Five Ethical Principles for Humanitarian Innovation
Humanitarians love standardization. In 1997, a group of humanitarians looking to improve the quality of disaster response created the Sphere project, which initiated the Sphere Standards, a set of minimum standards for response that includes details such as the number of liters of water organizations must provide each person per day. A 2014 policy brief by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), titled “Humanitarian Innovation: The State of the Art,” meanwhile described calls for standardization and codes of conduct to address ethical challenges relating to humanitarian innovation—challenges related to engagement with the private sector, the role of experimentation in humanitarian contexts, and intellectual property rights.
It would be naive to think that security and safeguarding are not essential to humanitarian assistance. Harvard’s Signal program, which promotes the safe and effective use of information technologies in humanitarian response, for example, has conducted important research on the application of remote sensing, and principles such as “do no harm”—a concept based on the Hippocratic Oath—help guide humanitarian work and protect those it aims to serve.
However, it’s also important for the field to take a step back and look at who exactly determines such standards and who does not, and whether such standards exclude the very people who should be driving the innovation process. In recent years, the United Nations Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) Innovation Service and Community Technology Empowerment Network (CTEN), a refugee-led organization based in Northern Uganda, wanted to try moving past the idea that co-designing and user-centered design are panaceas for sharing power. We began to ask: What if we could redistribute power so that refugees led the innovation process? What if refugees established and tested our approach to experimentation?
In early 2017, CTEN introduced members of UNHCR’s Innovation Service to its work in Rhino Camp Settlement in Uganda. CTEN had established an information and communications center in the settlement (which has since evolved into a Multipurpose Community Technology Centre, or MCTC) with support from the refugee and host communities within days of its arrival. This was no easy task, as thousands of people fleeing escalating violence in South Sudan were arriving each day. Staff used personal resources to quickly buy a generator, then put out a call for laptops, identified people who could donate time and expertise, and found a space where they could run training sessions on topics like how to use web browsers and build ICT capacity.
The Innovation Service saw the project as a great opportunity to learn from and test ways of supporting refugee-led experimentation, an area it had been keen to support since its inception. The Innovation Service, UNHCR colleagues in the Uganda operation, and CTEN started a process of formalizing their partnership in support of refugee-led innovation and the MCTC. Amid all of the activity around the center’s set up, CTEN didn’t implement formal rules around the ethics of its experimentation. But it was nevertheless able to operate ethically, largely because the people leading the effort and the people it aimed to serve shared many of the same cultural values and historical connections. Led by South Sudanese refugees and Uganda nationals from Northern Uganda, the organization is culturally connected to the communities where it works, because it is the community.
Based on this experience, UNHCR and CTEN developed a pragmatic, refugee-led, “good enough” approach to experimentation in humanitarian contexts. We believe a wide range of organizations, including grassroots community organizations and big-tech multinationals, can apply this approach to ensure that the people they aim to help hold the reigns of the experimentation process.
1. Collaborate Authentically and Build Intentional Partnerships
Resource and information asymmetry are inherent in the humanitarian system. Refugees have long been constructed as “‘victims”’ in humanitarian response, waiting for “salvation” from heroic humanitarians. Researcher Matthew Zagor describes this construct as follows: “The genuine refugee … is the passive, coerced, patient refugee, the one waiting in the queue—the victim, anticipating our redemptive touch, defined by the very passivity which in our gaze both dehumanizes them, in that they lack all autonomy in our eyes, and romanticizes them as worthy in their potentiality.”
Such power dynamics make authentic collaboration challenging. Organizations therefore need to find ways to strengthen open dialogue, and commit to genuinely testing with rather than experimenting on communities. A community-led process of defining challenges and generating ideas helps build safeguards into experimentation, and solutions designed and led by the community are more likely to take social dynamics, common beliefs, and preferred practices into account.
With the MCTC, CTEN worked with the community to determine what online content should be available, when the center should be open, and what the terms of use should be. Humanitarian programming often derives from preconceived ideas of what type of content a community needs most. However, in this case, the community had free choice and decided it wanted, among other things, access to sports results—a type of content organizations might normally overlook.
In Northern Uganda, we’re really excited to support other refugee-led innovation initiatives, including SINA Loketa, a social innovation academy based in Bidibidi Settlement, and winners of UNHCR’s Innovation Award in 2018.
