POLICY BRIEF – Protecting Eritrean Refugees Amidst Shifting Policies and Conflict
December 2024
This policy brief examines the critical shifts in Ethiopia’s refugee protection policies and the plight of Eritrean refugees in Tigray. Analysis of two key periods in Ethiopia: the pre-war period (2018–2020) and the intra-war period (2020–2022), showed that Eritrean refugees faced unprecedented levels of endangerment. The abrupt revocation of prima facie refugee status for Eritreans in 2020 and subsequent destruction of refugee camps during the war in Tigray (2020–2022) have exposed refugees to heightened vulnerability, including abduction.
POLICY BRIEF – Perspectives of Eritrean and Tigrayan Refugees on Return Post-Tigray War
December 2024
This study investigates the intention of Eritrean and Tigrayan refugees to return to their home regions following the Tigray war. The results indicate a significant reluctance among both groups to return, amidst instability, human rights violations, and the threat of human trafficking. Refugees are stuck in situations in which such violence is worsening and becoming normalized; yet despite this, they felt unable to return unless the situation would improve significantly in their home countries.
POLICY BRIEF – Humanitarian Response to the Crisis during Tigray war & The Role of NGOs
December 2024
This study examines the humanitarian crisis in Tigray, highlighting the severe shortages of food, water, shelter, and healthcare caused by the siege and communication blackout during the conflict. Despite the efforts of NGOs and UN agencies, significant barriers such as access restrictions, funding shortages, and political tensions impeded effective aid delivery, with the Ethiopian government further complicating the situation by blocking assistance. The findings emphasize the importance of local NGOs in addressing urgent needs and suggest that collaboration between larger humanitarian organizations and local entities is essential for a successful response and long-term recovery in the region.
POLICY BRIEF – The Impact of the Siege and Communication Blackout during Tigray war
December 2024
This policy brief examines the profound effects of the siege and communication blackout in Tigray during the 2020-2022 conflict. The study identifies five distinct phases of the siege, highlighting how the lack of communication exacerbated the humanitarian crisis and altered social dynamics within the region. Key findings reveal that the communication blockade not only hindered access to vital information but also fostered a sense of isolation and a ‘we versus them’ mentality among the Tigrayan population. The research underscores the need for innovative digital solutions to enhance communication resilience in future crises and advocates for a shift towards federated digital infrastructure to reduce dependency on centralized systems.
POLICY BRIEF – Landmark court case against Eritrean human traffickers Walid and Kidane
December 2024
Tewelde Goitom (Walid) and Kidane Zekarias Habtemariam (Kidane) are notorious Eritrean traffickers accused of severe human rights abuses against Eritrean refugees in Libya. They operated warehouses in Bani Walid, where thousands were held in inhumane conditions. Walid is currently on trial in the Netherlands, and Kidane faces extradition after being recaptured.
The case is part of an international investigation, with survivors reporting extreme abuse and ransom demands of $3,000 to $6,000.
POLICY BRIEF – Privacy preserving health analytics of patient data: use case
November 2024
The policy brief highlights the potential of FAIRified patient data for privacy-preserving health analytics in Uganda, where raw data was converted into a FAIR format to enable secure querying of disease prevalence and medication use. It identifies challenges such as fragmented data and the absence of electronic health records, and offers recommendations including establishing a national policy for digitizing health records, developing interoperability standards, providing incentives for adopting FAIR practices, training healthcare workers, utilizing advanced data collection tools, and monitoring data quality. Overall, it emphasizes the need for improved data practices to facilitate effective health analytics while protecting patient privacy.
POLICY BRIEF – Vascular disease risk analytics: use case
November 2024
The policy brief highlights the integration of wearable data, like that from Fitbits, with patient records to enhance health analytics and predict vascular disease risk. It outlines a system for converting this data into a FAIR format for advanced analytics and better patient monitoring. Key recommendations include creating a national framework for integration, establishing data quality standards, and promoting Federated Learning for secure analytics across healthcare facilities while protecting patient privacy.
POLICY BRIEF – Pregnancy risk analytics: use case
November 2024
The policy brief highlights the use of FAIR patient data to develop classification systems for predicting pregnancy risk levels using maternal healthcare data through a Federated Learning approach, which ensures data privacy by keeping it at health facilities. Recommendations include incentivizing data sharing, standardizing data collection protocols, establishing ethical guidelines for predictive models, investing in Federated Learning infrastructure, certifying data handling scripts, providing training for healthcare professionals, and promoting partnerships to enhance these applications in healthcare.
POLICY BRIEF – Personal data safety for refugees on the move: securepod
November 2024
The policy brief emphasizes the importance of data ownership for vulnerable groups like refugees, whose personal and medical data is often fragmented and inaccessible. It introduces personal datapods as a solution, allowing refugees to own, store, and manage their data securely while adhering to FAIR principles. Recommendations include creating interoperability guidelines for cross-border data sharing, promoting data portability, developing transparent data-sharing agreements, implementing digital literacy programs for refugees, and establishing crisis-responsive data management systems to ensure continued access and data security.
POLICY BRIEF – Identifying nodes and graphs of perpetrators in human trafficking data: use case
November 2024
The policy brief discusses the potential of FAIRifying unstructured data, such as interview data on human trafficking, to uncover insights and patterns more efficiently. By creating a FAIR-based ontology, the analysis of sensitive data can be conducted while ensuring privacy and security. Recommendations include establishing a multi-stakeholder collaboration framework for secure data sharing and analysis, and providing funding for machine learning models to detect trafficking networks and hotspots, ensuring these models are transparent and unbiased.
POLICY BRIEF – FAIR Antenatal Care (Anc) data for disease surveillance: use case
November 2024
The policy brief emphasizes the importance of managing patient data to be machine-readable and actionable while ensuring privacy, which can enhance disease monitoring. Recommendations include establishing interoperability protocols, incentivizing data system updates, providing training for staff, implementing monitoring mechanisms, and fostering collaboration with private organizations to enhance data sharing infrastructure.
POLICY BRIEF – Data interoperability for elderly with dementia: use case
November 2024
The policy brief highlights the importance of patient data interoperability for elderly individuals with dementia, who require coordinated care from multiple healthcare providers. It emphasizes making patient data FAIR to enhance data exchange while ensuring privacy. Recommendations include establishing a governance framework for data access, implementing national interoperability standards, providing financial incentives for FAIR systems, creating integrated patient data portals, and enabling real-time data exchange for critical updates.
POLICY BRIEF – Family Reunification for Eritreans
January 2020
This policy brief gives an account of the issues involved in the family reunification process for Eritrean refugees in Belgium and the Netherlands and provides recommendations to improve the procedure. Some of the main issues found are that there is no clear understanding of the process by refugees, there is an excessive demand of documents which are difficult to obtain, people face obstacles in relation to home country authorities and there are contradictory benchmarks for documentation between EU member states.