IATI.AI: Building Health Care Capacity Through Transparency

Teaching organizations how to make activities transparent to artificial intelligent applications and using the data to make the applications smarter

What's IATI?

IATI is an open data sharing framework developed by the humanitarian community. It was specifically created to make detailed information on aid activities, transactions and results more transparent and accessible to machine applications. Today, applications capable of being powered by IATI data include powerful new artificial intelligent applications and popular digital assistants like Alexa.

Outside of view of the private sector, through progressive development and steady growth in usage, IATI has become the humanitarian community’s open data sharing standard. Currently, the framework is being used by over 800 organizations, it's supported by the United Nations and mandated by a growing number of government development agencies.

The humanitarian community is committed to expanding IATI’s broad adoption and implementation as part of "improving the overall use and impact of data in humanitarian sector, creating a future where all people involved in humanitarian and development operations have access to the data they need, when and how they need it, to make responsible and informed decisions".

Problems

In spite of thousands of aid activity files being published, comparatively few organizations comprehensively share information on their activities or take advantage of IATI’s full range of 200 plus unique information fields. This has created data gaps and makes it difficult to effectively put IATI to effective use.

In the field, few organizations operating at the mid and local community levels providing frontline health services to individuals living in urban slums and rural areas for example know about IATI or its ability to make their organizations and their activities broadly visible to others and to machine applications.

To compound these problems, virtually no work has been carried out to solve the many technical challenges standing in the way of making IATI data conveniently accessible to communities via mobile devices typically used in developing countries and via emerging new artificial intelligent applications and digital assistants.

Data gaps and a lack of knowhow and technical resources make it hard to program and train applications to answer detailed thematic questions for example or carry out sophisticated analytical functions.

Solution

Leveraging IATI to build frontline health care capacity through improving visibility, data sharing and transparency is thus a two part problem. On one hand, efforts need to be made to teach more organizations how to report their activities and on the another hand efforts need to be made to develop the technical ability to put information to use, making reporting worthwhile and valuable to communities.

IATI.AI is an open source initiative linking humanitarian organizations, tech volunteers and supports. It was created to address these problems and to undertake the following:

• Systematically teach targeted groups of frontline health workers how to use IATI and help them get their organization’s first and successive aid activity files published on line via the IATI registry
• Use the new data to develop training datasets and algorithms artificial intelligent applications need to process information streaming through IATI
• Work out how existing web and mobile applications and new artificial intelligent applications can effectively plug into IATI and carry out backend web functions needed to power applications

IATI is a ten-year-old initiative leveraging technology to improve open data sharing between humanitarian stakeholders. Today, the idea of teaching organizations how to use IATI to make their activities broadly transparent can't be considered an innovative solution.

It's merely something vitally important and overdue that stakeholders committed to improving frontline health haven't yet been able to conceive of doing to help build frontline health capacity.

Using data streaming through IATI to train artificial intelligent applications and make them smarter and more capable of serving the humanitarian community is an entirely new and innovative use of technology.

Technology is integral to our solution and at the same time our solution is integral to technological development.

Technology is required to share and put IATI data to use on one hand. At the same time, our solution is needed to improve that technology on the other hand.

Over the last year, we've been assembling our project, recruiting tech volunteers and beginning work on developing our AI training datasets.

Over the next 12 months, we hope to begin formally teaching targeted groups of organizations how to use IATI and begin collecting IATI files from them. We also hope to begin major development work on our algorithms.

Similar to open source initiatives like Linux and Python, over the next three to five years we hope to institutionalize our initiative, establish a large and self-sustaining community of volunteers and achieve our mission.

In this question's context, humanitarian organizations are our beneficiaries.

We aim to principally identify organizations to train through ReliefWeb, web portals run by agencies like the UNHCR and via asking larger organizations to refer vetted local level partners to us. We'll then introduce staff to IATI, identify individuals to train and help organizations get their first IATI files online.

We'll retain our customers through direct engagement and via helping them provide follow-up data and showing them how their data is being used by the initiative.

We're presently getting our initiative started and concentrating on working with fewer than fifty humanitarian organizations. We're mainly making contact with organizations and getting them started reporting their first aid activities via IATI.

More importantly at the moment, we're recruiting tech volunteers and beginning work on defining our AI training dataset and algorithm needs.

IATI.AI was launched to principally serve humanitarian and development organizations and in turn their beneficiaries via teaching organizations how to report their activities properly and using the data to make frontline health focused artificial intelligent applications smarter.

Over the next 12 months we aim to help tens of targeted groups of organizations use IATI and expand the number into the hundreds over the next 3 years. 

IATI.AI is being implemented by a group of volunteers with expertise in humanitarian operations, backend web development, artificial intelligence, machine learning and blockchain applications.

Being an open source technology initiative like Linux and Python that's principally developing technical knowhow and computer code, IATI.AI is not dependent on raising revenue to sustain its operations. We're a community of volunteers working together to pursue a single unified mission.

MIT Solve has proven capable of helping accelerate and rally support behind solution based social good initiatives. We believe that MIT Solve can help our team as well and we're excited about joining the MIT Solver community.

In our case, partnering with MIT Solve gives our initiative added structure and a conduit to use to interface with a wide variety of potential supporters and mentors.

Teaching organizations how to properly use IATI, an established open data sharing framework supported by the UN and mandated by government development agencies, to report their aid activities can only benefit organizations and the broader the humanitarian community.

Making reporting worth the effort to organizations and building the algorithms needed to power new IATI-data-driven applications however will require a great deal of highly technical work which can be a challenge to coordinate and sustain.

MIT Solve can help our team build the partnerships necessary to keep this work going and on track.