors and humanitarian actors, is presented as a one-directional activity premised on notions of charity and financial generosity. With the rise of wearables, this relationship is turned on its head if we recognize the central premise of the global data economy: that beneficiary data is the product, not the tracking device, and that human bodies become data-producing units—aid beneficiaries become data subjects.

The prevailing attitude among proponents of digital humanitarian technologies seem to be that this is neither an extractive relationship nor an inverted one: beneficiary data logically constitute a reciprocal gesture in return for humanitarian aid, ‘the original gift’. But data of commercial value produced through the bodies of aid beneficiaries is not a gift, and will likely not be seen as such. However, given the continuing failure to characterize data transfer properly, it is useful to hold on to the gift concept as an analytical device for developing critiques of digital humanitarian goods in the age of data colonialism. This entails considering what kind of gifts data represent, the relationships ‘data gifts’ emanate from and create, and the costs and types of revenue generated, how and for whom.

References
Sandvik, Kristin Bergtora. “Wearables for something good: aid, dataveillance and the production of children’s digital bodies.” Information, Communication & Society (2020): 1-16. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2020.1753797
Sandvik, Kristin Bergtora. “Digital Dead Body Management (DDBM): Time to Think it Through.” Journal of Human Rights Practice (2020). https://academic.oup.com/jhrp/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jhuman/huaa002/5822573
Sandvik, Kristin Bergtora. “Making wearables in aid: Digital bodies, data and gifts.” Journal of Humanitarian Affairs 1.3 (2019): 33-41. https://www.manchesteropenhive.com/view/journals/jha/1/3/article-p33.xml

Kristin SandvikKristin Bergtora Sandvik, SJD Harvard Law School, is a Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and a Professor of Sociology of Law at the University of Oslo.  Sandvik teaches robot regulations, legal technology and AI, legal sociology and ethics. Her widely published socio-legal research focuses on criminalization, technology and the struggle for accountability in humanitarian action. Most recently, she has published on humanitarian wearables and digital dead body management.

 

 

Title Image Credit: World Bank Photo Collection on Flickr

EADI/ISS Series | Digitalizing agriculture in Africa: promises and risks of an emerging trend by Fabio Gatti and Oane Visser

By Posted on 4129 views

The potential of the digitalization of agriculture in Africa to contribute to food security, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability agendas is being increasingly claimed by international development actors, and reflects in growing investments in digital technologies that are supposed to help small-scale farmers to ‘upgrade’ the way they farm. However, these technologies should not be considered panaceas from the get-go and require critical scrutiny to ensure that they will benefit who need it the most. There is a strong need for independent and in-depth social science research able to go beyond the surface of international donors and policy makers’ discourses and assess the effectiveness ‘on the ground’ of such new and greatly emphasized developing trend.

Drones used to map the boundaries of fields and monitor plant health, ground sensors to measure soil moisture levels, air temperature and humidity to prevent crop diseases, digital apps to provide farmers with localized weather forecasts, market price information and agricultural advice—these are just some examples of an emerging rural development trend called digital agriculture.

Assuming different guises (‘digital agriculture’, ‘smart farming’, ‘climate-smart agriculture’, ‘precision agriculture’), digital technologies and ICTs have started to penetrate the agricultural sector in the Global South in the past few years. Africa, with more than 60% of the population employed in the rural sector and relatively low agricultural yields, has become the main target of this ‘development’ strategy. For some, this is ‘the new Green Revolution’, an opportunity which Africa, having failed to seize before, cannot afford to miss this time.

These technologies, however, are not without concerns and limitations. Our ongoing research on digital agriculture in Africa draws out some of the hidden dimensions of the digitalization agenda, showing that we need to be aware of the risk that digital agriculture – when implemented without critical debate – might primarily benefit tech companies and multinational input providers, rather than smallholders or the environment. In the next section, therefore, the purported benefits of digital agriculture are discussed, along with some concerns.

Drone flying above beautiful landscape with vineyards

A triple-win strategy

Most proponents of digitalization in agriculture—governments, international donors, development agencies, and high-tech companies—convey the idea that it represents a triple-win solution which could be used to ‘feed’ a rapidly growing population while at the same time reducing rural poverty levels and mitigating the environmental impact of farming.

