Blog
Team Social Xleration, 26th August 2021
Introduction
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) by their very nature are people-centric organizations that come in contact with and work with a vast number of people. Thus, they are always dealing with loads of data, which the majority of them are still not able to effectively utilize to gather fresh insights and further augment their work. This lacuna is being addressed by the adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology by various NGOs in the country. Many NGOs have partnered with tech solution providers and enablers to commence AI-centred projects that use data analytics extensively to move up the effectiveness trajectory. This piece explores various such initiatives.
The AI Technology
Before we take a deep dive to explore the instances of such work, it would be useful to understand what exactly is AI technology. According to IT major, IBM, “AI leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind”. It further states, “At its simplest form, artificial intelligence is a field, which combines computer science and robust datasets, to enable problem-solving”. Now, we take a look at few cases where AI technology is being put to use for social good.
EmancipAction India Foundation and IBM Partnership
The EmancipAction India Foundation is an NGO that provides trauma care to India’s most vulnerable people, which comprise victims of gender violence and human trafficking. A vital facet of their work is to find and train lay individuals to become mental health workers to expand the organization’s reach and influence. This is important given the fact that the number of specialists comprising psychologists and psychiatrists is very less in number. Therefore, to make up for this shortage, the organization trains potential lay counselors, which essentially are people with qualities to be a counselor and are willing to learn. This is where a team of IBM volunteers stepped in. They developed a framework that uses AI and machine learning to assist aid organizations in finding and recruiting lay counselors and deploy them quickly to help persons in need.
EmancipAction has adopted this system for the aforementioned purpose. The AI-based system enables the organization to rank the potential child counselors based on intelligence cues and multiple types of responses that include text and audio responses and multiple-choice questions. EmancipAction used the AI system to evaluate and score the candidates on different parameters such as counseling awareness, teamwork abilities, adolescence concerns, assistance skills, and curiosity, and so on. It was revealed that AI system scores when compared with scores provided by human interviewers matched well with a low error margin. The system is also capable of handling multi-lingual responses. The organization aims to scale it to reach 100 child care institutions initially in Mumbai and to 9,000 institutions nationally.
Kushi Baby, Seva Mandir, and Google
In 2014, Ruchit Nagar, a medical student at Harvard Medical School, and classmates developed a medical wearable called Khushi Baby, which won the Yale Thorne Prize for Social Innovation in Health and $25,000 in seed funding. It later developed into a full-fledged company with the help of Udaipur-based NGO Seva Mandir. Wearables developed by Khushi Baby can track the health of babies and pregnant women. Khushi Baby is building the first community health worker diligence model, a machine learning solution to measure the trustworthiness of the data provided by a health worker, in collaboration with Google AI and experts from Singapore Management University. This data quality score is used to encourage thoroughness among health workers in the data collection process and to filter data before it is passed to AI algorithms to predict subsequent health and health behavior outcomes. Khushi Baby has inked a three-year formal agreement as The Nodal Technical Service Provider with Rajasthan’s Department of Medical, Health, and Family Welfare.
Save Life Foundation and Mahindra & Mahindra
Save Life Foundation, which was founded in 2008 to improve road safety in India is implementing a multi-year project with Indian automaker Mahindra & Mahindra on Mumbai-Pune Expressway to make it a zero-fatality corridor. The organization has carried out multiple interventions such as trimming the plantation along the highway for enhanced visibility on the curves, closing the median gaps, erecting sufficient warning signs to keep the driver alert. The efforts have yielded positive results with the fatality reducing by 43 percent and crash severity declining by 29 percent. Their recent addition is the introduction of the Vehicle Activated Speed-sign System (VASS), which is an AI technology-based system aimed at rectifying the driving of vehicles. The smart technology imported from Australia facilitates the identification of distracted drivers and enables enforcement agencies to take suitable action.
Wadhwani Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Perhaps, the only non-profit in the country that is dedicated to the use of AI technology to offer solutions to social concerns, Wadhwani AI works in the areas of health and agriculture. In agriculture, the organization focuses on cotton, which it says is the third-largest crop grown in the country after rice and wheat, and 75 percent of which is grown by small land-holding farmers. Many small-scale farmers face pest damage that can wipe off up to half of their annual crop harvest. One of the biggest hazards in India, where 6 million people rely on cotton growing for a living, is the failure to efficiently manage pests. Although cotton uses nearly half of India’s pesticides, this is the case.
With the use of a simple smartphone, Wadhwani AI has built an AI solution that provides smallholder cotton farmers with the scientific understanding of an agriculture specialist. The solution gives real-time localized advice and surveillance via a mobile app. Farmers can detect pest infestations early and take appropriate and prompt action to avert crop damage, as well as increase their income by improving the quality of their produce. The organization partnered with other non-profits such as Welspun Foundation and Deshpande Foundation to deploy this solution in four districts across the largest cotton-producing states in the country which are Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Telangana in Kharif 2020. The organization has reached 15,000 farmers that have benefited from its agriculture program.
Besides the above instances, Microsoft and Facebook are the other tech giants that are working extensively to find AI-based solutions to social problems in India.
Conclusion
India with a population of over 1.35 billion will do well to be on a constant lookout for tech innovations and adopt the most workable and appropriate ones of these innovations. In this context, it is highly recommended that India harnesses the power of artificial intelligence to address its various social concerns. The AI technology can be a game-changing proposition to the country’s approach in dealing with the various social issues by unraveling and applying models that can enable effective scale-up of the basic services to ensure coverage of each and every individual immaterial of his/her location.