Machine Learning for Peace: Digital Tools for Civic Action

Expanding Engagement with USAID Missions under SEGA

Author

Published

January 8, 2024

Background

With funding from USAID and support from DevTech, the project seeks to engage with missions under the Swift Expertise and Grounded Analytics (SEGA) mechanism. MLP’s digital tools track and forecast major political events across dozens of countries by continuously scraping and processing more than 100 million articles published by 16 international, 12 regional, and 268 domestic online newspapers in 35 languages. This infrastructure provides monthly data on recent and historical trends in civic space and foreign influence and builds forecasting models to predict how conditions are likely to change in the near future.

We believe that these unique data and powerful tools can be useful for strategic planning by USAID mission staff and their local partners. To that end, this document outlines key features of MLP and options for direct engagement with missions. We encourage you to visit the MLP Website at mlpeace.org. Check out our interactive dashboards and update reports here.

Digital Tools

MLP’s digital tools provide access to unprecedented monthly data tracking 20 events bearing on civic space, including censorship, corruption, and legal changes, and 22 events indicative of foreign authoritarian influence, ranging from security engagements to domestic interference. Importantly, these data are updated every 90 days, ensuring their timeliness for studying current events in addition to longer-term patterns and trends.

Our Civic Space Early Warning System (pictured below) summarizes the results from hundreds of forecasting models into one simple visual representation of what our models are predicting across countries. By visiting the interactive data dashboard, you can learn about the types of events we can forecast accurately for each country and whether our models are predicting important increases in activity around any of those events.

Civic Space Early Warning System

For each country, we provide brief quarterly updates that summarize recent events detected by our data, analyze the accuracy of our previous forecasts, and discuss any major civic events our models are predicting for the next six months. See the update on South Africa below for a recent example. These updates are distributed to our monthly email list and posted to our website’s Civic Space Dashboards page, where you can find several interactive dashboards that provide more detailed analysis of our forecasts and allow users to interact with the underlying data.

Example of recent update report for South Africa

To assess the overall track record of our predictions, we reviewed all predictions since December 2022. For each prediction, we assessed whether the data from future updates aligned with the prediction that we reported several months prior. More than 70% of our models’ predictions successfully provided advanced warning of a major event that transpired over the following months.

We have growing evidence that a broad range of users find our tools useful. Since June 1, 2023, our website has had more than 10,000 page views from thousands of unique visitors across 106 countries, and our data dashboards average 155 hours of active usage time per month. We believe these numbers suggest that many civic actors are using our tools in their efforts to defend democracy and civic space around the world.

Opportunities for Mission Engagement

MLP’s tools are a valuable new resource for research and practice with applications for forecasting civic space, media monitoring, crisis response, and program evaluation. Through SEGA, MLP is excited to offer USAID missions an opportunity to engage directly with the research team to receive in-depth briefings, expanded data, or tailored analysis that builds on MLP’s publicly available data products. Examples of potential opportunities include:

  • Expanding countries or sources: In addition to our international and regional sources, we are actively scraping from an average of 4.7 domestic news sources per country. Under a direct engagement, MLP could add new countries to our dashboards or incorporate additional online news sources for countries that are already covered. Once we add a country, we will update the data and forecasts on our website every three months. Approximate cost: $25,000.
  • In-depth briefings and analysis: MLP’s quarterly updates provide a high-level overview of events and forecasts for each country. Under a direct engagement, MLP could produce more detailed description of countries’ media environments (ex. trends in publication volume across online sources), deeper analysis of reporting on major political events (ex. pro- or anti-government sentiment across outlets), or recent trends in critical civic space events (ex. whether censorship events or politically motivated defamation cases are becoming more or less frequent over time). Approximate cost: $40k.
  • Customized policy research: In recent years, the MLP research team has leveraged our data production infrastructure to answer specific, policy-relevant research questions posed by USAID missions. For example, MLP collaborated with a popular Tanzanian blog to investigate how both the traditional media and public political discourse changed in response to restrictions on speech in Tanzania. Examples of MLP’s recent and ongoing research can be found on our website. Approximate cost: Starting at $20k, but tbd pending discussion with mission.
  • Tracking new events: MLP’s infrastructure can be used to produce data that tracks reporting on new types of political and social events, such as mass migration or climate-driven conflict, or more produce more refined versions of existing event categories, such as isolating reporting on public health from our broader tracking of disasters. Approximate cost: Starting at $10k, but tbd pending discussion with mission.
  • Monitoring & Evaluation: We can leverage MLP’s digital tools to strengthen evaluations of USAID programming. For example, MLP is currently using our data to evaluate the impact of a USAID media strengthening program on the volume and quality of reporting on corruption across Central America.

Contact

USAID Missions interested in learning more about MLP or the potential for an MLP buy-in through SEGA can contact the research team directly or the COR for SEGA.