In terms of food security, digital and mobile technologies promise to deliver better yields and reduced losses arising from bad crop management. The rural poor will purportedly benefit from better market integration from being able to sell their product at higher prices, for example by being able to guarantee the traceability and origin of the product or to reduce the time between crop harvesting and selling, therefore enabling a shift toward more perishable (and profitable) crops (Asad 2016). In addition, the environment would benefit from a reduction in the use of pesticides and wasteful irrigation practices. Nevertheless, the mechanisms that enable achieving such promises remain a ‘black box’.

An expanding market

Digital agriculture seems to be first of all an appealing business opportunity for companies. According to some recent estimations, the market for precision and digital farming products has been growing at 12% per year and is expected to reach €10 billion by 2025. ‘Big tech’ players like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba, as well as big agribusiness companies like Bayer, Syngenta and John Deere have started to move into the market by making preliminary acquisitions, forging partnerships, and developing new products. In 2013, for example, Monsanto bought the Climate Corporation, a data analytics company specialized in weather forecasting technologies, for US$1.1 million.

Food security

The most intuitive effect of digital innovations in agriculture is an increased food production that would boost farmers’ income. A better reach of agricultural extension services and real-time information (for example regarding short-term weather conditions or market prices), combined with improved access to high-quality inputs and the reduction of losses due to unexpected weather events or bad pest management, are believed to allow small farmers to improve agricultural output both in terms of quantity and quality. Post-harvest losses could also be reduced with the improved monitoring of storage conditions. Additionally, an increasing ability of smallholder farmers to sell to larger markets by allowing buyers to track crops to source (certification and provenance) would allow countries and governments to achieve food security targets due to the much wider availability of lower-cost and more nutritious food products.

Poverty reduction

In mainstream discourses, smallholder farmers are considered the main target of such digital innovation policies. In terms of poverty reduction, easier access to credit and improved traceability of agricultural products, together with better integration into the supply value chain, are believed to eventually increase selling prices and consequently boost smallholder income, therefore contributing to lifting people out of rural poverty. Aker et al. (2016) found, however, that there is limited evidence to support this claim and that farmers do not always manage to sell their products at higher prices when making use of digital market information systems.

In order to make the services economically affordable, one of the solutions offered resides in the ‘Facebook model’: a digital platform collects farmers’ data and gets revenues from using and/or selling this data. In exchange, the users don’t pay (see for example this post). In this way data becomes the ‘exchange good’ with which the farmer effectively pays for the services provided by the company. This opens questions related to data ownership and which arrangements can be put in place to protect farmers’ sensitive data.

Sustainability

In the end, market and economic considerations seem to prevail, so far, over concerns about sustainability and environmental change. A recent report by the Technical Center for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in Wageningen states that “hard evidence of the impact of [such innovations] on climate resilience has yet to emerge”. The main climate change-related use case so far seems to be the highly localized weather forecasts, combined with the fact that “by increasing their productivity, [they] can help farmers earn additional income needed to invest in adapting to climate change”. Similarly, for the FAO “the effectiveness of these tools for advancing sustainability goals is unknown”. What are the real implications for the environment, then?

Other challenges and obstacles

From a socio-cultural point of view, there are other aspects that need to be taken into account. Agricultural knowledge transfer is a highly social process based on ‘on-field’ experience: human-to-human interaction might not be easily reduced to blocks of data analyzed by external algorithms (see for example Stone 2010). Also, what Friends of the Earth in a recent position paper calls the ‘erosion of tacit knowledge’ must not be overlooked: the risk is that delegating all farm-management decisions to an ‘expert app’ would reduce farmers’ autonomy and lock them into a dependency relationship with data analytics companies. Last, the lack of infrastructure, the ‘digital divide’ between urban and rural areas, and the high costs of telecommunication services in some countries represent obstacles which should be overcome before digital agriculture would be able to deliver the promised benefits for the rural poor.

In conclusion, the potential of the digitalization of agriculture in Africa to contribute food security, poverty reduction and environmental sustainability agendas still requires a proper assessment based on empirical evidence. More research is required in order to go beyond initial overoptimistic accounts and to facilitate the bridging of local barriers and yet unknown or unexpected effects.

