mMAP

Large-scale investments in digital economies among refugee/displaced communities are accelerating but constant survival tradeoffs for women are leaving them on the sidelines. Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) inverts this problem by placing nutrition & food insecurity at the heart of a scalable, adaptable digital engagement algorithm for displaced women. 

mMAP leverages the community digital engagement to create high-quality data-driven models of community variations in micronutrient deficiencies for more granular food assistance. In doing so, mMAP seeds local civil society to lead hyper-local digital strategies for maximum social impact and fills critical food insecurity data voids. This is a precursor to AI integration in humanitarian settings & urgently needed given evidence of partially diluted effects of fortified foods. 

mMAP's pilot in Gaza will use low-tech digital platforms to advance digital and nutrition skills among refugee women while progressively contributing to anonymized micronutrient deficiency heat maps by neighborhood.

As digital connectivity and utilization evolve, so does the digital economic gender divide. A growing segment of refugee/displaced women fall within a traditional classification of being connected (e.g., phone ownership, data usage) but remain perpetually outside digital economic engagement. 

This includes gender-based violence survivors and differently-abled women, who are among those with the highest economic and social needs, in refugee/displaced settings. Community ecosystems contribute to control over women and girls' lives regarding digital access and self-confidence and digital skills of women pertaining to digital utilization. 

At the same time, chronic food insecurity and its cascading effects eclipse women's time and energy, creating tradeoffs with other key priorities, including digital economic participation. LMIC communities are increasingly suffering from both chronic undernutrition as well as over-nutrition. At the heart of this is a common thread of poor diet quantity and poor diet diversity. Emerging evidence reflects partial diluting effects in some fortified foods, and research increasingly clarifies pathways between genes, environment, and lifestyle factors on health & trauma outcomes. From this, key vulnerabilities can be dialed up or back, influencing generations of refugees/displaced. mMAP leverages these actionable gaps to cross-fertilize digital economy entry points and community-driven micronutrient data.

Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) is a digital engagement algorithm for refugee/displaced women. Utilizing widely accessible low-tech, mMAP engages in a highly collaborative community-centered design. The results are hyper-local digital platforms-- designed for social impact in context instead of uniform commercial gain.

Concretely, mMAP includes a progressive series of three adaptable digital platforms. First, mMAP creates moderated digital spaces exclusively for women to support exchanges between women on localized family food coping strategies and micronutrient consumption among children. Anonymized data provides a generalizable baseline of intra-household food distribution. Within this project-driven learning is progressive digital literacy training, including numeracy, privacy training, and orientations to digital economies. 

A second phase focuses on creating community and family-centric digital participation entry points for women. This includes next levels of digital literacy with digital strategies to optimize locally accessible food sources for three essential micronutrients. 

Finally, mMAP is scalable via partnerships. mMAP works with civil society to locally calibrate digital nutrition tools and provides digital organizational capacity. Further, as mMAP grows with women's digital engagement and literacy and new civil society partnerships form, localized data will be well-positioned to identify micronutrient 'deserts' in refugee/displacement settings. 

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reported a record of over 70 million people displaced globally by the end of 2018. Among these, almost 30 million were refugees, and more than 40 million were internally displaced. It’s estimated 21 million are displaced women. This is very likely to be underestimated and varying widely by region. These numbers continue to grow in the face of the pandemic, climate change events, and geopolitical unrest. This translates into urgent need to create more effective and efficient responses. 

We’ve understood from displaced and refugee communities in over a dozen countries that tradeoffs between basic survival dynamics are central to shaping opportunities and limitations. Furthermore, in humanitarian settings, almost every limitation is intimately tied to violence. Both men and women experience these limitations. However, they are experienced very differently. Digital gender gaps in displaced settings are consistent with this.

Intimate partner violence (IPV) or other forms of GBV where family members are perpetrators hold a particularly complex matrix for any woman. For refugee and displaced women, this creates a set of logistical, social, mental, and physical constraints for displaced women. Even the most persuasive behavior change communication campaign and new access to hardware would not be able to address alone.  

