With the US government’s recent cuts to humanitarian funding, the entire system is now being forced to make difficult triage decisions across whole countries, crises, and sectors. As we move towards a much leaner humanitarian funding landscape, one with a likely reduced physical footprint on the ground, the traditional humanitarian information management methods we rely on will be forced to adapt.
At Premise, we believe that constraints breed creativity and that technology can play an important role in maintaining critical data collection and analysis functions.
That’s why we’re releasing our new product free to the humanitarian community while it’s still under development. We call it AEGIS.
AEGIS, our Advanced Early Global Indicator System, empowers humanitarian professionals to remotely monitor on-the-ground activity. It combines Premise’s core ground truth data collection platform with publicly available information, including key humanitarian data, scraped from the entire internet and uses generative AI to provide analysis, reporting, and recommendations. Here’s what it includes:
- Premise Groundtruth Network. Collect real-time ground truth data from millions of on-the-ground sources, providing a more accurate and nuanced picture of the situation than traditional methods or social listening alone.
- Open Source Monitoring. Integrate diverse open-source datasets, including websites, social media, and key humanitarian data sources, to create a comprehensive and holistic understanding of the environment.
- Generative AI Platform. Unify, model, and summarize data, transforming raw information into actionable insights that can illuminate data-gaps, inform decision-making, and improve the effectiveness of our foreign aid investments.
For our first release, we have directed AEGIS to create a humanitarian situation monitoring report for the DRC. We started by launching a standard needs assessment using the HESPER scale targeted at just North and South Kivu. The data was collected from 400 respondents over 1 week. AEGIS then scraped the internet for news relevant to the crisis. We directed it to focus on Congolese and regional websites. AEGIS then combined all of the datasets, analyzed them, and wrote the report based on guidance provided by us and training it received on other humanitarian situation monitoring reports. Our research team has cross checked AEGIS’ work and improved visualizations, which will be incorporated into future AEGIS versions’. Lastly, AEGIS recommended follow-up questions and automatically built a survey in Premise’s software using them, which we will launch in our next round.
This is just the beginning. In addition to fine-turning the survey instruments and prompts, we also want to integrate additional data sources. Eventually we think this approach could assist with higher value efforts, such as famine early warning, calculating people in need, displacement tracking, and more. That’s why we need your help.
We’re looking for organizations who want to try out AEGIS and provide feedback to our product team. If you are interested in this please get in touch!
Be on the lookout for additional DRC reports, and perhaps more countries as we scale AEGIS up.