This article is part of a series launched by the EADI (European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes) and the ISS in preparation for the 2020 EADI/ISS General Conference “Solidarity, Peace and Social Justice”. It was also published on the EADI blog.

About the authors:

photo_cvFabio Gatti is a graduate from the Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies (AFES) major at the International Institute for Social Studies (ISS). Together with dr. Oane Visser, he is currently investigating the impact of digital innovations on smallholder agriculture in Africa.

Foto-OaneVisser-Balkon-1[1]Oane Visser (associate professor, Political Ecology research group, ISS) leads an international Toyota Foundation-funded research project on the socio-economic effects of – and responses to – big data and digitalization in agriculture.

 

COVID-19 | Increased surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic reveals the emergence of a new architecture of global power by Jacqueline Gaybor and Henry Chavez

By Posted on 4379 views

Central to efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic has been the monitoring and prevention of the spread of the virus. To do so, governments need to keep discipline amongst their populations and limit their movements. While new big data, artificial intelligence technologies and control mechanisms are being implemented, we are witnessing the emergence of a new global structure of power built with our digital traces. As the intertwined history of epidemics and states shows, the utility of these new trends and devices should not be solely evaluated in terms of their effectiveness in controlling the spread of the virus, but also in terms of their consequences for the global structure of power and the future functioning of states.

History is replete with deadly contagion episodes that have decimated populations. Viruses, these little “insignificant” beings  (Žižek 2020), have created the conditions for the emergence of several devices and institutions that have become the very bases of modern nation states. Looking back, censuses, quarantines, hospitals, biometric registers and even punishment for disobedience were first conceived to be necessary to shorten the chains of infections and control the spread of diseases.

But once the crises were over, these devices were kept and instrumentalized by governments to better control their populations and territories and exercise their sovereignty. They became what Foucault called a disciplinary model of power (Foucault 1975). This model, based on a panoptical architecture (Bentham 1995) of societies and institutions, has been working, improving and spreading around the world since the 19th Century. In this panoptical model, found for instance in prisons, hospitals, or schools, a watchman position creates a feeling of constant surveillance among the population, which triggers them to ‘behave themselves’ (assert self-discipline).

12

  1. Marseille in quarantine. A naval officer with his family
  2. The man who brought the plague to Milan
Source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF (National Library of France)

The unprecedented scale and speed of responses to the COVID-19 crisis we face have unveiled a process of profound transformation in the architecture of power around the world. The panoptical disciplinary model from the 19th and 20th centuries seems insufficient to retain order in an increasingly interconnected and complex global system. The global lockdown we are part of is a step backward that reveals the weakening of the disciplinary model that supports modern nation states. At the same time, it reveals the emergence of new trends and devices with an unprecedented capacity to reshape, in a short period of time, human practices, imaginaries, and policies around the world. A huge transformation is taking place without a prior careful analysis, mostly based on new forms of population control and surveillance.

Mass harvesting of biometric data

An important distinction from other historical health crises is the largely unquestioned mass harvesting of biometric data—what Yuval Noah Harari (2020) has called a transition from ‘over-the-skin’ to ‘under-the-skin’ surveillance. Through this transition, largely sustained by contactless technologies, such as cameras measuring body temperature in airports, or at the entrance of Buddhist temple (as shown in the picture below), we have come to normalize images of temperature, breath, and heartrate screenings. But also, any actions that bear a resemblance to coughing, sneezing or blowing our noses can be collected and reported. This data is being used to identify possibly infected persons and control their mobility.

3

Buddha tooth relic temple, Singapore. 09 March 2020. Credits: Peter van Leeuwen.

The public seems to be rapidly accepting the risks involved with providing biometric data for prevention purposes, but caution is needed: While these devices may help solve urgent public health concerns, we do not know how they will be used afterwards.

Using apps to ‘manage the spread of the virus’

The emergence of mobile ‘coronavirus apps’ is another phenomenon that has become an integral part of collecting biometric data and limiting citizens’ freedom of movement during this pandemic. The Alipay HealthCode app was developed for the Chinese government to assign users three colour codes based on their health status and travel history, and a QR code that can be scanned at any time by law enforcement authorities. The app has specificities according to each city, but the three color codes[1] are a general commonality. The app relies on self-reporting by the user integrated with medical information provided by the government[2]. Yet, the app does not make clear to users what data is being stored, who can make use of it, and how it is used.