More concretely, reduced freedom of movement, reduced access to economic, and chronic food insecurity translates into a more complex matrix for marginalized women in humanitarian settings. In turn, this creates a fundamentally different value proposition for this sub-segment of the digital gender divide. 

Notably, indications of partially diluted effects from fortified food and major gaps in nutrition data in refugee/displaced settings underscored the need to leverage digital innovation to create more robust nutrition data. Given the scale at which food assistance operates and given a global average displacement duration is 10 to 26 years, this creates an urgent health crisis hiding in plain sight. For instance, UNRWA estimates over 600,000 refugees receive food aid accounting for approximately 80% of their daily calorie requirements, with additional numbers receiving lower percentages of daily calorie requirements based on poverty level in Gaza. The current nutrition model of food insecurity, revolving mainly around caloric intake and distributed based on poverty levels. But, the picture emerging from clinical and public health research suggests a need to update humanitarian food insecurity models to include nutrition insecurity. mMAP is working towards this goal with communities while widening digital economic opportunities at the same time.

mMAP responds to the digital inclusion challenge by creating a scalable, operational blueprint to respond to the individual displacement dynamics and ensure a safe, supportive community ecosystem for women's deeper digital engagement in digital economies. mMAP will 1) reach a high-need segment of the digital economic gender divide-- refugee and displaced women who are digitally present but not participating and, 2) create mechanisms to seed local civil society as moderators of locally produced digital knowledge for social impact. This enables hyper-local digital initiatives to evolve dynamically alongside displaced women and through self-sustaining mechanisms. 

The mMAP pilot will focus on a specific Gaza refugee camp community housing a population of 85,000 and enable a robust pilot to pull each of these levers together in real-time and within one target population.

Gaza is well-positioned to optimize mMAP with high mobile cellular subscriptions (86 per 100 people (2019)) and a recent World Bank infusion of $20m towards Gaza digital economies. Female ownership at a financial institution or with a mobile money service provider jumped from 10.18 (2011) to 21.21 (2014), then back to 15.91 (2017). While many factors attribute to these shifts, it is notable that the latest decline intersects with an aftermath of a 2014 armed conflict episode. Given the 2021 Gaza crisis and COVID-19, women are, once again, primed for a backslide.

Mobilizing Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) employs five fundamental innovations. 

First, mMAP focuses on those women at the bottom of the pyramid, including gender-based violence survivors. In doing so, mMAP accounts for social dynamics that persist after hardware and connectivity are delivered by offering digital innovations to advance chronic food insecurity issues. 

Second, digital designs responsive to stable settings transposed onto displacement settings are common in humanitarian settings. Instead, mMAP creates digital platforms that are locally adaptable but designed explicitly for displacement dynamics. Critical to this is embedding local civil society as the key driver of hyper-local digital strategies for social impact. This seeds a civil society-driven digital innovation as opposed to the current technology-driven civil society. 

Third, mMAP creates a blueprint for the next iterations of technology innovation in food security and beyond. mMAP improves the frequency and quality of micronutrient deficiency data at household and community levels. This provides a pivot to engage with food security actors to update and advance nutrition security strategies. Furthermore, more robust nutrition and food consumption data is also an essential component of AI integration in humanitarian settings. 

Fifth, mMAP incorporates a decolonized global health and data governance perspective. mMAP recalibrates communities and marginalized women beyond data points to digital local knowledge producers from Gaza to Ghana. These are early steps to create local accountability mechanisms directed towards humanitarian actors and towards more equitable global north-south partnerships.

Our Gaza pilot will mark the first population served by Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP), which we estimate will target approximately 100 refugee women. mMAP seeks to create an intensive, highly collaborative, and evaluated pilot. After which, mMAP will be in a position to scale up regionally, starting by expanding in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. 

mMAP anticipates expanding to one new region each year, including at least five local civil society partnerships and 1000 women directly (100-200 directly partnering refugee/displaced women per civil society partnership). mMAP's five-year plan is to create self-sustaining global South networks of local civil society and local and regional levels that will continue to seed replication to local civil society throughout their respective areas. Through these self-sustaining mechanisms, including open-access digital tools and thoughtful, strategic partnerships with civil society actors, we anticipate building regional civil society movements that will have a significant cascading effect globally.

Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) will measure progress towards our three stated impact goals through a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. 

Our first impact goal to implement a pilot in Gaza will measure three metrics: community, family-decision makers, and individuals. Community metrics will include, but will not be limited to, neighborhood proportion of families participating in pilot activities, qualitative assessments among those families who opt out of participating in pilot activities, and stakeholder assessments among community leaders. Family decision-maker metrics will assessments at three-time points: at initiation, mid-and endpoints of the pilot. At an individual level, an iterating set of metrics will quantify women’s digital literacy and numeracy. Qualitative data will measure self-efficacy constructs among women concerning digital skills to assess digital confidence. 

Second, measuring humanitarian influence will include, but not be limited to, the proportion of local and regional humanitarian service providers who are mMAP data partners, and the proportion of neighborhoods in towns and districts implementing mMAP. Qualitative measures, including key stakeholder interviewers, will strategically target technical advisors across mental health, digital economic, gender, gender-based violence, and health domains.

In addition, the production of cloud-based NGO calibration tools in multiple languages and indicators to reflect community-driven processes will be a cornerstone of mMAP's progress of impact goals. 

Our organizational design reflects a nimble presence to avoid diverting resources from local civil society partners. The mMAP solution team includes four members, one of which is full-time and three, which are currently part-time. We anticipate increasing full-time members to 3, 10-15 contractors/ volunteers and a 5 person advisory board.

The mMAP project team has both the breadth and depth of experience and skills in refugee and displacement settings to move mMAP forward. 

Drawing from two decades of work related to gender, gender-based violence, social epidemiology, digital youth engagement, digital engagement among marginalized groups, and global health in humanitarian & development settings. Our team has experience working in every level of the humanitarian industry- from UN, donor, academic entities to international and local NGOs in over 15 refugee and displaced settings. 

Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) is building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive team through a decolonial lens. mMAP's team is committed to creating a just, equitable working environment to advance community social impact. The solution team aims to ensure gender equity among staff and prioritizing recruitment of staff with extensive experience and commitment working within mMAP partner communities.

We are a team of academics, activists, and social entrepreneurs who seek pathways to realize big ideas with the freedom to create a decolonized blueprint for global North-global South partnerships. This includes financial support, but equally important, it includes improving iterations through wide-ranging alliances and networking. 

In a COVID/post-COVID-19 era, we have re-doubled our efforts to working alongside humanitarian communities to investigate, experiment, and implement new digital strategies to old problems and systems designed for a pre-Internet world. We seek networks that can engage with the macro as well as the micro questions in not only supporting mMAP but also beyond. In particular, we seek to engage in dynamic dialogues to reconsider the role of humanitarian local civil society in the context of technology for social impact. As communities and technology continue to co-evolve with each other, we believe this is a critical dimension of sustainable development for refugee and displaced communities in a mature digital era. 

The spirit in which Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) has been launched is to optimize the learning, networking, and generation of ideas outside of conventional echo chambers. We are dedicated to a trans-disciplinary approach and this extends into our partnership growth.

We seek specific partnerships in navigating nuances of exploring evolving technology-driven poverty alleviation strategies, financial investors, and human capital while continuing to contend with COVID-19 and its implications in refugee and displaced communities.

Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) seeks to optimize low tech for refugee and displaced women in simple yet powerful ways. We seek to broaden our partnerships and mentorships through the deep learning that has transpired at JPAL, the Berkman Klein Center as well as Amnesty's Technology Initiative, Technology Human Rights Scholar Sabelo Mhlambi to name a few. Broadly, we are interested in partnerships that cross AI and ethics, technology in humanitarian and development spaces as well as partnerships to ground operational success of mMAP from legal, finance, and human resources perspectives. 

