DATA-DRIVEN ASSET MAPPING IN PARTICIPATORY COMMUNITY BUILDING WITH URBAN REFUGEES

ABSTRACT

As the global refugee situation worsens and funding available to relieve the situation dissipates, refugees are facing unprecedented pressure to build self-reliant communities. Asset mapping, cataloging the assets a community can marshal, is gaining acceptance as a tool for community-led development. This project explores the feasibility of participatory asset mapping in refugee community building, as well as its impact on refugees’ sense of community and civic engagement.

During the implementation of the project, conducted in cooperation with UNHCR and involving urban refugees living in Rwanda, we engaged refugee participants throughout the entire process of designing, implementing, analyzing, and using the asset data system. The asset system makes use of the openly accessible UNHCR Kobo server, ODK Collect and widely available mobile networks in order to guarantee secure and open access by refugees. We also trained participants on basic data science skills to help them use and replicate the data collection and management process.

To investigate whether and how the asset data can be mobilized to build refugees’ own communities, we use field experiments with pre-and-post evaluations. Especially, as participatory asset mapping engages refugees in a wide range of activities with information technologies, we examine its effects on participants’ ICT self-efficacy, ‘sense of community’ and ‘civic engagement.’ Further, to explore the potential usage of the asset data in community building, we use focus groups in various sub-communities.

Our results indicate participatory asset mapping can increase refugee participants’ sense of community and civic engagement. When using regression models to explore demographic and behavioral factors contributing to these key metrics, we found that ICT self-efficacy is a strong predictor for both sense of community and civic engagement, and females are more likely to have a higher level of civic engagement. The results also indicated that the usability of the asset system is strongly correlated with refugees’ perceived effectiveness in using the system to build communities.

In the end, we provide insights into ICT-enabled community building activities in the following areas: community building with a displaced population, humanitarian data collection, participatory design in resource-constrained areas, as well as research in multicultural contexts. Essentially, these projects can and should include participatory design, open data, as well as data science training to enable self-reliance.

 

Chapter 1

 

Introduction

Refugees, who fled from their home countries for the fear of violence and persecution, experience significant disruption of connectedness with their established communities. They flee communities in which they developed skills and capacities for full participation in economic and social life. Within those communities, it is likely there exists general awareness of the skills and capacities among their members. However, when they reside in a newly settled community, whether in an urban environment or a refugee camp, awareness of one another’s skills and capacities is lost, if not significantly diminished. It is even harder for them to feel a strong sense of community and belonging in the host community. At the same time, as international support for refugees is decreasing, and their displacement status becomes ”permanently temporary” [105] , refugees can benefit from taking the initiative to build their communities collaboratively.

Among all the refugees in the world, more than sixty percent live in urban areas, as opposed to camps [130] . Urban refugees, compared to camp refugees, must be more self-reliant in accessing food, shelter, and other living resources. Greater opportunities for creating a new life always comes with higher risks and responsibilities. Urban refugees are likely scattered in a newly arrived city with limited support and interactions with other refugees as well as with local host communities. One way to increase urban refugees’ sense of community and civic engagement is through interacting with both refugees and host community and gaining information from the interactions [104] . There are various approaches that can be employed, for example capacity building and asset mapping, which both aim to increase communities’ selfreliance [35,41] . Various activities aiming to build refugee communities across their life cycle are starting to have success. For instance, because refugees tend to flee in groups, fellow refugees and those arriving earlier, are the main sources of support [10] . They help each other access resources to survive and thrive. Various international and local organizations protect and provide services for the affected population [26,129,131] . Assisting refugees in becoming self-reliant has become a critical task. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other aid agencies wish to assist refugees to achieve self-reliance even when still in a state of emergency [129] . These efforts are necessary to help refugees adjust both immediately after they are displaced, typically in a state of temporary asylum, and after they are resettled to a more permanent location in the future. With more interactions within the community, the level of familiarity with one’s community is expected to increase, together with refugees’ engagement in civic issues. Having a higher sense of community and level of civic engagement is important to help refugees recover from the disastrous events and get involved in the newly settled community

[4,17,119] .

One approach, Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD), aiming to mobilize a community’s own resources to build a resilient and cohesive society is gaining popularity [45,81] . The approach emphasizes on the value of asset in community building. In general, community building aims to assess needs and then to meet them, often through external actors/partners. However, asset-based approaches focus on community-led development using communities’ own resources and capacities. By a definition from UNHCR, assets can be categorized into physical, social, human, and natural resources [129] . Participatory ABCD engages various stakeholders, especially community members, in using their community assets to address challenges. To achieve this, techniques such as asset mapping are used. Asset mapping is the process by which community assets are represented by easily accessible data. The ‘mapping’ may involve a structure of categories relevant to the community’s problems, and in some cases may include a spatial mapping of assets. This mapping of asset data does displace other important data collection efforts such as needs. However, ABCD does not replace other types of community building; it complements and usually comes after needs-assessment.

As Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)’ roles in facilitating these processes are increasingly critical [6,51,142] , the participatory asset system, ideally, should consist of a database, and the means of collecting data and sharing analyses. It also should become the property of the community with open access to all of the community members. Every member then has the freedom to access the data in order to mobilize the assets relevant to the problem they face. If participants are engaged throughout the whole process, this can maximize the effects of community building: every step creates further interactions between the participants and the other community members [15,45] . This is especially useful for building social capital, promoting face-to-face community networks, and encouraging civic engagement, which are essential elements in community development [41] .

While asset mapping has been applied in urban and rural communities in the UK and US [41,45,81] , it is now just starting to be tested among refugee communities. This is particularly relevant, given their unique characteristics such as scarce resources, relatively low digital literacy, and the vulnerable state of the community. Their displacement, and associated lack of knowledge or awareness of their community’s assets, calls for a specialized approach, namely data-driven community building. Data-driven asset mapping overcomes the deficit of tacit knowledge of a community’s assets by codifying the asset base through digital data capture. The data can then be analyzed and communicated broadly across all members of a community. Ideally, such a system would also promote equality among sub-groups by reducing the power associated with access to

data.

In order to seize the opportunities that ICTs can bring to a low-resource community, we introduce a data-driven participatory data collection and management system to urban refugees living in Rwanda. This methodology is implemented in practice by actively engaging participants throughout the whole process of data inventory design, data collection, data analysis, and data management. The goal is to promote participants’ awareness of their community while gaining skills in collecting and using data. The system adheres to open data principles, where data collection processes are designed from the outset to generate shareable data. In addition, it engages both researchers/service providers and participants in the participatory design of a community data management system that is both feasible and has the potential to enhance the usefulness of the data as a community asset. This effort is undertaken in a humanitarian context, where ICTs are increasingly playing a critical role. Unlike the majority of technology-based humanitarian efforts, which position participants as passive users of a given technology [27,41] , we engage them in co-designing data collection forms to reflect their interests, as well as how to ethically collect and utilize such data. As mobile phone and Internet skills evolve, the ability to manage data and extract valuable information from such sources are becoming crucial in navigating crises. Over time, as data science tools become more accessible and have higher usability, it is likely basicdata science skillscan be mastered by diverse user communities. Traditionally, in humanitarian response, control over information and the ability to use that information in decision making has been limited to organizations with sufficient resources. However, as technologies and skills diffuse, even low resource communities are likely to have the potential to make data-based decisions on their own behalf. Developing these skills is likely best accomplished through training that provides the community access to data that is aligned with their own needs and interests [30] . This study is a first step in a journey towards a community development process that focuses on producing empowered, data-aware and data-utilizing community leaders.

Therefore, for this study, we aim to explore the feasibility and effects of a novel datadriven asset mapping system together with refugee communities in Rwanda, in which community members, rather than just development professionals, both generate and have access to the data.

For the feasibility assessment, we focus on answering whether the system design of balancing between privacy and access is feasible for refugee community building.  For the effects, we focus on two outcome measures: sense of community and civic engagement. Especially, we aim to dissect the full process of configuration of a system built of open source software tools, data collection and management and measure its individual contributions. To fully understand the value of data-driven asset mapping in refugee community building, we also explore the potential for and constraints to actual usage of the asset data.

Therefore, our theoretical framework is shown in Figure 1-1. In particular, we examine the following five questions:

1. Is a data-driven, community-owned asset system a feasible approach for urban refugee communities? Why?
2. How are Sense of Community and Civic Engagement related in the context of urban refugees? 3. How does participating in the full process of the system design, data collection and management (the intervention) affect individual’s Sense of Community and Civic Engagement? In particular, how do measures of system usability and effectiveness affect participants’ sense of community and civic engagement?
3. Whether and how do demographic features, ICT self-efficacy and perceived system effectiveness contribute to the changes of Sense of Community and Civic Engagement?
4. Are asset data valuable for refugees to solve individual and/or community problems? And how?

DATA-DRIVEN ASSET MAPPING IN PARTICIPATORY COMMUNITY BUILDING WITH URBAN REFUGEES

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