The global chaos has pushed different governments around the world to adopt approaches that have been conceived and designed under authoritarian regimes. For example, Andrus Ansip, Vice President of the European Commission, promoted Singapore’s TraceTogether Bluetooth-operating app as a key component for preventing COVID-19 spread in the EU. Countries like the Netherlands are looking at apps to trace the movements of citizens, but are facing resistance in light of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that prioritizes anonymization and privacy. Despite a strong common legal framework, we see the EU struggling to choose between ‘giving in’ and disregarding the complexities that the technological solutions impose on privacy rights in order to contain the spread of the virus, or protecting the rights of their citizens to privacy and the future of their democracies.

As the intertwined history of epidemics and states shows, the relevance of these new trends and devices should also be evaluated regarding their future consequences in the structure of power and the functioning of the states. Which of the array of devices, technologies, and policies imposed to us during this crisis will governments or corporations keep in the aftermath to exercise control over their citizens and reinforce their power? The reality in the Global South is even more complicated, considering their limited technical capacities and lack of privacy regulations.

 A new architectural power design

The current global quarantine reveals a weakened of the panoptical model, a lack of capacity of the states to keep discipline and order among their populations. However, the emergence of new trends and devices suggest that a new architectural power design is in the making: an omniopticon model. This model offers the same disciplinary advantages of the Bentham’s design, yet it is designed in a virtual space. In this model everybody can be seen, heard, localized, measured and predicted without the necessity of towers, walls, windows, or watchdogs. As in the panoptical model, it doesn’t matter who exercises power, or even if there is someone actually watching: the discipline is internalized by fear.

However, two differences can be identified. First, this new model is not limited to the actual existence of institutions or physical spaces that discipline individuals. It is diluted around us; we contribute to it every day through our digital traces, our physical movements, eye blinks, and heartbeats. It can be anywhere in the world at any time and therefore it cannot be contained or driven by limited entities as the modern states. We are facing the emergence of a global structure of power with no modern political entity capable of controlling it.

Secondly, the Bentham’s ideal model guaranteed that the watchman position is held by any individual and therefore anyone outside the panopticon could supervise the watchman. A form of accountability to prevent a tyranny. In the omniopticon, the feature of accountability is replaced by automation led by big data and artificial intelligence technologies. No human can hold the position of the watcher, neither can they supervise something they don’t understand. As in the quarantines of the 17th century, this new disciplinary model that is taking over will lock all of us (the watchdogs included) in our cells, leave the keys outside the doors, and will leave no-one to reopen them afterwards.

[1] Green allows individuals to travel relatively freely, yellow confines individuals to their homes for isolation, while red indicates individuals with a confirmed COVID-19 case who should be in quarantine.
[2] This comprises medical records, travel history records, and information regarding being in contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19.
References
Bentham, Jeremy. 1995. Jeremy Bentham: The Panopticon Writings. Edited by Miran Bozovic. London: Verso.
Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard.
Harari, Yuval Noah. 2020. “Yuval Noah Harari: The World after Coronavirus.” Financial Times, March 20, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2020. “Slavoj Žižek ‘el Coronavirus es un golpe a lo Kill Bill al sistema capitalista.’” Esferapública (blog). March 18, 2020. http://esferapublica.org/nfblog/slavoj-zizek-el-coronavirus-es-un-golpe-a-lo-kill-bill-al-sistema-capitalista/.
Title Image: The new medusa, “it’s a good thing i can’t see myself”. Credits: Richard Scott

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

94495422_625119175013763_4784373467849949184_n

About the authors:

Jacqueline Gaybor is a Research Associate at the International Institute of Social Studies/Erasmus University Rotterdam, in The Netherlands. She holds a Ph.D. in development studies and has an interdisciplinary background in law, gender, social studies of science and technology, and sustainable development. She is also a lecturer at Erasmus University College.

Henry Chavez is a Research Associate at the Science, Technology and Society Lab (CTS-Lab) FLACSO, in Ecuador. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. He has an interdisciplinary background in social sciences, economics, and politics; and is a specialist in social studies of science, technology and innovation; anthropology of global systems; public policy design and evaluation.