We've understood from work with over 15 refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) communities that tradeoffs between basic survival needs are central to shaping opportunities and limitations. However, these tradeoffs are not uniformly experienced. Community-level coping mechanisms create different risk/benefit tradeoffs in the context of social structures and power within displaced groups, resulting in an adaptive interplay between individuals and their environment. 

This interplay is at the core of Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) strategy to increase strategic participation in digital economies for marginalized refugee and displaced women. mMAP targets an evolving segment of the digital gender divide in displacement settings: women who are digitally present but not strategically participating. 

mMAP shifts the digital entry point from promises of future poverty alleviation to immediate community priorities related to food insecurity. Our team will use The Andan Prize funds to pilot mMAP's model in Gaza. 

Based on preliminary work within communities residing at Al-Shati refugee camp, mMAP's pilot will build women's digital literacy and skills to create real-time micronutrient deficiency anonymized tracking in Al-Shati camp. Through this, mMAP will 1) facilitate greater community acceptance to women's strategic digital participation among family decision-makers and community leaders, 2) advance women's digital literacy and numeracy while benefiting better nutrition and food security outcomes, and 3) empower community voices to more directly and collectively influence humanitarian agendas in real-time. 

Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) targets an evolving segment of the digital gender divide in refugee and displacement settings: women who are digitally present but not strategically participating.

mMAP shifts the digital entry point from promises of future poverty alleviation to immediate community priorities related to food insecurity. Our team will use The HP Prize for Advancing Digital Equity to pilot mMAP in Gaza, arguably one of the most complex humanitarian emergencies in the world with high need and high mobile phone density. 

mMAP's pilot will build women's digital literacy and skills to create real-time micronutrient deficiency heat maps in a Gaza refugee camp community. Through this, mMAP will 1) facilitate greater community acceptance to women's strategic digital participation among family decision-makers and community leaders, 2) advance women's digital literacy and numeracy while benefiting better nutrition and food security outcomes, and 3) empower community voices to more directly and collectively influence humanitarian food security planning and policies in real-time. 

As connectivity and cheaper data access have increased, a less discussed segment of the digital gender divide is emerging and one not captured by mainstream digital gender initiatives: women connected but not strategically accessing digital opportunities, including digital economies. 

We've understood from gender-related work with over 15 refugee and internally displaced persons (IDP) communities that tradeoffs between basic survival needs are central to shaping opportunities and limitations. However, these tradeoffs are not uniformly experienced. Community-level coping mechanisms create different risk/benefit tradeoffs in the context of gender, poverty, and power within displaced groups, resulting in an adaptive interplay between individuals and their environment. 

This interplay is at the core of Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) strategy, targeting an evolving segment of the digital gender divide in displacement settings: women who are digitally present but not strategically participating. 

Our team will use Innovation Prize for Women funds to pilot mMAP's model in Gaza. mMAP's pilot will build women's digital literacy and skills to create real-time micronutrient deficiency heat maps in a Gaza refugee camp community. Through this, mMAP will 1) facilitate greater community acceptance to women's strategic digital participation among family decision-makers and community leaders, 2) advance women's digital literacy and numeracy while benefiting better nutrition and food security outcomes, and 3) empower community voices to more directly and collectively influence humanitarian food security planning and policies in real-time. 

Mobile Mothers Advancing Priorities (mMAP) targets an evolving segment of the digital gender divide in refugee and displacement settings: women who are digitally present but not strategically participating. 

mMAP shifts the digital entry point from promises of future poverty alleviation to immediate community priorities related to food insecurity. Our team will use The GSR Prize funds to pilot mMAP's model in Gaza.

mMAP's pilot will build women's digital literacy and skills to create real-time micronutrient deficiency heat maps in Gaza refugee camp community. Through this, mMAP will 1) facilitate greater community acceptance to women's strategic digital participation among family decision-makers and community leaders, 2) advance women's digital literacy and numeracy while benefiting better nutrition and food security outcomes, and 3) empower community voices to more directly and collectively influence humanitarian food security policies and practice in real-time.