Digital ID and AI: Reshaping Aid in the Middle East and North Africa

Biometric systems and predictive algorithms are changing how humanitarian aid is delivered, raising concerns about data privacy and ethical considerations.

ZA’ATARI REFUGEE CAMP, Jordan – At the World Food Program (WFP) distribution centers in Jordan’s Za’atari refugee camp, Syrian refugees use iris scanners to pay for food. The scanner logs each transaction on the program’s Building Blocks blockchain network.

Za’atari is home to the world’s first comprehensive biometrics system for refugees. The united Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) unveiled it in 2013, featuring large-scale digitization of refugee registration via the Biometric Identity Management System (BIMS). The UNHCR began using BIMS after a trial wiht Afghan refugees in Pakistan in 2002.

The system creates a unique biometric identifier for each registered refugee, stored in a blockchain called the Population Registration and Identity Management Ecosystem (PRIMES).Initially intended to track refugee registration and residency, the biometrics model has evolved into a surveillance system. BIMS registers every refugee life event, from marriage to education to death. Over 90% of Syrians in Za’tari have been registered into the system as a precondition for receiving aid.

The Za’atari Model has become standard in UNHCR operations. Registration in BIMS is required for refugee registration, asylum applications, resettlement, and humanitarian aid.By 2020, over 37 million refugees worldwide had their biometric information registered through BIMS into PRIMES. Manny now receive aid payments via digital wallets, communicate with the UNHCR through chatbots, and, in some cases, receive aid from drones.

Robotics, biometrics, drones, artificial intelligence, computational software, and blockchain are increasingly present in humanitarianism. The humanitarian sector is adopting a digital approach that is reshaping aid delivery and the concept of care. The crises in the Middle East and North Africa, including the Syrian civil war and the violence in Sudan and Palestine, are key testing grounds for these new practices.

As refugees become digital subjects, technology mediates their interactions with humanitarian organizations. These technologies aim to enhance the efficiency of humanitarian care, while also shaping the predictive, autonomous capabilities of technologies to meet humanitarian needs. This requires a specific fuel: data.

The Rise of Data as a Commodity

The expression “data is the new oil” reflects the growing importance of data-driven digital technologies. The Middle East’s commercial interest in data extends into the humanitarian sector. Local companies are involved in developing mobile payment applications and biometric registration systems, such as the Zayn wallets used for digital cash transfers and the EyePay systems used to collect iris and fingerprint data in Za’atari. A network of commercial interests now supports the humanitarian sector’s digitization of refugee registration and aid delivery.

The United Arab Emirates has become a hub for government bodies, commercial interests, international consultants, and local start-ups that deepen the connections between war, surveillance, logistics, humanitarianism, and digitization.For example, the International Humanitarian City in Dubai, created in 2003, connects aid to conflict and disaster zones in the Horn of Africa, Red Sea, and the Indian Ocean region. The UAE recently created a “digital response platform” that uses machine learning, artificial intelligence, and geospatial technologies to facilitate information sharing among Humanitarian City’s partners.

The involvement of tech companies in humanitarian work raises concerns about how their profit motive might compromise humanitarian principles. The absence of strong data protection laws makes data a commodity to be bought and sold.Commercial companies with contracts with the UNHCR or WFP can access anonymized refugee data. This data is rarely protected and can be circulated among humanitarian and commercial actors long after an individual no longer receives humanitarian support. Humanitarian emergencies become opportunities for companies to profit as both service providers and data hoarders.

The adoption of digital technologies also changes the nature of the humanitarian problems being addressed. Predictive analytics, a type of artificial intelligence, can anticipate the timing, cause, and duration of events, from environmental catastrophes to violent conflicts.The WFP has created a modeling platform called SHAPES (Shock and Assistance Platform for Economic simulations) to forecast food security outcomes in the event of severe crisis. It has deployed SHAPES in Yemen and Lebanon, reducing the average food security assessment time from six months to three. It also uses the “hunger Map Live” to model caloric needs depending on the location of the disaster. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs created the Humanitarian Data Exchange (HDE) to provide data and datasets to organizations like the WFP that feed into their predictive analytics. These programs all cast data and associated problems differently but share a commitment to forecasting how to deal with humanitarian emergencies.

Knowledge about emergencies and those affected by them is no longer being produced in context but rather through machines and artificial intelligence that dictate how humanitarians should intervene in crisis situations. In this form of contemporary humanitarianism, each emergency produces data that feeds into the responses of humanitarian organizations anticipating the next emergency. The data is circulated through PRIMES, SHAPES, HDE, and other similar platforms, becoming the source feeding predictive humanitarianism.As a result, knowledge about emergencies and those affected by them is no longer being produced in context but rather through machines and artificial intelligence that dictate how humanitarians should intervene in crisis situations.By producing predictive visions that can be acted upon by humanitarian organizations, these technologies shift the whole terrain of humanitarian action from reactive to anticipatory. The cascading crises in the Middle East and North Africa provide a data mine for humanitarian organizations to hone these predictive analytics.