Technological solutions for socio-political problems: revisiting an open humanitarian debate by Rodrigo Mena

By Posted on 3707 views

The use of technology in the humanitarian aid sector is showing a steady increase based on a sense of hope that technology could help to improve the delivery of aid and solve multiple systemic problems. Technological solutions alone, however, cannot properly address such complex problems. This blog engages in an ongoing debate among development scholars on some of the hopes and concerns related to the use of digital and web-based technology in this sector. The main conclusion: we need more case research on the use of technology and, in the meantime, the careful use of technology is invited.

The application of technology is gaining popularity in the humanitarian sector due to the series of perceived benefits and ‘solutions’ that it seems to provide. Increasingly, development scholars are warning of the unintended consequences that such technological ‘solutions’ can produce—some of them negative. Dr. Duncan Green, Senior Strategic Adviser at Oxfam GB, in one of his blog posts, cautions us about the limits of technological solutions, saying that ‘just because technologies can allow us to collect, store, analyse and communicate data and ideas in unprecedented ways should not lull us to think they can address old, entrenched problems in unprecedented ways. The primary constraints for human action are non-technological in nature.’

Long-term research on the topic by Dr. Kristin Bergtora Sandvik, Dr. Katja Lindskov Jacobsen, and Sean Martin McDonald, from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), reminds us of how technology shapes humanitarian action; they also write in a blog post that technology is implemented in the humanitarian sector without adequate legal, ethical and methodological frameworks. Another warning comes from Dr. Emre Eren Korkmaz, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Oxford, who in a recent blog post shows how the use of blockchain technologies[i] by aid agencies to support people in need, especially refugees, is embraced with great hopes, but also brings along deep concerns. He highlights the complexity of certain socio-environmental problems that are unlikely to be sufficiently addressed by technological solutions alone. Sandvik, Jacobson and Korkmaz in deepening the debate then call for more research on specific cases of the applications of digital and web-based technology in the humanitarian aid sector.

The utility of technological ‘solutions’

Is the use of more technology really making humanitarian aid and disaster responses better, faster or more efficient? Even though it is difficult to find a single answer to this question, the reality is that many believe that technology can fulfil this ideal. Let’s consider a few examples:

Satellite images are being used for data collection and project monitoring with the hope that this technology will obtain more accurate information, more quickly. Iris and fingerprint scanning for the registration of the recipients of aid bring the hope of reducing duplications on the delivery of aid and more focused assistance. The use of Skype, email, and cloud systems are essential for the day-to-day management of humanitarian aid, but the hope remains that they will also improve the coordination of disaster responses and humanitarian aid provision within and among organisations and agencies.

Technology, it is said, will also reduce excessive bureaucratic bottlenecks and could provide a solution to problems of access and increased insecurity in the field. The use of digital payment systems, e-transfers or “mobile money” revolutionised the ways of delivering economic aid, promising more flexible, faster and safer economic assistance as compared to moving and distributing cash. Finally, there is hope that the use of technology will help to avoid problems of corruption, power struggles, or inequality. It is believed that using technology is politically neutral, but this belief has proven to in fact be far from reality.

A panacea for deeper problems?

Despite the benefits that these technologies can bring, they cannot be used naïvely, as the use of any technology (and the use of the information obtained along with it) involves multiple political and social variables. New technologies interplay with the realities of the places where they are implemented, and in places requiring humanitarian aid, with the existing and emerging needs of people.

We must question how these technologies interact with the inequalities of these places or their political regimes. As Korkmaz warns in his blog, there is also risk of abuse —institutions can use digital identities ‘to track people’s choices and desires’, which could lead to increased surveillance and the use of information against refugees.

Technology is also subject to instrumentalisation and can be used for purposes quite the opposite of those humanitarian purposes it is intended to serve. The way in which information is collected, analysed and presented, can also be motivated by other, non-humanitarian objectives. In other words, the use of technology is never politically neutral— it affects and is affected by actors and processes, in ways not always fully understood. Reflecting on this is as important as thinking about the benefits of using new data-collection technologies. And we must also identify when, how and which technology to use.

The need for more case studies

The expansion[ii] and international call[iii] for the use of technology need to go hand-in-hand with greater reflection and deeper knowledge of the real impact, benefits and consequences of technology’s use. As McDonald, Sandvik, and Jacobsen argue in their blog post, ‘humanitarians need both an ethical and evidence-driven human experimentation framework for new technologies.’