2. Avoid Technocratic Language
Communication can divide us or bring us together. Using exclusive or “expert” terminology (terms like “ideation,” “accelerator,” and “design thinking”) or language that reinforces power dynamics or assigns an outsider role (such as “experimenting on”) can alienate community participants. Organizations should aim to use inclusive language than everyone understands, as well as set a positive and realistic tone. Communication should focus on the need to co-develop solutions with the community, and the role that testing or trying something new can play.
In Rhino Camp settlement, for example, it was important that CTEN establish the MCTC as a center for people from diverse backgrounds. But while being enthusiastic about the potential of the MCTC for everyone, it was also important to manage expectations. CTEN worked to clearly communicate the possibility of failure and unexpected outcomes from the outset, and ensure that people knew that they were an important part of the design and improvement process.
3. Don’t Assume Caution Is Best
Research tells us that we feel more regret over actions that lead to negative outcomes than we do over inactions that lead to the same or worse outcomes. As a result, we tend to perceive and weigh action and inaction unequally. So while humanitarian organizations frequently consider the implications of our actions and the possible negative outcome for communities, we don’t always consider the implications of doing nothing. Is it ethical to continue an activity that we know isn’t as effective as it could be, when testing small and learning fast could reap real benefits? In some cases, taking a risk might, in fact, be the least risky path of action. We need to always ask ourselves, “Is it really ethical to do nothing?”
If CTEN had not taken the leap to set up the MCTC, for example, there would have been huge information gaps in the refugee settlement, with families struggling to trace loved ones and find ways to charge their phones. Instead, CTEN’s quick establishment of the center also drew attention from partners and donors, putting CTEN in the position of expanding their information sharing and ICT activities to Bidibidi, another settlement in Uganda.
4. Choose Experiment Participants Based on Values
Many humanitarian efforts identify participants based on their societal role, vulnerability, or other selection criteria. However, these methods often lead to challenges related to incentivization—the need to provide things like tea, transportation, or cash payments to keep participants engaged. Organizations should instead consider identifying participants who demonstrate the values they hope to promote—such as collaboration, transparency, inclusivity, or curiosity. These community members are well-poised to promote inclusivity, model positive behaviors, and engage participants across the diversity of your community.
When setting up the MCTC, a handful of individuals from the refugee and host community wanted to support and help in any way they could. They were drawn to the center, because they believed in its purpose and the values of CTEN. While these individuals didn’t represent the full diversity of the community at that stage, over time their dedication to and enthusiasm for the experiment drew a more diverse group of people to the project.
5. Monitor Community Feedback and Adapt
While most humanitarian agencies know they need to listen and adapt after establishing communication channels, the process remains notoriously challenging. One reason is that community members don’t always share their feedback on experimentation formally; feedback sometimes comes from informal channels or even rumors. Yet consistent, real-time feedback is essential to experimentation. Listening is the pressure valve in humanitarian experimentation; it allows organizations to adjust or stop an experiment if the community flags a negative outcome.
To understand how to listen better, UNHCR’s Innovation Service is testing communication tools across a range of contexts. This includes assessing which communication channels communities use and trust—for example, whether people trust the information they access over social media or prefer face-to-face meetings with humanitarian staff. The tools also help dig into how information flows in a community—who has access to information and who doesn’t, who controls this access, and how do rumors spread. The Innovation Service’s experimentation has included working with refugee and asylum-seekers in Nairobi to adapt the tools to an urban context with a community-led approach, as well as testing several versions at border crossings in Colombia to understand how they might work for people on the move.
Of course, this “good enough” approach draws on just one experience in Northern Uganda. But while our assumptions of its universal application certainly need testing, the success of MCTC reminds us that it’s worth interrogating how we develop ethical standards and illustrates the potential of moving beyond a top-down approach. While it’s imperative that social innovators follow standards such as do no harm, it’s also not for outsiders to decide what harm looks like and how to mitigate it. Otherwise, organizations risk exacerbating power imbalances and limiting ethical experimentation to those who know the code or understand the standards. Ethical practice, in short, is a byproduct of strong communication practices, dynamic feedback mechanisms, and community-centered project design, and if we do it well, we can open new pathways to effective, community-led innovation.