Anticipating a crisis and acting upon one are very different things, however. Predictive analytics will always rely on incomplete data. They will also include algorithmic biases, which have already been called into question in the case of predictive policing that overwhelmingly targets racialized and poor communities for police interventions. Moreover, the data fed into these predictive algorithms has frequently enough been extracted from people in humanitarian emergencies that may have not understood or consented to the future uses of their data.

The Role of Humanitarian Robots

In 2013, the US Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) created a Robotics Challenge to incentivize commercial and academic research into the potential for these technologies to support humanitarian and disaster relief operations. Teams submitted everything from robotic snakes capable of capturing images under rubble, to humanoid robots that could drive cars, use power tools and transform into moving vehicles. The robots might have been clunky, their movements slow and awkward, but they showcased a new way of being humanitarian.

Many of DARPA’s publicly known projects are the stuff of dystopian science fiction, but the robotics envisioned in the 2013 challenge were not from the realm of fantasy or techno-futurism. A robot named Sophia is the first United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Innovation Ambassador. notably, she is also the first robot to receive legal personhood, after Saudi Arabia granted her citizenship in 2017.Sophia mingles with dignitaries and diplomats at various UNDP events. At an “AI for Good” summit in July of 2023, Sophia was joined by eight other humanitarian robot prototypes that can do everything from prepare food, heal wounds or simply socialize with someone who needs a friend.A future in which robots are an integrated part of the landscape of refugee camps, serving as soccer players, companion dogs or cleaners, may not be far off.

But humanitarian robots can do much more than socialize. Robotic technologies are justified as being able to move aid the so-called last mile, usually conceived as up to 50 kilometers, when it is too hazardous for humans to physically move aid into war or disaster zones. According to the head of the WFP’s innovation department, Bernhard Kowatsch, the idea for robotic vehicles as aid deliverers was conceived during the brutal four-year battle of Aleppo between 2012-2016, when it was virtually unfeasible to move aid into the city. A decade later, Project A.H.E.A.D (Autonomous Humanitarian Emergency Aid Devices) was born out of the WFP’s Buisness accelerator and launched in Germany for its first use case in South Sudan. This pilot project involves remotely operating aid delivery into South Sudan using a Ukrainian built amphibious truck with an unassumingly playful name: Herbert the Sherp.

Herbert is one cog in a material structure linking several digital technologies and applications: Drones and satellites produce information about the terrain, that data is then transmitted to an operating center far from the afflicted area to determine what aid and supplies Herbert needs before the Sherp is loaded up and sent to the zone through remote operation. Humanitarian workers, by which I mean humans, are only one part of a mostly non-human, networked structure in which drones, satellites, communications towers and Herbert the Sherp are collecting the information needed to deliver humanitarian aid.

There are good reasons to believe that the Herberts of the humanitarian world will save lives and protect humanitarian workers in dangerous situations. But they also represent a new form of robotic intermediation that threatens to render life-and-death decisions, like who gets food and who does not, up to machine learning. Although humanitarian dilemmas about how to deliver aid and to whom have always existed, humanitarian robots change these calculations and potentially absolve humanitarian actors of the ethical considerations required to meet people’s needs in moments of emergency.

Moreover, these technologies are mirror images of those deployed in contemporary warfare-responsible for creating some of today’s most devastating humanitarian crises. Indeed, Israel has used remotely operated drones to surveil and target aid workers in Gaza and obstruct the delivery of aid. Cyber warfare targeting key infrastructures has become routine. Suicide drones are regularly deployed by Israel, Hizballah and other actors, and there is increasing evidence of underwater drones and land robots deployed on the battlefield.

The same technologies that network data, algorithms, machines and drones to recast humanitarian possibilities are thus similarly reshaping warfare. Israel’s “Lavender” and “the Gospel” are the most notable examples. Both systems are AI and machine learning programs that have identified more than 37,000 individual Palestinian targets that were afterward targeted by Israeli drones.These systems function mostly independently of human oversight. Much like Project A.H.E.A.D,Lavender and the Gospel bring together data and machines to make decisions about life and death.

The blurring Lines of Humanitarianism and Warfare

Za’atari demonstrated that large-scale digitization of registration and surveillance of everyday life by the UNHCR was possible. Its success meant that the model has been transported to other protracted refugee situations including the Dadaab camp in Kenya, the Osire camp in Namibia and the Tongogara refugee camp in Zimbabwe.

Alongside the circulation of these technologies and practices are the ideas at the core of contemporary humanitarianism: accountability, transparency and efficiency. Humanitarian technophilia is rationalized as facilitating better forms of intermediation to meet people’s needs. But these rationalizations mask a complex system of power oriented toward data extraction and commodification. The immediate and long-term effects of crisis and emergency are rendered into a series of digitally legible data points that feed into systems of computational analytics.

Moreover, many of the same companies at the forefront of digital humanitarianism are implicated in digitized warfare and other forms of surveillance and violence. Palantir, such as, a company whose original funding came partly from CIA-linked venture capital firm Q-Tel, has contracts with such diverse