As the discussion on the need for awareness about the use of technology is already ongoing, it is important to start gathering information on specific cases showing how which technology is used in reality. Afghanistan presents a good case for examining the application of aid technology, as its use has increased here over the last decade4–6.

Ongoing research I’m carrying out as Visiting Scholar of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit (AREU) on the (political) use and the introduction of data-collection technology in Afghanistan seeks to map this technology, also reflecting on who uses it, who can get access to the collected information, and how and for which purposes it is used. The research importantly also asks: does technology really fulfil the promises it carries?

The promotion of technology is still alive in Afghanistan and globally, as multiple new forms of technology are being implemented by the humanitarian sector, like bitcoin or blockchain technology9,10. However, the applicants of technology in the humanitarian sector should not be blind to its potential negative effects. Technology can be tremendously helpful, but must also pass the ‘do no harm’ test11,12 and should be applied in a reflective manner. In the meantime, the thoughtful use of technology and more research on the topic are invited.

[i] Blockchain technologies refers to a distributed and decentralized database of continuously growing records of digital information, ordered, linked and secured using cryptography.
[ii] The use technology in the humanitarian sector, if far from new, is a growing phenomenon since the late 20th Century1–3. The difference nowadays lies in its expansion and penetration at all levels of the humanitarian aid system.
[iii] There has been an international call to innovate and introduce more technology. For instance, two reports from 2013 reinforced the use of multiple communications and data collection technologies in the humanitarian system: the World Disaster Report from the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC), and the document Humanitarian in a Network Age from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
References:
  1. Stephenson, R. and P.S. Anderson (1997) ‘Disasters and the information technology revolution’, Disasters 21, 305–334.
  2. Sandvik, K. B., M. Gabrielsen Jumbert, J. Karlsrud and M. Kaufmann (2014) ‘Humanitarian technology: a critical research agenda’, Int. Rev. Red Cross 96, 219–242.
  3. Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (2011) ‘Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies‘. UN Foundation & Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership.
  4. IRIN (2013) ‘Innovative ICT helps aid workers in Afghanistan’. Available at: http://www.irinnews.org/feature/2013/05/02/innovative-ict-helps-aid-workers-afghanistan.
  5. Boone, J. US army amasses biometric data in Afghanistan. The Guardian (2010). Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/oct/27/us-army-biometric-data-afghanistan.
  6. Zax, D. In Afghanistan, Cash Has Become The Most Effective Form Of Aid. Fast Company (2016). Available at: https://www.fastcompany.com/3065011/in-afghanistan-cash-has-become-the-most-effective-form-of-aid.
  7. Jacobsen, K. L. Experimentation in humanitarian locations: UNHCR and biometric registration of Afghan refugees. Secure. Dialogue 46, 144–164 (2015).
  8. Jacobsen, K. L. Humanitarian biometrics. In The Politics of Humanitarian Technology: Good intentions, unintended consequences and insecurity. 57–87 (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2017).
  9. DH Network. Blockchain for the Humanitarian Sector: Future opportunities. Digital Humanitarian Network (2016). Available at: http://digitalhumanitarians.com/resource/blockchain-humanitarian-sector-future-opportunities.
  10. Bello Perez, Y. Can Bitcoin Make a Difference in the Global Aid Sector? CoinDesk (2015). Available at: https://www.coindesk.com/can-bitcoin-make-a-difference-in-the-global-aid-sector/.
  11. Jacobsen, K. L. Humanitarian technology: revisiting the ‘do no harm’ debate. ODI HPN (2015). Available at: https://odihpn.org/blog/humanitarian-technology-revisiting-the-%c2%91do-no-harm%c2%92-debate/.
  12. The Sphere Handbook. Protection Principle 1: Avoid exposing people to further harm as a result of your actions. The Sphere Project Available at: http://www.spherehandbook.org/en/protection-principle-1-avoid-exposing-people-to-further-harm-as-a-result-of-your-actions/. (Accessed: 5th January 2018)

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAbout the author: 

Rodrigo (Rod) Mena is a socio-environmental AiO-PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His current research project focuses on disaster response and humanitarian aid in complex and high-intensity conflict-affected scenarios.